Conor McGregor is a phenom who has woken up a nation - him beating Floyd Mayweather is just what boxing needs

Whether you’re a Fleetwood Mac or a Gabrielle type of person, one thing is for certain: Dreams are important. The ability to mentally take yourself out of mundanity and into the big time is essential for anyone who strives for a better life, and can often make reality a little more tolerable.

The problem with dreams though, is that those who can’t do it, pour scorn on the concept. It happens in all walks of life no matter who you’re dealing with. A lack of imagination from one person can frustrate and embarrass another who is trying to create their own legacy. And when you experience this cynicism and disdain on a consistent basis, the desire to improve diminishes.

Some manage to break through the wave of apathy however. For a select few, the challenges faced from the disbelievers makes them work harder, makes their decisions clearer, and makes the rewards all the more sweeter. When Conor McGregor steps into the ring against Floyd Mayweather tonight, the laziness of the boxing media won’t be on his mind, and nor will Mayweather’s aspirational army. He’s heard it all before, from the moment he first laced up a pair of gloves. Above the noise, instead the discarded dreamers, all he hears is serenity.

That’s not something boxing fans want to hear. They want to believe that he’s just another meathead fighter, a big mouth who lacks substance. But that’s not McGregor. It’s certainly a description that could fit Mayweather, but McGregor is made of much more than fists and kicks.

A fighter’s background is often used as the catalyst for their entire personality, but the truth is that the majority of professional fighters were not born in luxury. It’s not enough to say that a place of birth is what makes a fighter, because if it was, every school bully would be a world champion and every five-pint hero would be driving a Ferrari. Yes McGregor was born in a relatively poor part of Dublin, but so are thousands of people every year.

It’s not Crumlin that made McGregor. Instead he made his mark on the world by daring to dream that his life could be more than building sites and dole queues. The Irishman has attributed much of his success to visualisation and the laws of attraction, but most of all to spending every waking hour bettering himself as a human and an athlete.

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Hard work and dedication is Mayweather’s mantra, but the actual work is limited. It’s graft that is made in a gym, in a designer clothing store, or in jail. It’s not aspirational except to those who believe that the safe option is the sexy option. That risk is tantamount to failure, and that genuine ambition is a mucky trap, and not something you’d tell the family.

What we have tonight in Las Vegas is a boxing match yes, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a genuine battle between good and evil, between a phenom who has woken up a nation and pushed a sport forwards, against a mercenary who has achieved incredible success with calculated joylessness. Whether we’re born to fight is a discussion for another day, but it’s hard to see a man who enjoys what he does less than Mayweather. Perhaps it’s too easy for him, 21 years of consecutive success can get boring after a while, but have you ever seen genuine joy on his face?

When it comes to representing his sport in a positive way, the light in his eyes has been switched off for a long time. Mayweather has never been good for boxing, no matter what his Pay-Per-View records may say. His fights are rarely entertaining, his words never mean anything, and his inability to respect his fans are indicative of someone the sport can do without.

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A win for McGregor tonight would be the best possible thing for boxing because the sport will finally have a top-level star who genuinely loves what he does, and will legitimately say what he thinks. Forget the media trained promotion playboys, if McGregor starches Mayweather out in the middle of that Vegas ring, the entire sporting world will never be the same again.

But that’s where the dreams come back in. Although many people are rooting for McGregor, there is still a large group of people who can’t stomach the idea of a victory for the 29-year-old. Why? It can only be because change is scary, right? It can’t be that people want Mayweather, who was imprisoned in 2012 after beating up his ex-wife in front of his children, to actually achieve more success?

For some crimes, we can put aside the past and forgive. But for domestic violence, for a man who treats women as nothing more than entertainment, this cannot be excused, and it cannot be forgotten or postponed as it was in the past. This is the measure of Mayweather, an unapologetic brute who thinks that money is the same as legacy.

Is Conor perfect? No, nobody is, but a win for him tonight would be delightful for so many reasons. The betting industry would lose a lot of money and the naysayers would have to eat the most decadent of humble pie, but above all else, Mayweather would wake up in Vegas the next morning, surrounded by opulence, but clouded by misery