There are those within combat sports who have dismissed Saturday's Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor pay-per-view boxing match as nothing more than a shameless showcase of greed.
Some have called it a carnival and a circus. Others have gone so far as to question the character of anyone willing to pay upwards of $100 to watch two genius marketers who so effortlessly slung racial, misogynistic and homophobic epithets at one another during July's international press tour simply as a way to build hype for the event.
While many of those critics present some fair points -- and the think pieces authored by the literary elite who typically steer clear of the red-light district of combat sports are certainly well presented -- in the end, it doesn't really matter because of one piece of firm reality.
On Saturday night, when the 40-year-old Mayweather (49-0, 26 KOs) returns from a two-year retirement to face McGregor, the UFC's lightweight champion, at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas (Showtime PPV, 9 p.m. ET), every single person who knocked the fight will also be watching (along with upwards of a loosely projected five million more who purchase it on pay-per-view).
Of all the great fight promotions in the modern era, this one has been the most transparent as to what you will probably be getting. Yet at the same time, considering the size of personalities and egos involved, and the incredible crossover potential beyond both the fight game and sports in general, this is the one fight in history that most dares you not to buy it.
Do you really want to be that one person who doesn't find out in real time what happens when either Mayweather makes McGregor (21-3 in MMA) eat his words, proving for the final time that boxing and mixed martial arts are two entirely different spots, or Mayweather suffers his first defeat in the biggest upset in sports history?
It's a big part of what will ultimately make this promotion so successful as it challenges to break Mayweather's past records for live gate ($72 million) and most PPV buys (4.6 million) from his 2015 super fight with Manny Pacquiao that was widely panned for a lack of entertainment.
In an era where car-wreck reality television is the norm and not the exception as far as the general public's taste, there are elements of pro wrestling and scripted reality to this fight's promotion that are impossible to ignore.
While Mayweather-Pacquiao had a five-plus year soap opera build and the competitive promise of finding out, once and for all, who was the greatest fighter of his era as a drawing card, Saturday's fight has more to do about entertainment and not just the hope to see a spectacle of bizarre proportions but the sincere expectation of it.
That's why Mayweather-McGregor is such a one-in-a-million type fight between two fighters -- representing polar opposite sports, styles, fan bases and skin color -- that supersedes the need for it to be competitively balanced on paper in order to be a successful event.
This is the ultimate guilty pleasure event that can be produced in professional sports and could only be this large because of the pair of once-in-a-generation personalities who will square off against each other. And say what you will about the pageantry and sensationalism, the two combatants will actually take part in a sanctioned fight when the opening bell finally rings, one that promises some form of concrete closure to seal the entire experience.
It will be in that exact moment, somewhere around midnight ET on Sunday, that all of the critical talk that was thrown at this fight -- most of which was fair, for the record -- will be rendered null and void.
As I've said from the day this fight was announced, the only thing greater than Mayweather's lust for the ultimate low risk/high reward proposition which McGregor represents is the general public's same addiction to the bizarre and spectacular. Both fighters know and have openly preyed upon it.
Mayweather-McGregor promises an escape from reality on Saturday where you can check your moral code at the door and simply sit back and enjoy the kind of event that doesn't come around every year and is too impossibly outlandish to ignore.
The only thing missing would be a much more truthful tagline: Just try and ignore this fight, we dare you.
