Tonight, the biggest star in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) will fight for the first time in 2017.

Throughout its twenty-four-year history, the UFC has advertised itself as a more genuine competition than boxing — “as real as it gets.” This was to be reflected not only in its allowance of kicks and grappling, but also in its establishment of a genuine meritocracy. The best would fight the best, unlike boxing’s carefully selected mismatches. It is fitting, then, that the UFC’s biggest event of the year is an obvious mismatch featuring a hand-selected star and, in a particularly unsubtle note, is a boxing match.

UFC champion Conor McGregor’s fight against boxing great Floyd Mayweather would seem to be the apex of craven ugliness in sports. Every serious analyst predicts the fight will be a whitewash — a reasonable conclusion, given that one man enters with a professional boxing record of 49-0 and the other with one of 0-0. Few even expect the fight to be entertaining.