Nikita Hand's bravery is in stark contrast to the bombast and bluster of busted flush Conor McGregor

This used to be the future. Conor McGregor was the man of the moment. The figure in Irish sport who was most keenly tuned into the zeitgeist.

In a world where you can become a multi-millionaire by filming yourself playing video games on YouTube, McGregor was the poster boy.

You could be sure that Love Islanders - in between applying fake tan and waxing, and that's just the men - followed him on Instagram.

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Influencers queued up to touch the hem of his garments, hoping for a bit of the stardust that made him the most famous Irishperson of the 21st century.

Those of us with grey in our beards scrambled frantically, trying to get a grip on what was happening.

At the 2018 Pendulum Summit in Dublin, McGregor and Virgin boss Richard Branson were two of the keynote speakers.

Branson was finishing up his speech when McGregor walked on to the stage. Both men took off their tops and squared up to each other barechested.

The audience - which included many top businesspeople in Ireland who had paid a serious whack for tickets - whooped and hollered in delight.

The generation gap was never starker than with the rise and rise and rise of Conor McGregor.

A chat with a barber before Christmas, 2016, led to a nugget about how he'd been snowed under before the Dubliner's last fight in Vegas.

So many wanted to get their hair and beards styled like McGregor before heading Stateside.

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That is something new, something those of us with mileage on the clock find hard to fathom.

During the glory days of everyone from Barry McGuigan to Liam Brady to Eamonn Coghlan, the hero-worship didn't go so far as to try and look like them.

No sportsperson ever had media coverage like McGregor, though. In 2015, the American website Deadspin released their annual list of the worst sportswriting of the year.

A profile of McGregor from Esquire magazine made the cut. That wasn't a surprise. What was surprising was that they were able to single it out from an ocean of drivel about him.

Maybe the scales have fallen from some eyes since Friday and Nikita Hand's powerful speech outside a Dublin court. McGregor had a hotshot American PR adviser along with him for the duration of the civil case that Hand took against him.

He had the clout that serious wealth brings. Hand didn't have anything like that. What she had was an unbreakable spirit and a craving for justice. She spoke softly of hard things. We can only imagine what the last few years have been like for her.

McGregor left court without saying a word. On social media on Friday night and on Saturday, he had plenty to say.

Conor McGregor and partner Dee Devlin leave the High Court in Dublin
(Image: Brian Lawless/PA Wire)

He had plenty who had his back too, but that's been a familiar problem. Nobody shouting stop. Anything and everything could be excused.

"I would invade his favela on horseback, and would kill anyone who wasn't fit to work...What I really want to do is to turn his favela into a Reebok sweatshop." Ah, Conor is just selling a fight.

"All I’m saying, he’s a faggot. I never knew he was a faggot.” That's just banter, Conor loves banter.

"Smell of shite off your Da." He's the 21st century Oscar Wilde.

To McGregor fans - and there still are legions of them all over the world - what he says and does outside the Octagon doesn't matter.

They're often entertained by it but, when he crosses the line - as he often does - they dismiss it as just selling the brand.

Ariel Helwani is a Canadian MMA journalist who now works for ESPN in the US.

He has moved into boxing now too - but he's seen as an authority on his first love.

McGregor was one of his guests on the MMA Show a few years ago and Helwani made it clear that he felt he doesn't get enough respect in his homeland.

"I'm not just saying it because you are on, I feel they still don't appreciate you,'' said Helwani.

"They are still stuck on page one of your story, they are still talking about cage fighting and the antics.

"One of the biggest stars in our sport, in the world. The biggest star in sport, period, is from Ireland. Little Ireland.

"I still feel like the media over there they still want to try and take shots at you and discredit you and not treat you like a Roy Keane type of star."

This sums up part of the problem with MMA - a sport that is still very young.

It irritates the more knowledgeable fans and commentators to hear outsiders talk of 'fan-boys' covering the sport.

But then you look at what Helwani had to say, and it's hard not to conclude that many want reverential and uncritical coverage.

McGregor lapped it up. He was fawned over by supposed media as well as fans. Little wonder he lost the run of himself.

There are different ways to measure John Wooden's legacy. Silverware? Well, he did win 10 national championships with the UCLA Bruins - who were treading water until he came along.

But his impact went way beyond college basketball. Wooden's books are lapped up by coaches and managers in different sports all around the world.

He's someone you'll hear regularly referenced here too - by everyone from Jim Gavin to Stuart Lancaster.

Wooden was different because he didn't measure success in medals. To him, success meant getting the best out of yourself on a regular basis.

The C word mattered to him too, mattered greatly.

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

Character was a word McGregor reached for late on a Saturday night in July 2021.

He'd been demolished in no time at all by Dustin Poirier and, once the nuts and bolts of the fight had been probed by the MMA media, they did what they often do - they moved on to the circus.

Conor McGregor v Dustin Poirier III
(Image: (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images))

Khabib Nurmagomedov, McGregor's nemesis for so long, had taken to Twitter to twist the knife.

“This is what happened, when you change your team, leave the sparring partners, who made you a champion and sparring with little kids, far away from reality,'' he posted.

His words were put to McGregor, and he snapped back. “That’s the character of the man, for sure, behind the mask. Whatever, what’s he want to do? Does he want to come back or no? If he wants to have his disrespectful comments, come back and let’s go again, my man. I’m here for it. That’s fighting talk.”

He brought it up, so let's talk about McGregor's character. Who is the man behind his mask?

There was a time when he seemed ready to live up to his boast that he wasn't here to take part, but to take over.

In New York's Times Square, the world's crossroads, there were giant billboards bearing his face and tattooed body.

He became a global superstar, the biggest name in a rapidly growing very 21st century sport.

But McGregor's rise troubled as many as it inspired.

Following his reelection as President of Ireland in October, 2018, Michael D Higgins made an acceptance speech, and one passage really resonated.

"Words matter. Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can empower. Words can divide."

McGregor found that out against Nurmagomedov a few weeks before that.

Part of the reason why the Dubliner took such a battering was down to Khabib's rage about the way he'd talked about his family and his religion.

Conor McGregor after being defeated by Khabib Nurmagomedov in 2018
(Image: Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

See, words do matter. McGregor's words might have cost him in the cage, but they put bums on seats and secured pay-per-view dollars. They made him substantially richer.

After a while, though, you start to wonder - some argued that it was just about ''selling a fight''.

But how can you tell the dancer from the dance?

When he appeared in a Dublin court on an assault charge in 2018, it was revealed that he had 18 convictions from the previous decade. Most were for traffic offences, but one was for assault.

Where does he go from here? McGregor has often come across as starring in a scripted version of his own life. Has he moved on to the chapter titled 'Downfall'.

A couple of years back, I sat down for an interview with Thomas Hauser, whose crowning achievement is the definitive autobiography of Muhammad Ali.

As Ali's Boswell, what did Hauser make of McGregor being compared to the Greatest?

"Well, there are people who compared Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln, people who compared Boris Johnson to Winston Churchill.''

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