Jake Paul's pay-per-view appeal against the ropes after loss to Tommy Fury

This is a column by Morgan Campbell, who writes opinion for CBC Sports.  For more information about  CBC's Opinion section , please see the  FAQ .

First, let's squash any lingering confusion:

Jake Paul is a real boxer.

Period.

This isn't a title boxing writers and other sweet science lifers bestowed upon Paul because he showed heart in dropping an eight-round decision to Tommy Fury, in the main event of a pay-per-view card in Saudi Arabia last Sunday. That bout, objectively, was not close. Fury, a reality TV star from a boxing family, outclassed Paul, a social media celebrity who now boxes. He landed more often, with more authority, while Paul struggled to adjust to Fury's length, and the tempo he set.

If anything, Sunday night's loss highlighted the limitations in Paul's skill set and business model.

In the immediate term, he's fine. Paul grossed a reported $30 million US to receive that boxing lesson from Fury, the younger half-brother of WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury.

The question was never whether the 26-year-old Paul was a legitimate boxer. He has coaches, training partners and a full-time training schedule. Several times a year he signs up to trade punches in public, wearing 10-ounce gloves and no headgear. Anybody who does that stuff is a real boxer, and doesn't need to win a world title to prove it to the rest of us.

But what does Sunday's humbling loss say about Paul, the public, and the media who helped turn his otherwise run-of-the-mill fights into major events? What happens now that the question at the crux of Paul's appeal — whether he can actually beat a full-time boxer — has been answered? How does a 6-1 cruiserweight who lost the first time he, as boxing people say, stepped up in