People like to feel their bodies, and fighting is a good way. Even just watching is exciting, or at least that's what the people watching boxing, or Hockey think. Much of the interest in watching cycling, or at least how it is covered by the media is - " look at the pain in their eyes," and "they must be in such tremendous pain." We idealize pain in a certain way, perhaps still a remainder from the days of the warriors. How many games are there of who can suffer the most? Much of sports is built around that. Just yesterday I saw some competition of who can stay inside an extremely hot sauna the longest. They even made it part of yoga - have you tried Bikram Yoga? (yoga in a steaming hot room).
Feeling pain and accepting it is part of being a man, a man's man, though many of those will start crying if a nurse wants to prick a needle in them (and can you blame them?). Getting the injury from another man is the key. If you get it from a woman it's much less enjoyable, even, especially, if she's really pretty.
Another reason is that people want to feel their interior. It's hard, how do you feel you have an interior? They want things to penetrate, and though fists don't penetrate, they still do something. They still move the interiors around.
Another reason, for some people, is that they feel they need to be punished, and getting into fights is also a way to be punished. Or religiously, repeating the pain of Christ.
When I was very young I liked to fight. I fought a lot. Really, a lot, and I was good at it, even though I was physically rather weak. At some point in my childhood my fights moved to be more theoretical. The energy moved elsewhere where it could be much more powerful. Part of fighting is confronting obstacles and overcoming them. As Chris Utterman said on Asking the big questions,
post (continuing from an Edna Stern
post on wilderness), these obstacles keep getting bigger and bigger:
"One advances by overcoming obstacles, again and again, and to become
really serious one trains oneself for the greatest obstacles. The big
questions are in a way the wilderness. A vastness that can't be
conquered and can only be walked in."
Fighting is still checking your powers, proving yourself, against a very weak enemy - even if that enemy is Schwarzenegger from his terminator days. They might beat you up, seriously beat you up, but even if you beat them it's nothing.
Should you have stopped it - why? As you note, they seemed to have all enjoyed it. As long as innocent bystanders aren't hurt.
