I completely understood that. I was breaking funny.
I recall reading a biography of John Wesley Hardin 40+ years ago, and the writer described a knife fight Hardin got into that was similar to that.
It was so horrifying that I’ve never forgotten it.
We used to do something similar with the newly-minted Marines at ITS at Camp Pendleton in the early 1980s. Some days we'd have several hours to idle between morning and night fires, and the training staff had some rather interesting ways of letting the boys blow off steam. We'd always have a few pairs of guys who didn't like one another, and we'd set them up with gloves and let them box.
Then this staff sergeant who was a Navajo Indian came up with the idea to let each opponent wrap their left hand in a towel, and gave them foam bats he bought somewhere to hold in the other hand, and let them wail away at each other. Not quite the same, for sure, but they still managed to bruise themselves up pretty good. I know because I was a medic who got to patch them up afterwards. $:-)