Boxing In The World Of Sports

I could never understand how boxing got into the world of sports. The way I see it, sports is supposed to promote camaraderie. It's supposed to be fun. But in boxing, you have to hurt each other in order to win. You certainly cannot be having fun when you are bleeding to death (or your opponent is).

In sports, you are not supposed to hurt each other at all; you'll get a technical call if you do. But boxing actually requires that you hurt your opponent, and the crowd cheers every time you do. I must be missing something here, but aren't we sort of glorifying evil here? I mean, think about this - at Manny Pacquiao's last fight when he failed to end it in a knock out, people were even kind of disappointed. They wanted to see Clottey on his knees, eyes sore, nose bleeding, pleading for mercy.

How could we be so mean?