by Dan Severn
THE REALEST GUY IN THE ROOM
THE REALEST GUY IN THE ROOM:
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DAN SEVERN
Dan Severn
with Ian Douglass
Foreword by Jim Cornette
Copyright © WhatCulture.com 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Published by WhatCulture.com
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in any part, in any form, without written permission from the publisher or author.
This book is set in Garamond.
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Contents
FOREWORD by Jim Cornette
PREFACE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD by Jim Cornette
THE LINE I USED MOST often to describe Dan Severn when promoting his matches in the world of pro wrestling was that he was, “one of the most decorated amateur or professional athletes the United States has ever produced.” Like most of Dan’s career itself, that line was not just wrestling hyperbole – it was REAL. One look at the hundreds of trophies, medals, plaques and awards lining the walls of his Coldwater, Michigan training facility would tell you that, but the book you now hold in your hands will provide the incredible details of how he rose from working his family’s farm as a child to become one of the most successful all-around fighters in combat sports history.
It will also tell you how, in a world of bizarre individuals, tough guys, carnival-barker promoters and “enhanced” physiques, that success came the old-fashioned way – through Dan’s work ethic, mental and physical toughness, determination and the inability to understand, or even spell, the word “quit”.
I first met Dan when my friend, NWA promoter Dennis Coralluzzo, asked if I could arrange for him to win the NWA World Championship on one of my Smoky Mountain Wrestling events. I would have done almost anything for Dennis, but it didn’t take a lot of convincing for me to want to feature a world-class athlete like that in my small, regional wrestling promotion. Dan was a prince to deal with, and I remember wondering if this seemingly normal man – at least as normal as one of the greatest hand-to-hand combat experts on the planet could be – knew what he was getting into in the world of pro wrestling. Not that Dan couldn’t handle himself INSIDE the ring, it was OUTSIDE it that I thought Dan would run afoul, between the politics, the show-biz aspects necessary, and the overall Wild West atmosphere of the sport even in the 1990’s. But, much as he did with another “wild frontier” sport, mixed martial arts, he learned to adapt where he needed to, and carve his own path when necessary.
Dan’s SMW appearances also opened the door for SMW to be the only active pro wrestling promotion at the time also doing advertising and promotion for the early UFC pay-per-views – and cashing the check that came with it – at a time when all other wrestling was running away from its roots as a (mostly) competitive sport and running headlong into the “sports entertainment” era with no premium being placed on credibility.
A few years later, I was with the WWF, and was excited to hear that Dan had made an agreement to come into the promotion for a series of matches, AND was to be recognized as NWA Champion. My mind raced and my tongue started salivating at the opportunity for the WWF, of all companies, to present Severn-Shamrock #3 on PPV. I knew full well there were things Dan could do that no one else in the world could, but there were also things in pro wrestling that Dan couldn’t – and more importantly, shouldn’t – do, mostly centering on things that would make him just another “entertainer” on the roster, and compromise his major attribute – the fact that he was the real deal. I sent reams of notes to Vince McMahon and the writing staff on just those very topics.
Unfortunately, they went unread, and Dan’s tenure in the WWF was not nearly as successful as I believe it could have been. The head “writer” had never seen the UFC, had no idea who Dan was, and was more concerned with booking transvestite dance-offs and wrestlers painted in rainbow colors than a man who had dominated the fledgling UFC and drawn more than 100,000 buys on PPV more than once at a time when they had no TV coverage whatsoever. The rubber match between Dan and Ken never took place, despite my efforts to the contrary, but I DID get the honor of managing Dan and helping to increase his profile to wrestling fans watching WWF TV.
Of course, even that didn’t last long. The writing staff’s ADD meant we would break up after a short run together, and in doing so, Dan was to give me his famous belly-to-belly suplex. Even though I knew Dan had no ill intent, I was still somewhat nervous about this, especially given the WWF rings were a lot harder back then. Sensing this, Dan looked at me and said, “Relax, Jim, you’re in the hands of a professional.”
Truer words were never spoken. The man who Tank Abbott once described fighting as, “like being prison raped by Freddie Mercury,” grabbed my fat, unathletic, then-270 pound bliffet ass, picked me up over his head, and slammed me to the mat in convincing fashion while making it feel like I had landed on an air mattress. Of all the things I am grateful to Dan for, that may be at the top of the list!
Years went by, and yours truly was still acting as a “battered housewife” (read the book) for the wrestling business when another chance to work with Dan came about. I was with Ring of Honor, the company had just been purchased and put on TV across the country by Sinclair Broadcasting, and our big year-end event, Final Battle, was coming up. It would feature a World Championship match between former partners Davey Richards and Eddie Edwards, both of whom had MMA-influenced styles.
My idea was to increase their profile, and get the company exposure and credibility, by having Dan and Ken Shamrock in their corners as their trainers, in the process coming as close to that third matchup as I imagined we ever would again. I spoke to Ken and pitched the idea, and he expressed interest and referred me to his agent, who never got back to me. Dan, on the other hand, was straight up, made his own deal with me, did it for considerably less money than he would do a lot of things for at that stage of his life, and was once again a dream to work with. We even shot workout footage at his Coldwater facility where Dan, in his 50’s at the time, blew through and blew up Edwards and several sparring partners, all at least 25 years his junior. ‘The Beast’ was still very capable of being released.
Near the end of this book, Dan pontificates on what it might have been like if he had gotten into pro wrestling a little earlier, and worked the territories. He definitely would have been used at a high level in the 1970’s and 1980’s by promoters who respected legitimacy – the Verne Gagnes and Eddie Grahams and Bill Watts’ of the business, who knew how to accentuate strengths and stay away from weaknesses – ev
en though he didn’t do over-the-top promos or wear outlandish gimmicks.
But Dan’s real success in wrestling may have come even earlier, when many of the top pro wrestlers really were world-class shooters and were earning what, at the time, was enormous money for pro athletes. It seems highly possible that if Dan was in the business in the 1950’s, that HE, instead of Dick Hutton, may have been Lou Thesz’ handpicked replacement for a run with the NWA World Championship. I second the vote Dan gives Thesz for being his dream opponent, because of the similarities in their respective careers. Both hit the mat as youngsters, both won major titles, both competed at their craft at a high level for decades because of conditioning that belied their ages and came as a result of a lack of bad habits in their personal lives, and both carried themselves as champions, with dignity and pride wherever they went. Dan may have been primarily focused on legitimate sports, while Thesz spent most of his time in a worked environment because in his era that’s where the money was made, but both had the respect of their peers as being the real deals.
In many fighters’ books, there is a lot of what, in wrestling, we call “wrestler’s exaggeration”. As a pretty fair wrestling historian myself, I see little of that here. Dan tells his story like he lived it – with blunt honesty, a sense of honor in an often dishonorable environment, and a wry sense of humor. So when you read this book, my advice is to just sit back and relax--you’re in the hands of a professional.
Jim Cornette
Louisville, Kentucky
June 2016
PREFACE
NOWADAYS, IF YOU GO TO a sports bar on a Friday or Saturday night, there’s always that one guy in attendance wearing a Tapout shirt.
You know the type of guy I’m talking about. He couldn’t spell UFC if you spotted him the “U” and the “F,” but now he has just enough alcohol in his system to convince him that he’s a mixed martial artist, simply because he’s watched some fights on television.
I’ve never been in a real fistfight in my entire life, but I’ve been much closer to getting into real fistfights in sports bars over the last twenty years of my life than at any time before that.
I’ve done appearances at many such bars for autograph signings and meet and greets, and it never fails that some inebriated fool walks up to me and says something like, “I thought you’d be bigger,” “You don’t look so tough,” or “You write like a girl” after I’ve handed him an autographed photo.
I’ll admit it, I may not look the way you’d expect a guy to look who has won more than one-hundred professional fights in his career. I don’t have a broken nose. I don’t have cauliflower ears. I have all of my original teeth, and I can speak in full sentences.
On one such occasion, when I was perilously close to throwing hands with one of these self-styled tough guys, I reached into my pocket, selected one of my business cards, and scribbled a phone number on the back of it.
“What’s this?” the guy asked, as I handed him the card.
“That’s the number to the UFC,” I informed him. “I’ve never fought for free, and I’m not going to start indulging in any bad habits now.”
As the look on the man’s face changed from angry to perplexed, I continued.
“There’s something about this arrangement you’re going to like even more,” I told him.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“There’s a referee there, and there’s also a ringside doctor who won’t be seated any more than forty feet away from you,” I explained. “Because, my friend, if this goes down here and now, there are no rules, and I will finish with you when I’m good and ready.”
The other advantage to fighting in the UFC cage, to me, is that in every other walk of life, I have to play nice. But, when the cage door closes, I don’t have to be nice anymore.
And when I got started in this world, there were only two rules: No biting, and no eye gouging.
Things were a lot simpler back then.
ONE
I WAS BORN IN FLINT, Michigan, on June 9, 1958, and was the second child born to my parents, Marvin and Barbara Severn. Years later, I would begin describing myself to people as my family’s second-oldest, second-smallest male, which just blows people away, but it’s true. The more children my parents had, the larger they progressively seemed to grow.
Our home at the time was in Juddville, which is the smallest sort of town you could ever imagine. It’s just a dot on the map, and within that dot existed next to nothing.
At the time Juddville consisted of a fourway stop, a Methodist church, and a gas station with a candy store inside.
Early in my life it was the candy store that I was most interested in. My brothers and I would walk along the road trying to find pop bottles, because the deposit on them was three cents apiece. Once we had the bottles, we’d take them to the gas station, collect the deposit on them, and immediately exchange the money for the penny candy sold at the counter.
Our family may have lived on a farm in Juddville, but I have no recollection of what we actually farmed. I spent most of my time running around and playing in the hayloft above the barn.
Several of our family members lived on farms within that same proximity as us, and all of my mom’s relatives were only a few miles away.
At that stage of my life, it was a huge deal just to get a big cast-iron train set and to lay it out on several pieces of plywood. I actually still have that train set. It’s one of those things that I should probably start thinking of getting rid of now before I leave this planet.
Next door to us, my two cousins had all kinds of toys, and my brothers and I would always run to their house to play with them.
My Severn grandparents were married in the Mid Michigan city of Bad Axe, and they lived in a big, white, two-story home close to ours. For the longest time, the only running water my grandparents had in the house was out in the mudroom, which was the place in a farmhouse where you would store your boots and coats to prevent mud from being tracked throughout the rest of the house.
They didn’t have indoor plumbing; they had a hand pump outside. So if my grandmother wanted to make a cup of coffee for someone, she had to take the kettle outside and pump the water by hand before bringing it back in and putting in on the pot belly stove, which was also the house’s primary heating mechanism. If you had to go to the bathroom, there was a nice, comfortable outhouse out in the yard. Visiting them was like going back in time.
We referred to my dad’s parents as “Goose Grandma and Goose Grandpa,” because of the proliferation of geese on their property. When we left our home in Juddville, we moved to a house on Johnstone Road, which was the closest home we could get to my grandparents at that time. After my grandfather died, my grandmother decided to scale back and moved to a house in Flint. To maintain our family’s farming tradition, my dad bought the property from his mom and moved us in.
My father was the baby of the twelve children that survived infancy. He was born during the time period when a lot of childbirth was still taking place at home, through the assistance of a midwife, and any of our family’s stillborn children were buried out in the farm somewhere. Sadly, there are no grave markers.
During the transition period on the farm, we tore down my grandparents’ old house. To accomplish this task, several of us got involved, including my uncles. We stripped out everything we could salvage, included a lot of wood. Eventually, fueled by a lot of beer, my father and uncles would build another home for us on the same spot. It was another white, two-story home, but this one was modernized and had a fully-functional basement.
The home we lived in while the new house was being built was scary. It had an old-style, dark, dreary Michigan basement with a coal furnace. Every so often, a coal truck would drive out to the house, open a coal shoot, and drop a load of coal straight into the nether region of the house.
During the cold winter months, one of our regular jobs was to head down to the basement and stick a couple shovels full of coal into th
e furnace to keep the fire from going out. That was the only way we could keep warm. Heat would rise through the tubing, and eventually the warm air would meet us on the main floor. I used to lie on the floor register with my brother just to make sure we could stay warm.
Once we took over my grandparents’ farm, the farming continued. We would raise corn, beans, oats, and wheat, harvest it, then haul it by tractor or wagon to the grainery in nearby New Lothrop. Those were very happy times for all of us, particularly my parents. They were finally able to reap the rewards for all of their hard, diligent work throughout the season.
We carried on my grandparents’ tradition of farming geese, but we also had cattle, pigs, rabbits, sheep, and chickens. Very quickly, you learned that you didn’t want to start naming your animals, because sooner or later, they normally ended up on your dinner plate.
Farm life is a hard life, and you have to be a jack of all trades in order to thrive. My dad could fix anything, whether it was a car, truck, or tractor. It boggled my mind how skilled he was. By the same token, my uncles were very skilled in carpentry and other crafts, which was of great value to us in an era where family helped family.
Living on a farm quickly taught me the value of getting up early and prioritizing my day. As soon as you woke up, the animals had to be tended to before you could tend to yourself. One of my siblings might be collecting eggs from the hens while feeding and watering them, one of us would be feeding and watering the rabbits, and another would have to water and feed the pigs.
All of this work had to be done in the morning before we got ready to head off to school.
When the weather was nice, my brother and I would walk half a mile up to the corner where the two different school busses would meet, which was right on the county line border of Montrose and New Lothrop.