by Dan Severn
Once my family reached its full size, there were eight of us, with thirteen years separating me from my youngest sibling. It wasn’t until I reached my sophomore year of high school that I would have a bed all to myself.
The 120-acre Severn farm was a wonderful place to grow up. It included a forest and a couple creeks, and we could look at tadpoles, capture crayfish, build treehouses and do all sorts of other things.
Every spring when the water would exceed its banks, new treasures would wash up for us to play with and enjoy.
THE ONLY things I really did athletically up until that point involved playing in our huge yard. We played in the forest and the creeks a lot. In the spring, we had northern pike that were running through the creek, and we’d spear them and eat them. We’d also hunt rabbits, then cook them and eat them.
At no point did it occur to me that we were poor. There was always something to do, and there was always food to eat.
One of my responsibilities was to milk Peggy, the family cow. Mom would run the milk through a cheesecloth to filter out impurities, including the cow’s hair. She would allow the milk and cream to separate, then whip the cream into butter.
In elementary school, mom would visit the schools with an old-fashioned butter churn to demonstrate to them how the agitation process produced the butter, and then she would give them each a piece of bread and allow them to taste the fresh butter.
There was no margarine in our family.
We were the first family living on our road, and we would be out playing amongst ourselves. We played a game with a very politically-incorrect name called “smear the queer,” where we’d throw the ball up, someone would catch it and run around trying to be elusive, and everyone else would try to tackle them.
Soon, the Eisenhower family moved next door to us, and they had about a dozen children, and then a neighbor moved in on the other side with another dozen children. That meant whenever we played football, we had enough people to have a first string and a second string with some left over.
We’d play soccer, kickball, red rover, and then we’d just do some standard roughhousing. When the bean fields grew high enough, we would play “army.” We would crawl through the bean fields, and clods of dirt served as our bullets. We’d toss the clods at each other, never thinking about the damage that might be done if we hit someone in the face, or in the eye.
There were plenty of times where someone got hurt, but the games always went on.
Until junior high, I went to a school in New Lothrop called Maple Grove. Once we moved, I began attending the schools in Montrose.
MY DAD had some cows tied up by the road once, and the mailman drove by and spooked the cow. It jumped the fence and hung itself. My brother and I were supposed to be going to school, but we couldn’t let the cow go to waste.
Dad cut the cow down, and my parents, my brother Dave and I all went out and spent the day butchering the cow, because we couldn’t let the meat go to waste. Because my brother and I couldn’t go to school that day, mom sent us to the teacher with a note the following day. The note read as follows:
Please excuse Dave and Dan for yesterday’s absence. We had a death in the family.
Another time, when I received an overdue notice for a library book I’d checked out and then lost, mom send this note to the librarian:
I’m sorry to inform you that my son will not be paying his bill. He has run off to join the moonies. He’s gone, and I don’t know where to find him. There’s no son, and no mon(ey). Love, Barbara.
I definitely received a mixture of both of my parents’ personality traits. My mother had a very humorous side, and while my dad was a man of few words, you needed to pay heed to the warnings he gave.
When Dave and I shared one of the upstairs bedrooms, we knew that when my father began yelling up the stairs for us we would have three opportunities to come down. By the time he called the second time, one of us needed to stomp his feet on the ground next to the bed to give the impression that we were moving around. When the third request came, we knew we needed to hurry up and get downstairs as quickly as we could.
The threat of, “Wait until your father gets home!” was a lethal threat to us.
TWO
I STARTED WRESTLING IN 7TH grade, and only because it was taught as a part of our gym class. This fact surprises a lot of people, particularly nowadays when you can start getting your children involved in the four-year-old age division in Michigan.
It boggled my mind when they opened up a competitive division for kids that young. Every year I have someone bringing me their three-year-old son and saying, “Please, mold him now!” There are so many programs set up nowadays that give parents an opportunity to create the next child wrestling prodigy.
In my era, we were all introduced to wrestling as a regular component of our middle school physical education classes. With thirty to thirty-five students in our gym classes, we would compete in sports seasonally. During the warm months, the gym teacher would take us outside to play football, soccer, and baseball, and we would even participate in all of the traditional track-and-field events. When it got colder, we would go indoors and play basketball and volleyball, and then they had us get down on the mats and learn how to wrestle.
The mats we used in our class weren’t even real wrestling mats; they were inch-and-a-half-thick horsehair mats. I had to get on these mats wearing my Converse high-top shoes, because I only had one pair of shoes that were expected to last me the entire year.
The middle school even had its own wrestling team, but I wasn’t interested in joining the wrestling team back then. I wanted to be a basketball player! Wilt Chamberlain was doing all of these incredible things in the NBA during that time, and I wanted to be like Wilt ‘The Stilt.’
Well, I signed up for the basketball team, and I sucked.
I didn’t have the necessary coordination, so trying to dribble the ball with one hand while looking up at a defender and trying to keep the ball away from him just wasn’t working for me. If I tried to bounce the ball over to my left hand, I lost it almost every time. Because of my lack of coordination, I wound up sitting on the bench a lot, which wasn’t a whole lot of fun.
That same seventh-grade year a big flu epidemic hit the area and a lot of students got sick, including several members of the wrestling team. A couple of my buddies who were on the team asked me to fill in a weight class for them because otherwise they would have to forfeit the meet.
I was tired of sitting on the bench during basketball games, and I figured that my natural strength as a farm kid would kick in and help me win these matches. As a favor to my buddies, I wrestled in two matches that night. I was pinned in both matches. I really let my friends down, and I was ashamed of myself. I went back to finish my basketball season, and the next year, I signed up for wrestling.
In my first true season of wrestling I lost several matches before I finally won my first. When that victory occurred I didn’t know if I should be happier because I’d won a match, or because I’d somehow managed to find someone worse than me!
The plain truth is that I sucked at wrestling. My exposure to wrestling prior to middle school was primarily through watching Detroit’s Big Time Wrestling on television with my brothers. That’s where I saw the Sheik and Bobo Brazil and all of these other larger than life personalities. On the middle school wrestling mats, I never saw an airplane spin or a camel clutch. What I was doing on those mats was a totally different type of thing.
In ninth grade I read my first Amateur Wrestling News magazine. My high school wrestling coach had several of them on his desk, and I asked him if I could look through it. The magazine talked about weightlifting routines, nutrition programs, stretching, mental preparation, and goal setting, all of which was specifically designed to help with wrestling. I was blown away by the fact that all of this was required in order to be a truly effective wrestler.
As ninth grade year progressed I caught wind of the fact that no freshman had
ever made it onto the school’s varsity wrestling team. Here I was, just another scrub on the team, and I got the idea in my head that I could make history at Montrose Hill-McCloy High School by making the varsity wrestling team.
For most wrestlers, the mentality is to lose weight and be a monster at a lower weight class, but I saw how that method takes a psychological toll on the athletes and leads to them to feel lightheaded and sorry for themselves. My natural weight was 165 pounds and I would cut down to 155 pounds. As a freshman challenging against juniors and seniors, I was competing against people with two to three years-worth of physical and mental development over and above mine, and I was getting beaten regularly.
I challenged next at 165 pounds and got beaten again, and then I started challenging at each successive weight class with the same negative result. Finally, I reached the heavyweight level, which was humorous, because at this time the heavyweight class had no ceiling, and I was going against people who were better than me in every respect, including size, strength, and experience.
I’m not sure why my coach allowed it to happen. I think he might have been trying to see how much punishment I could take. Either that, or he just wanted to be entertained.
Somehow, I won a challenge match against a guy who weighed around 300 pounds. I won the match, achieved my goal, and made the varsity team, but this opened up an entirely new set of obstacles. For starters, my entire body fit into one leg of the heavyweight uniform because I was so tiny. Instead, I wrestled as a heavyweight while fitting comfortably into the 165-pound uniform.
At least the varsity uniform was an improvement over the JV uniform, which was hideous. I’d put on the leotard the exact same way I would have put on the varsity uniform, but I had to pull the singlet on over my heads. After you’d pulled it down as far as you could, you had to button this ring of buttons in your crotch region, and cover all of this up with a set of trunks that had a drawstring.
I used to get nervous before a wrestling match; I always had to pee. On a regular basis, I would have to make a mad dash to the restroom, pull my trunks down, unbutton the five buttons in my crotch, pull the singlet off, undo the drawstring of the leotards, take care of business, and then put it all back together and get out there to compete.
It was not an easy process!
Before my very first match, I remember standing next to my coach as he held a clipboard. I was bouncing up and down, simply mimicking all of the other wrestlers who were bouncing up and down so that I could fit in.
My opponent was out on the mat, standing 6’4” and weighing 290 pounds. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the guy.
I was standing out on the mat wearing the 165-pound uniform, and the referee looked at me with a confused expression.
“Hey, coach, where’s your heavyweight?” the ref asked.
Coach Tom Casteel stood there with his arms crossed and his clipboard against his chest. Without moving his arms, and without looking at me, he just used his index finger to point in my general direction.
The official looked at my coach, then to me, bouncing up and down on the mat, and then back at my coach.
“Are you sure, coach?” the ref asked again.
Again, without looking at me, Coach Casteel just nodded his head. He didn’t give me any kind of handshake or encouragement. He simply sent me out onto the mat.
The referee told me where my feet were supposed to be set, and then he started the match.
I’d be impressed to learn the match even lasted twelve seconds. As my opponent came across at me, he just crushed me. As he made contact, he mowed me over so badly that he actually had to stop and turn around just to throw a half nelson on me and turn my limp body over for the official pin.
Needless to say, my high school varsity wrestling career did not begin successfully.
ALL IN all, my freshman season as a varsity wrestler actually wasn’t that bad. I had a losing record of thirteen wins and fourteen losses, and I provided unintended entertainment for people without even realizing I was doing so. People in the stands saw this tiny pipsqueak come out onto the mat and compete against true heavyweights, and every now and then David would get lucky and slay one of the Goliaths.
The way I normally describe things is that somehow one of the less-coordinated heavyweights would trip and fall, and I would land on top of him for the pinfall win. There was no chance of me actually throwing any of those guys around.
Toward the end of my freshman year, I finally learned how to avoid getting crushed by these large guys.
During one of the matches, I was paired up against a butterball from another school, and as the match progressed, he kept getting steadily more worn down. As his movement slowed, it dawned on me that I could actually beat this guy!
Toward the end of the match, he was at the edge of the mat, trying desperately to get out of bounds while I clutched at his ankle. I stood up, held onto his ankle like it was a big chunk of rope, and dramatically dragged him all the way back to the center of the mat. From there, I fell on him for the pin.
The crowd went nuts.
Triumphs like these were nice, particularly when you were giving up so much body weight and size to these buffalos.
RATHER THAN being a wrestler who was struggling to cut weight, I was struggling to gain it. By now I was consistently winning the challenge matches to participate in our varsity wrestling meets, so I was officially the team’s heavyweight. During our practices, Coach Casteel would dismiss us occasionally to get a quick drink and return to the mats.
“Severn, you stay there at that drinking fountain!” he would yell. “You need to drink more!”
The other wrestlers on the team hated me, because they were doing everything they could to cut weight, and I was allowed to eat and drink as much as I wanted to in order to add weight.
On the way to the official weigh-ins for dual meets and tournaments, I’d sit on the bus drinking as much water as I possibly could. Once we arrived, I would get on the scale fully dressed with my shoes and my coat on, with bottles of pop in my pockets, just to make the minimum weight of 175 pounds.
I’d get into arguments with my coach all the time because I would need to pee so badly, but he wouldn’t let me use the bathroom for fear of having me lose too much weight. These arguments took place while I was surrounded by wrestlers who were trying to spit out as much water as they could in order to make weight. After the weigh-ins, when everyone else was making a mad dash to get something to eat, I was making a mad dash to the toilet!
Even though I had a losing season, my school’s placement at the conference meet hinged on my performance.
Coach Casteel was a genius when it came to knowing where the team needed to score points, and how we needed to win. He’d let his wrestlers know whether they needed to score additional points during a match, or whether they needed to win by pinfall.
The coach told all of us before the conference meet that the result of the heavyweight match would probably determine whether or not we would win the championship. Specifically, we would likely win the conference championship as long as I was not pinned. I was matched against the defending champion of the conference, who weighed somewhere around 275 pounds.
Sure enough, it came down to the heavyweight result. The other team was cheering for their guy, and I looked like a pimple on an elephant’s butt by comparison. As the match began, this guy absolutely had his way with me. I was on my back left and right, but somehow I was managing to arch my back and avoid getting pinned.
He slammed me with a crossface here and a crossface there, smashed my face into the mat with a power half, then quickly rolled me once again onto my back. He crossfaced me so hard, I thought he was going to take my face off and wear it as a mask. Yet, I was somehow still managing to avoid being pinned.
The crowd was going absolutely crazy.
He was racking up an incredible score, but that did not matter. The tech falls rule did not exist at this time, which meant he actually had to pin
me in order to get all of the points his team needed to win.
When time expired, the parents, student body, friends, and distant relatives of the Montrose Hill-McCloy Wrestling team went crazy. The ref brought my opponent and I together to the center of the mat and raised my opponent’s hand in victory. As I walked toward my team, they ran onto the mat and gave me a hero’s welcome.
They jumped all around me, hugging me and tagging me on the back, all while saying, “Way to go, Severn!” because I’d helped our team secure the conference title. My opponent might have destroyed me physically, but he did not destroy my will to not be pinned.
After the excitement subsided and I had a moment to myself, I walked off to a private corner and began to cry. It dawned on me during my team’s celebration that I had only contributed to my team’s victory by not losing in the worst way possible.
From that moment on, I vowed to put myself in a position where much more would be expected of me by my teammates and coaches.
THREE
SIBLING RIVALRIES EXIST WITHIN MANY families, and my family was no different. My brother Dave set the bar high for all of his younger brothers to strive to reach, and starting immediately after my freshman wrestling season ended, we both began to make each other great.
Now that I’d cut my teeth as a criminally undersized heavyweight, I was finally moved to the 185-pound division, which would become my home for the next three years. However, if there was an opportunity for me to compete in a heavier weight class I didn’t mind doing it for the sake of gaining experience on the mat.
Every weekend that there was a wrestling tournament, Dave and I would climb into his Volkswagen Bug and go out in search of AAU and USWF events to compete in. Since I wasn’t old enough to drive, I’d sit in the passenger seat with the map open and act as the co-pilot by providing Dave with directions. Before things like Google Maps and GPS existed, this was what was necessary to get from one place to another.