by Dan Severn
The funny thing is, a lot of the people trying to get me to attend these colleges were like celebrities to me!
I had Russ Hellickson from Wisconsin contacting me. He was the assistant wrestling coach at the university, but he was also an Olympic silver medalist. He would call me personally to tell me he wanted to work out with me to progress me along in my wrestling career.
Dan Gable, the living symbol of American wrestling, was also calling me to get me to come to Iowa, and so was Stan Abel, the national-championship-winning coach from the University of Oklahoma.
This led to one of the most humorous recruiting pitches I ever received, as the latter sought to distinguish himself from the former.
“Hi, Dan,” Coach Abel would begin. “This is Stan… not Dan… Abel… not Gable! I’m from the land of milk and honey - The University of Oklahoma.”
All of the major schools were recruiting me, including Iowa, Iowa State, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State.
And, so was Arizona State.
FIVE
AFTER I GRADUATED FROM HIGH school, I tried out for the 1976 U.S. Olympic Team. I’d been having such a great year, so I figured there was nothing to lose in making the attempt.
I went to the qualifier and won, and I found myself at the national meet with the top thirty-two wrestlers in the country. I was surrounded by people I’d read about in all the top wrestling magazines, and now I was competing against them.
If I’d thought Michigan’s high school state championship meet was ‘the big show’ or the freestyle national championship meet was ‘the big show’ neither one of them could compare with wrestling at the U.S. Olympic Trials.
At the age of eighteen, I finished in the top six.
USA Wrestling recognized my achievement, and normally they only bring the top two in each weight class to the Olympic Team’s training camp, but I was invited to come along and train as well because of the promise I’d shown.
Some of the guys who were recruiting me, like Russ Hellickson at Wisconsin, now had me as a regular workout partner. I went to the Olympic training camp, and then they brought me to Montreal to watch the competition in person.
As I sat there, I watched from the stands and thought, “One day, that’s going to be me out there.”
I TOOK all six of my allotted NCAA recruiting trips, which included trips to Iowa, Oklahoma, Arizona State, Wisconsin, Indiana State, and the University of Michigan.
Up until that point, all of the travels in my life had been primarily connected to wrestling events, and this was one of my first opportunities getting to travel out of state without having to be concerned with entering a wrestling tournament.
I made it well known to all of the coaches that I wanted to attend a collegiate program that had the best of both worlds, meaning they had a freestyle program in addition to having a traditional American folkstyle program.
The U.S. is the only country where folkstyle wrestling is the dominant form of competition on the high school and collegiate levels, which means we constantly lag behind other countries on the world stage when our athletes have to learn a new style of wrestling that our international opponents have been mastering for their entire lives.
If you have aspirations to compete on national teams in international competitions, you must learn to compete in either freestyle or Greco Roman wrestling.
My brother Dave and I had been competing in both freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling for years, so we were viewed as crossover athletes who trained in all wrestling forms.
While I toured the various college campuses, several of the coaches tried to position their programs as being able to accommodate my Olympic aspirations, and they also made sure I was properly wined and dined.
I was taken out for meals at nice restaurants, and they made sure I was escorted around campus by attractive young coeds. Normally, there were one or two girls serving as the eye candy, showing me around and providing me with some very flattering comments to entice me to join their school’s wrestling team.
During my trip to Arizona State I met with the legendary Bobby Douglas, one of the most significant figures in the development of wrestling in the United States. I’d already met Bobby when I was a sophomore in high school, back when he thought my brother and I were twins.
I spent some time with Bobby during my recruiting trip, and I also met former ASU wrestler Art Martori during one of our luncheons. Bobby left to make some more recruiting phone calls from his office, which left me sitting alone with Art.
“I hear you also want to do some freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling,” Art said.
“Yes, Mr. Martori,” I replied, trying to be very respectful. “I always felt I was a better freestyle and Greco-Roman-style wrestler than folkstyle wrestler. I went up to Iowa, and they have the Hawkeye Wrestling Club for that.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Art began. “If you come here, I’ll start up a freestyle wrestling club for you.”
The freestyle wrestling club he started was called the ‘Sunkist Kids’, and I became the very first Sunkist Kid added to the club’s roster.
Ultimately, Arizona State won the recruiting war because they offered a feature that no other school could match: my brother, Dave, was already a member of the Sun Devils wrestling team.
BEFORE I enrolled at Arizona State, I made several trips abroad. One of those trips took me to Turkey, which is where I was when registration commenced at ASU. As I flew back to Michigan from Turkey, I already knew my turnaround time would be very short, and then I’d need to hop right back on a plane for Arizona.
When I got home from Istanbul, I unpacked, washed my clothes, repacked, and took off for Tempe. By the time I got to Tempe, I was dead tired. I was sitting there in the coach’s office looking like a bobblehead, waiting for registration to begin.
One of the ASU wrestlers, my brother’s buddy Todd Prince, rolled in with his golf cart and drove Dave and I around what is now known as Wells Fargo Arena. The university had everything laid out for us to register for classes, and Todd drove us from table to table to complete my signup.
After that, he took me over to the student clinic for a quick physical, and all of this was accomplished in about forty-five minutes. I figured that had to be some kind of registration speed record.
My brother lived off campus with an upperclassman named Dan Santoro, and they invited me to stay with them. So, once again, my brother Mark and I shared a room!
I slept for the better part of the next twenty-four hours.
Now that I was in college, there would be no shifting between sports as the year unfolded. Now there was a true preseason which was heavily geared toward developing our cardiovascular capacities, all while “melting the butter” (also known as fat) off our bodies!
We also did three-a-day workouts, which meant we would get up in the morning and do running and weightlifting, followed by early afternoon technique drills, and evening ground wrestling.
After only three days of this, my neck was raw. I wasn’t used to being pawed and pried on this much.
Once again, I was the low man on the team’s totem pole. There was a world of difference between the mental and physical prowess of a high school athlete and an NCAA Division I athlete. The college wrestlers were much rougher. One of the guys I tried to shoot in on just knocked me to the mat with a forearm shiver to the face.
The message was clear: “Welcome to college, freshman.” I would have to rise up through the ranks once again.
My 1977 freshman season started off as a continuation of high school. I was winning match after match, and even though I was a true freshman, I was pinning pretty much everyone in the process.
With the success came more popularity and new opportunities. I was being asked to speak at engagements more and more frequently. I’d already taken a speech class in high school because people wanted to talk to me about the different benchmarks I was hitting with my performances, and I was terrified about talking to anyone.
Now that I was in college, I took yet another speech class, and boy, did I ever need it. Once a week, the school held an event called The Press Club at a place we called the Budweiser Building, and different athletes would be invited to speak there at press conferences.
Normally, the invitees were football players and basketball players, but I was one of the first wrestlers invited to these press conferences. They brought me up to the podium to field questions, and that kind of attention was mind boggling to me.
While answering questions, I was like a deer caught in the headlights. I liked winning on the wrestling mat, but I wasn’t wild about the idea of talking about it.
As a true eighteen-year-old freshman, I was turning the amateur wrestling world upside down. I was 34-0 with twenty-six pins, which had never been done before. In a one-week period, I pinned the Big Eight champ and the Big Ten champ, and then I pinned NCAA champion Evan Johnson from Minnesota twice.
I finished my freshman year undefeated, but I never finished the season.
During an invitational meet in San Francisco, I was beating my opponent 3-2 in a very tight match. We got involved in scramble, and I went down in a twisting motion.
As we came back up, I saw a bulge emerging from my right knee. I freaked out when I saw it, and fell backward to take the weight off of my knee.
I pushed the bulge back in using both of my thumbs, and soon discovered that I couldn’t bend my knee anymore.
The referee signaled for the end of the match, but I refused to accept it. I still wanted to wrestle, I was winning 3-2, and I did not want to lose by an injury default.
Coach Bobby Douglas wasn’t on this trip, so instead I conferred with the assistant athletic director.
Everyone told me I should stop, including the physician, the assistant athletic director, and the referee, but I pleaded with them to let me continue. Finally, they agreed that I could finish the match, but if I found myself in another bad predicament, they were going to stop the contest.
When things finally started back up, my opponent and I stood up and faced off from the neutral position. He was like a shark smelling blood, because it was obvious that I didn’t have the full use of my right leg. Everyone in the building knew he was going to come after my leg, including me.
As soon as the referee blew his whistle, my opponent fired in on my leg and I sprawled backwards. I slammed him down, slapped a cradle on him, pinned him, and then limped off the mat toward my team.
That was how my undefeated freshman season came to a close.
AS IT turns out, the bulge in my knee had been torn cartilage. During my match in San Francisco, I’d torn the cartilage completely in two, and one of the flaps balled up. When I pushed it back in, I trapped it in under my kneecap, and my entire knee had locked up.
On Monday, I was in the office of the student clinic being examined by the orthopedic specialist, Dr. Norman Fee. After checking me out, Dr. Fee glanced up at me with a somber look on his face.
“We’ve got to cut you open and fix your knee,” he assessed. “Your wrestling career is done.”
“You mean for the season, right? I asked, hopefully.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Your wrestling career is done.”
My entire world came crashing down. My wrestling career was done? I could not wrap my mind around the concept of my wrestling career being done.
What else was there?
My wrestling career allowed me travel around the United States and to different countries. My wrestling career had given me a full college scholarship. My wrestling career had given me all sorts of national recognition. In fact, my wrestling career is what prompted me to perform well academically, because I never wanted to have any problems with eligibility.
Literally, wrestling was everything to me.
If you saw the classes I took during my freshman year, you would have seen there was no degree in my future. I’d essentially majored in wrestling. I took a nutrition class because I wanted to know that everything I put in my body was going to help me develop into the ultimate wrestler. I took a weightlifting class so that I could sculpt my body into the perfect wrestling machine. I’d even taken a judo class so that I could use foot-sweeping techniques. I wanted to become so skilled with my legs that they would function as a second pair of arms.
From my own personal vantage point, I was an eighteen-year-old kid who was destined to become one of the all-time great wrestlers, and now I had no choice but to have a surgery that was going to effectively kill all of my dreams.
SIX
FORTUNATELY, THE SURGERY WENT BETTER than expected. Of course, I would still be out of action for at least the 1978 season, and Dr. Fee said any chance for a return to the mat would depend up on how well my rehabilitation went. In those days, nothing elaborate was done in the way of active rehab, so the remedy primarily involved sitting idle and waiting for my knee to heal.
Dr. Fee also lectured me about the psychological affects the injury might have on me.
“Most guys who have knee injuries are never the same,” he warned.
A lot of things were rolling through my mind at the time. For all intents and purposes, I wasn’t on the wrestling team anymore.
The wrestling team redshirted me to give me an opportunity to recover. When I came back to wrestle again, I was never quite the same. The surgery had taken me down a peg both physically and emotionally.
Coach Douglas obviously wasn’t happy about the injury. He’d been the coach of this freshman phenom, and here I was sidelined with an injury a week before the conference championship meet.
Whether I could compete or not, the coaching staff and the team had to go on without factoring me into their plans. Things still needed to move forward, and I began to learn my true value minus the athletics, because there was no longer any attention on me.
I fell out of the training loop, I was no longer in the media’s eyes, and opportunities suddenly began to vanish. Sport Illustrated had even contacted Arizona State about potentially allowing me to grace their cover, which would have made me the only college wrestler, other than the great Danny Hodge of Oklahoma, to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
When the cartilage in my knee unraveled, that opportunity unraveled with it.
Even though I was injured, I still attended the NCAA Championships, and I met Danny Hodge in the stands. Danny told me about a book by Mike Chapman entitled ‘Two Guys Named Dan’, which was about both himself and Dan Gable.
“We thought Mike was going to be able to put out a book one day called ‘Three Guys Named Dan,’” Danny said, in reference to my injury.
From the stands, I watched as five guys I’d pinned that year finished in the NCAA’s top six. Had I not been injured, every indication is that I probably would have gone undefeated and won the NCAA championship that year.
I HAD flickering moments of greatness during my career at Arizona State, but I never again experienced the wave of success and good fortune I’d ridden in the beginning,
Aside from the knee issue, I would also separate my shoulder, and the knuckles of my thumbs were in endless need of being taped up. I may have been compensating for one injury by working harder in other areas, it may have been the strength of the competition at that level, or it may have been a combination of the two. Whatever it was, I was undoubtedly plagued with injuries.
Over the course of my college career, it seemed like my body just kept breaking down on me.
I never had a complete season. Decades later, it still bothers me that I never realized my full potential as a college wrestler. Even though I was the exact same person after the initial injury, I was now trapped in a body that couldn’t seem to comply with my wishes the way it had in past.
When you look at the sheer facts, I was only a three-time NCAA All-American, and the highest I ever placed was as an NCAA Championship runner-up. Unfortunately, facts don’t take into account things like streaks, momentum and injuries.
They don’t
take robberies into account, either.
In my sophomore season, I came back and finished a disappointing fourth at the 1979 NCAA championships, but the following year I made it all the way to the finals of the 1980 NCAA tournament.
In the finals, I met Noel Loban from Clemson University, and we engaged in a tense, back-and-forth struggle for the 190-pound championship.
With ten seconds left on the clock, and with Noel and I having both been cautioned by the referee at different points in the match, we rolled out of bounds while I held a one-point advantage. The referee brought us both back to the center, and restarted the match.
Immediately, I advanced forward, made contact with Noel and established position on him. As Noel was moving backwards, the referee, for some unfathomable reason, called stalling on me.
The entire match, I’d never taken a backward step, and I’d never assumed a defensive posture. I’d been on the attack the entire time, so for me to somehow be called for stalling made no sense whatsoever. As a result, the match was ruled a draw, and Noel and I went into overtime.
The only problem was that my mind wasn’t even close to being composed as we entered the overtime session. Noel outscored me in overtime and won the national championship that I’d earned during regulation.
I was robbed. There was no other way to summarize what had just happened to me.
After everything I’d been through, and after everything I’d overcome in order to put my career on track, to have the NCAA championship stolen from me due to poor officiating was simply unacceptable to me.
Sadly, I would never get that close to being the NCAA champion again.
My junior season, I suffered a pinched nerve in my neck. X-rays were done, but the doctors couldn’t tell exactly what the problem was. They proposed exploratory surgery, but I didn’t want anyone playing hide and seek inside my neck for shits and giggles, especially when they told me they would have to enter through my throat and push my esophagus to the side.