The Realest Guy in the Room: The Life and Times of Dan Severn

by Dan Severn

  There was no way I was going to let someone put a literal knife to my throat if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. In my self-diagnosis, what caused the pain was either a bulging disc, a pinched nerve, or a vertebrae that was out of sync. I never got it fixed.

  Even to this day, whatever it is that’s wrong with my neck, it still causes my hands to tingle.

  I REGULARLY ask the kids I train whether it’s worse to lose by points or to lose by pin. The kids will usually say it’s worse to lose by a pin, and then they’ll rationalize that selection by saying the reason it’s worse to lose by a pin is because you surrender six points to the opposing team rather than three.

  Ultimately, all of the kids will agree the best way to win is by pinning your opponent, but then they’ll revert back to justifying that choice in terms of the number of points that are scored.

  That’s when I normally explain how pinning someone goes much deeper than the scoring of points.

  An opponent who loses to you by a scoring margin still thinks he can come back and defeat you the next time. An opponent who loses to you by a pinfall knows that you physically manhandled him, imposed your will on him, put him on his back and pinned him.

  If you got pinned, it means you got owned. An opponent who pins you leaves a psychological imprint on your brain. If you face him again on the mat, you’ll never be the same competitor you were before you were pinned.

  When I was at my best, I was known as a very aggressive pinner who wasn’t satisfied unless I pinned an opponent.

  During one national tournament, I waited until late in the weigh-ins before I walked in and stepped on the scale. There were seven other men there to compete, and I made the count an even eight.

  When I was done weighing in, I asked the officials a question.

  “Can you put my name toward the top of the list, please?” I requested. “I don’t want to get any byes.”

  If your name was at the bottom of the list, it was possible to get a bye into the next round if an opponent suffered an injury. I asked to have my name toward the top because I wanted matches.

  Usually at least a few hours passed between the weigh-ins and the posting of the wrestling brackets, so I went up to my hotel room to kill a couple hours. Afterward, I walked downstairs with my duffle bag, and I headed over to the wall chart.

  Typically, the wall chart displays the singlet colors the wrestlers will be wearing during their matches, so I’d stopped at the chart to find out whether I would be wearing a red or blue singlet at the beginning of the competition.

  That’s when I learned there wouldn’t be a competition.

  I looked at the wall chart, and the bracket indicated the other seven men had all withdrawn. My reputation as an aggressive pinner had preceded me.

  I won a national tournament without ever stepping on that mat. That’s how psychologically devastating it is to be pinned, and those are the lengths to which people will go to avoid suffering that indignity.

  Fortunately, I managed to avoid that indignity until the very last match of my collegiate career.

  Rather than risking life and limb by continuing to compete against the strong bulls of the 190-pound weight class, I decided to wrestle my 1981 senior season as a heavyweight.

  This is back when there were still no weight limits in the heavyweight class, but I knew how to play the heavyweight game since I’d been doing it since my freshman year of high school. I wasn’t going to shoot in on those big oafs. I knew how to pummel them, and then I knew how to use my intelligence to outmaneuver them.

  As a heavyweight, I returned to the NCAA Championships, and lost a close semi-final match with Lou Banach of Iowa. That’s when I met Steve Williams.

  Before Steve Williams was a world famous professional wrestling star known as ‘Dr. Death’, he was a star heavyweight wrestler at the University of Oklahoma. We met in the third-place match of the 1981 NCAA Championships.

  I shot in on Steve, and he met me with a sprawl. Whatever issue I was having with the nerves in my neck was exacerbated when we collided, and it felt like electrical bolts were traveling down my legs.

  For a moment, I was convinced I’d broken my neck. I thought I was paralyzed.

  At that point, there wasn’t anything I could do to prevent Steve from driving in like a football player, rolling me over and pinning me.

  As relieved as I probably should have felt to still have a fully-functioning body, I was far too devastated by the fact that I’d been pinned to take solace in the fact that I could walk. I was one match away from going my entire collegiate career without getting pinned, and I’d blown it.

  That was a dark moment of my life that I wish I could banish from my memory.

  SEVEN

  EVEN THOUGH MY COLLEGIATE CAREER was over, I went straight to coaching the wrestling team of Arizona State as an assistant to Bobby Douglas.

  At this juncture of my life, I still wanted to compete, and I was looking for the opportunity to compete in a way that would keep me as safe as possible from potential neck injuries.

  I was bouncing between the 220-pound weight class and the heavyweight weight class. Making the cut to 198 pounds was something I could still do, and I was a monster in the weight room, doing tons of lifting.

  Ultimately, I decided staying in the heavyweight division would be the simplest way to avoid re-injuring my neck. This was an era when the heavyweight division had an uncapped weight limit. Some heavyweight wrestlers, like the legendary Chris Taylor of Iowa State, could easily top 400 pounds.

  This is one of the reasons the heavyweight division was commonly referred to as “the unlimited weight class” in that era.

  It was a rarity for you to have to defend against a shooting opponent in a division with monsters who were that big.

  THE 1984 Olympic Games were going to provide the easiest opportunity to win a gold medal in the history of USA Wrestling.

  The Russians were the toughest competitors to compete against on the wrestling mat, and we wouldn’t have to worry about any of them because the Soviet Union was involved in a retaliatory boycott against the U.S. since we’d boycotted the 1980 Olympics.

  Even so, with the Turks, Iranians and Bulgarians still competing in the Olympic Games, a gold medal was still far from guaranteed.

  For the first time ever, the wrestling matches of the Olympic Trials would be videotaped, and there would be three separate cameras recording the action. The sole reason for having the cameras present was to make sure a proper decision could be reached if a protest was filed due to improper scoring.

  Lou Banach and I wrestled in a best-of-three series to determine USA Wrestling’s Olympic representative in the heavyweight division.

  Lou beat me in the first match, and I rebounded to win the second match, which left us deadlocked. The winner of the third match would be the nation’s sole heavyweight representative, and the loser would get to watch the Olympic Games from the sidelines.

  In the third match, Lou and I went through a series of scrambles, and I put Lou on his back with forty seconds remaining in the contest.

  One of the referees awarded me the pin and the victory. Unfortunately, the other two officials disagreed with his decision. If one of the other referees awarded me the pin, it would’ve been over.

  Not only was I not awarded the pin, but I also wasn’t awarded any of the points I should’ve received from that exchange either. At a bare minimum, they should have awarded me those points.

  With forty seconds remaining, I would’ve been leading if the match had been scored with even remote accuracy, and Lou would’ve needed to take risks by attacking me. Instead, Lou had the lead during that crucial juncture of the match.

  As a result, I lost. Even though I pinned Lou Banach and everyone saw it, I was still the runner-up. Of course, I was beside myself.

  I filed a protest, but even before I went through with the formal filing, I found a few independent referees who’d known nothing of the match I’d just participate
d in, and I asked them to call the points of the match from their perspective as it unfolded.

  I played my video of the match for them, and from their perspective, unanimously, I’d won the match.

  To my knowledge, there were at least thirty formal protests filed to dispute the results of matches during the trials. The referees went back and reviewed each match, and then a formal decision was rendered on each match once they reached their findings.

  There were three possible outcomes to a protest. Either the result of the match would remain as it was originally scored, the match would be rescored, or the match could be re-wrestled.

  Of the dozens of protests filed, one match was rescored, and one match was re-wrestled.

  And, one match was never officially ruled upon. Mine.

  I reached out to a wrestling friend of mine who was also an attorney, and I asked him if there was anything I could do to get justice.

  “Unless you have something like a Nike contract that says if you win a gold medal you’ll get $100,000, you’ve got nothing,” he explained. “All you’ll do is piss off people who are going to blackball you from wrestling for the rest of your career.”

  In essence, he told me to roll over.

  I lacked the political connections I would’ve had if I’d been a wrestler from a school like the University of Iowa.

  Having finished as a runner-up at the Olympic Trials, I was automatically brought into the Olympic Team’s training camp as an alternate. I’m not sure if it was deliberate, or if I was just being too aggressive, but I “accidentally” hurt Lou Banach during one of our training sessions.

  In case it hadn’t been obvious before, the coaches now realized that I probably had some hostile feelings about what had transpired during my match with Lou at the Olympic Trials. They shoved me over to hang out with the heavyweights and had me work out with Bruce Baumgartner.

  I brutalized Bruce.

  “I didn’t do anything to you!” Bruce would shout. “Don’t take it out on me!’

  Eventually, they shipped me over to the Greco Roman heavyweights, including Jeff Blatnick and Pete Lee, and I pushed them all around, too. I was so full of anger.

  Not only did Lou Banach end up winning the gold medal at the Olympics, but he went unscored upon. Everyone he wrestled, I’d not only wrestled against, but I’d also pinned them all in less than a minute.

  Lou didn’t pin anybody. He beat them, but he went the distance against every one of them.

  To add insult to injury, I’d also beaten all of the competitors Bruce Baumgartner wrestled against as well. At the 1984 Olympic Games, I could have won a gold medal at either 220 pounds, or in the heavyweight weight class!

  By the time the Olympic Games were over, I was seething. Figuratively, I was a walking volcano. Dan Gable initiated a conversation with me outside of the stadium, and I verbally lit into him. I was convinced that he’d been trying to stack the wrestling team with guys like Lou, who were from the University of Iowa, and that left me on the outside looking in.

  To me, the circumstances surrounding the 1984 Olympic Games will always remain a wound.

  OUTWARDLY, I couldn’t show too much unhappiness after the Olympics were over, because I had to get around to the business of getting married.

  I met Terry Savidje for the first time at an Arizona State baseball game during the early stages of my college wrestling career.

  I was sent to the game to be interviewed by one of the ASU student reporters, and I noticed one of the Arizona State wrestling cheerleaders, or “mat maids,” in the stands. She’d brought Terry to the game as a guest.

  Terry and I spoke to one another for a little bit, and then we connected once again at a wrestling team party. She wasn’t an ASU student; Terry had grown up a military brat. Her father was in the U.S. Air Force, and her mom had a home out in Paradise Valley.

  One of the highlights of hanging out at Terry’s mother’s house was they always had a well-stocked refrigerator, and Terry always joked that I would bypass her to get to the food.

  We were finally married on October 6, 1984, when I was still coping with a very fresh Olympic wound. Thankfully, I’ve always had a very strong poker face, and I was able to mask some of the anguish I was feeling at that time.

  My exterior may have looked calm, but underneath, I was a raging volcano. All I could do was bury my emotions, move on, and try to create different results in the future.

  EIGHT

  I RULED THE WRESTLING WORLD between 1984 and 1986. In the two-year period following the Olympic Games, no other wrestler could touch me.

  I was so enraged by the injustice I suffered at the 1984 Olympic trials that I destroyed a lot of people.

  In one event during that period, the U.S. wrestling team competed against the Soviet Union in a ten-match exhibition in Yerevan, Armenia. The Soviets were champing at the bit to show the Americans what would’ve happened if they hadn’t boycotted the Olympic Games.

  My opponent that day was Leri Khabelov, who would conclude his career as a five-time world champion and an Olympic gold medalist.

  This was one of the few cases where I knew I was competing against someone who was clearly better than me. The only way I could possibly beat him was to wear him down over the course of the contest and make up the point differential at the end.

  As expected, I was losing the match badly at one point, and Khabelov was shutting me out on the scoreboard. Gradually, he became more and more fatigued, and when we went out of bounds, I always got back to the center faster than him.

  I think my superior conditioning started to get in Khabelov’s head a little bit, giving me a psychological advantage.

  Suddenly, I started scoring on him over and over again, and there was nothing he could do about it. I came back and imposed my will on a technically superior opponent.

  The Arizona Republic reported on the event, and their brief summary captures everything you need to know about what happened:

  “Soviet wrestlers beat an American squad, 9-1, in an exhibition match Tuesday… The only winner from the United States was former Arizona State wrestler Dan Severn, who beat Leri Khabelov by a fall in 4:45 in the 220-pound class.”

  Sometimes in life, you have to make a statement by beating the opponents you shouldn’t beat.

  MY TIME as an assistant coach at Arizona State was very enjoyable. A lot of the time was spent training, making sure the athletes were fed and shuttling them around, and the wrestlers also knew Dan Severn was a lot more fun than Bobby Douglas. I was a lot closer to them in age, and Bobby would come down on them a lot harder for mischievous behavior than I would.

  Because I was making a whopping $3,200 a year as an assistant wrestling coach, I received the bulk of my income from a weightlifting manufacturing company called Olympic Enterprises.

  For the first several months on the job, I was scrubbing the newly-welded weight equipment just before it went to the sprayer. I had duck feet, because they were always wet and wrinkled. I was out there every day with a hose and a steel-wool pad cleaning everything off.

  In less than one year, I went from being the low man on the totem pole to being the owner’s right-hand man. He put me in charge of hiring and firing, which was actually a pretty shitty job, and I made sure the team would get the equipment manufactured and shipped out to customers.

  All of our equipment was free weight equipment. The bars and the weights were imported to us, but we made standard benches, incline benches, curling stations, vertical leg presses, wall-mounted pull-up bars, and a host of other products.

  During my stint with Olympic Enterprises, I visited every correctional facility in Arizona, delivering, installing or repairing weightlifting equipment.

  There were guys in these prisons serving sentences for breaking-and-entering convictions, and I couldn’t understand why on earth we would give them weights to play with. The same guys who needed crowbars and hammers to break into places before were now so jacked up, they could simply gr
ab a door and tear it off by the hinges!

  Even in these correctional facilities that were supposed to be so tightly controlled, these guys were still somehow able to get their hands on steroids. It was clear even then that either the guards were really stupid, they were turning a blind eye to the situation, or they were in on it.

  IN THE summer of 1986, Terry and I moved back to East Lansing, Michigan so that I could report as the assistant coach of the Michigan State University wrestling team.

  My departure from Arizona State was amicable. Coach Douglas knew Phil Parker, the Michigan State wrestling coach, and that made the transition an easy one.

  It was nice to be back in Michigan and to know that I’d come full circle, having been out to Arizona and performing as well as I had, even if it wasn’t all I’d dreamed it would be when I’d initially departed.

  When I arrived in East Lansing, I immediately began performing the duties of a true assistant coach. I ran the team’s practices while Phil handled the business of recruiting and arranging the schedules.

  The locker room was dilapidated, which to me indicated an overall lack of pride in the wrestling program. I made sure the lockers were upgraded and the walls were freshly painted, because I wanted to the wrestlers to be proud. My thinking was, If they were treated like quality wrestlers, they would begin to view themselves as quality wrestlers, and then they would perform like quality wrestlers.

  Phil and I shared an office, and I decorated my area with plaques, trophies and other mementos from my national championship wins, NCAA championship appearances, and my participation in the Olympic Trials and Pan American Games. I felt that tangible evidence of success would inspire the young pups in the MSU program to do more. Also, I was young enough that my achievements were recent, and I could motivate them to achieve some of the objectives that were within their grasp as well.