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

by Dan Severn

  Not only did I bark orders and lead the practices, but I also jumped in and worked out with the wrestlers. I would rotate in as a workout partner for the top four weight classes.

  The area in which I was most valuable was with teaching techniques on an individual basis. I could assess each wrestler, identify his strengths and weaknesses, and then customize the techniques and strategies to suit them individually.

  Most coaches do production-grade, one-size-fits-all training. While I still taught the basics, I would modify the techniques for every wrestler based upon their body types, the way they moved, and the lengths of their arms and legs.

  Over the course of my time at Michigan State, the wrestling team went from the Big Ten’s basement to finishing among the top four teams in the conference.

  I was also training for my own benefit, and I was still performing at an elite level. It was around this time that I faced, and beat, a young 18-year-old wrestler by the name of Kurt Angle. Kurt would go on to win an Olympic Gold medal in 1996, and then he went on to even greater fame afterward as a pro wrestling superstar. I don’t remember much about our match, other than the fact that I won it.

  World class wrestlers tend to remember their losses far more frequently than they remember their wins, and I’m sure Kurt is the same way, because he certainly suffered very few losses in his amateur career.

  Even though I was still a top competitor in the amateur wrestling world, by the time the 1988 Olympic Trials rolled around, the difficulties with my neck had flared up again. This time, I finished sixth.

  As problematic as my neck pains had been going into the Olympic Trials, my misfortune was compounded by another knee injury that I suffered during the meet itself, which resulted in the second of my four knee surgeries.

  Terry and I lived in the housing units for married couples on the Michigan State campus, and by now, I had also become a father. My son Michael had been born, and my first baby girl, Danielle, was on the way.

  One time, I was upstairs galloping around on all fours, bucking like a bronco, while Michael hung onto the back of my shirt for dear life. He was squealing with laughter and doing his best to hang on.

  I guess we were making a little too much noise for our downstairs neighbor, who came upstairs and banged loudly on our door. His demeanor changed quickly once the door opened.

  “I’m so sorry, sir, but I really need to get some sleep because I have to work tomorrow,” he stuttered. “The noise is coming through the ceiling pretty good. Can you please try to keep it down?”

  “Well, I’ll do my best,” I replied.

  For what was soon to become a family of four, it was a cramped place to live. I knew I needed a house.

  I didn’t want to live in Lansing because there were too many people there, so I wound up moving us into a home in Owosso, which was a thirty-minute drive from East Lansing. It was a beautiful area, and we had great neighbors who acted like grandparents toward our children.

  In my mind, I was doing the pinnacle of what a wrestler could do. I was living the family life as an assistant coach in the Big Ten Conference, which was the heartbeat of amateur wrestling.

  By this time, my mom was running a catering business, and Terry and I would help her out on the weekends when I had no coaching duties to perform. Soon, we reached the point where Terry and I became so skilled at catering that we could handle a party in excess of 350 people between the two of us.

  I suffered from sleep deprivation quite often during that period. Many times, my last night of sleep during a week would be on a Thursday. As soon as I was done with work on Friday, I would drive my van home, strip the seats out of it, and turn my residential vehicle into a commercial vehicle rigged to haul cartons of vegetables, bags of potatoes, and boxes of meat.

  We would stock up on supplies at the local grocery stores, then we’d get on location at 8:00 a.m. and spend all Saturday morning and afternoon cooking. We also had to be careful not to overcook anything because certain things hold together better than others before they’re placed over a warmer.

  During serving time, Terry manned the kitchen while I stood in front of the guests wearing the classic black slacks, white shirt, red apron, and black bowtie. I had a smile spread across my face to look friendly and approachable for the guests, but my eyes were hustling up and down the service line to make sure the Sterno cans were staying lit, the food was staying warm, and also making sure the area remained clean after people had finished loading their plates like they hadn’t eaten in three months.

  People would spill drinks on the floor, look over at you to get your attention, and then point at the mess as if to say, “Fetch.” It would grate on your nerves to the point where you sometimes just didn’t want to be around people.

  Still, there was a special high I’d get in the catering business from knowing I’d kicked ass with my wife as a two-person crew that had successfully prepared food for 350 people.

  Over those years, I peeled thousands of pounds of potatoes. I may never have been in the military, but I can tell you what KP duty is all about!

  NINE

  IN MY THIRD YEAR OF coaching at Michigan State, some strange things began to happen.

  For two years, Coach Parker had been content to let me run the practices while he managed the office, which is a distribution of duties that had worked very well. Now, all of a sudden, he decided he wanted to be involved with teaching the wrestlers.

  Until that point, I’d never questioned him with regard to his wrestling acumen or credentials. Honestly, it never came up. But, as I watched him teach, I was left wondering if Phil had ever wrestled.

  As Phil was attempting to instruct, the wrestlers would either look at me questioningly, or they’d roll their eyes at what Phil was doing. It boggled my mind, but I would do my best to keep up appearances and support the head coach.

  “Watch what he’s doing, and keep an open mind,” I would tell them. “Everyone does things differently.”

  I was trying to support Phil Parker, but in my own mind, I had no clue as to what he was doing.

  I don’t know if Phil’s actions had to do with jealousy over the fact that the wrestlers tended to come to me for advice before they came to him, but what he was now attempting to teach them was actually a hindrance to their development.

  By the same token, from the wrestlers’ standpoint, I was essentially one of them. I ran their workouts, literally ran with them, wrestled with them, and cut weight in the saunas with them. If they missed practice, I’d show up to their dorm rooms, haul them out of bed, and put them through a special one-one-one training session as penance for the workout they’d missed.

  I also taught them how to break down and analyze the techniques of their opponents so they could better prepare for each individual competitor they would be squaring off against. In short, I taught them how to have pride in their program and themselves, and to not be satisfied with being the laughingstock of the Big Ten.

  Everything came to a head when I asked Phil if I could compete in a competition that was scheduled to take place the same weekend as the 1989 Big Ten Championships.

  I’d mentioned my upcoming competition to Phil before, but just to be on the safe side, I went to Phil and reminded him of the event once again. Phil officially gave me his blessing.

  Sadly, I could also see the team was beginning to unravel thanks to the miseducation Phil was providing them, and they clearly didn’t trust him.

  “Phil, I can skip this event,” I told him.

  “I’ve got it,” Phil insisted. “We’ll be just fine. You’ve been training for this. You should go wrestle.”

  Some of the guys from the team came to me privately and expressed their concerns, stating that they didn’t think they could wrestle for Phil.

  “Who do you wrestle for?” I asked them, rhetorically. “First of all, you’ll always represent yourself. Second, you represent your family, and then you represent the school. Your performance reflects on you, first an
d foremost.”

  An overlapping issue I was noticing at that time had to do with the per-diem money that didn’t seem to be making its way to the wrestlers. The school allocated $15 each day for wrestlers during road trips, but the team’s members didn’t seem to be receiving anything approaching that level of value.

  In reality, it seemed far more likely the wrestlers were receiving only a fraction of their allotted per diem each day, and Phil was pocketing the remainder. I was convinced Phil was embezzling money.

  All the same, I was receiving my standard per diem money, probably because Phil was attempting to keep me in the dark, but I could easily pull the financial files and see what was really happening.

  There were ways of obscuring how much was being spent on the team, like buying massive meals for the team of spaghetti and salad, which were significantly cheaper on a per-person basis than what the per-diem allotment should have provided for them.

  Still, with Phil’s blessing, I went off to compete. When I came back, all hell had broken loose. Wrestlers were up in arms, parents were up in arms, administrators were up in arms, and at the center of the storm was Phil Parker.

  During the Big Ten Championships, the shit hit the fan.

  Wrestlers were left at the weigh-ins without a coach, and they’d also been left at the hotel without transportation back to the tournament.

  To make matters worse, Phil and I both reported to Doug Weaver, the athletic director, and it was clear to everyone that Doug wanted to get rid of the wrestling program. The former head coach of the wrestling team, Grady Peninger, still worked for the university, and he would clue me in as to what Doug’s intentions were for our program.

  Thanks to Phil’s mishandling of the Big Ten Championship weekend, Doug now had the perfect opportunity to make his case for the elimination of Michigan State’s wrestling program.

  When Doug met with Phil to get to the bottom of the problems that transpired over that weekend, one of the first things he asked involved the whereabouts of assistant coach Dan Severn, and whether or not I had Phil’s permission to participate in my own wrestling event that weekend.

  Phil threw me under the bus, lied to Doug, and told him that I had not been given permission to skip the Big Ten Championships.

  Afterward, I was called into Doug’s office. During that meeting, Doug kept harping on the assertion that I didn’t have any form of official permission to be absent from the team.

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “I had the permission of my superior, Phil Parker.”

  Things became progressively more confrontational as the conversation went on. Finally, I reached the point where I’d had enough.

  “I have never brought any form of disgrace to this university, or its wrestling program,” I proclaimed. “I have never violated any Big Ten regulations or NCAA regulations, but I cannot say the same for my superior.”

  If Doug was planning to come after me, I was going to reroute him toward the guy he really needed to be dealing with.

  “I can see the two of you don’t really get along,” Doug said. “Perhaps you should take a couple of weeks off, and then we can revisit this.”

  I could see the writing on the wall. MSU had a good-ol’-boy network, and I was an outsider. I started scrambling for ways to protect my ass. When business concluded that day, I stayed behind in my office at the IM West building, pondering what my next move should be.

  To protect myself, I realized I should make copies of the team’s travel vouchers. That way, I’d have proof to show an attorney if things went sideways. I started pulling all of the files, and I made so many copies that the copy machine actually started smoking. When I was nearly done, I thought to myself, “What does it matter if I have copies, or if I just have the original files? I’ll just take both!”

  That night, I cleaned out my office. A few days later, my buddy Mike arranged for me to meet with a Metro Detroit prosecuting attorney named L. Brooks Patterson. I went into the office with Brooks, and I laid out everything I had.

  “Name your price, son,” he said to me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’ve got Michigan State by the proverbial balls,” Brooks assured me. “How hard do you want to squeeze them? Would you like to be the head wrestling coach?”

  “Not unless you can take out the athletic director and a few of the other people who tried to sell me down the river,” I replied.

  “I’m pretty good, but I don’t know if I’m that good,” Brooks admitted. “Asking for that would end up pissing off a lot of the regents.”

  “Okay, then I want a strong letter of recommendation from athletic director Doug Weaver,” I stated. “I don’t want to be involved in this program anymore. They can send the rest of my checks to my home in Owosso.”

  I had no intention of sticking around to give the Michigan State athletic department another chance to fire me.

  Less than a year later, Phil Parker was arrested for raping a twenty-year-old woman on February 14, 1990, and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  I went home to try to find another job.

  WHILE I still had a paycheck from Michigan State coming to my house every week, eventually, the mailman was going to stop delivering those checks.

  Fortunately, Bob Barnes, who’d been the best man at my wedding, told me he needed someone to come out and troubleshoot some things at his family’s Chicago company.

  Bob had been on the Arizona State wrestling team while I was coaching, and he knew I had an industrial arts background. I was also eighteen credits into a Master’s of Education degree with a specialization in manufacturing. With that educational background, along with the experience I gained working for Olympic Enterprises in Arizona, he thought I might be able to help his company out.

  By accepting the job offer, I was committing to a seven-hour drive from Owosso to the northside of Chicago every Sunday night. Once I arrived in Chicago, I would be staying at Bob’s house. When work concluded for the week, I would then leave the office and drive straight from Chicago to Owosso, just to be home for thirty-six hours before I’d have to turn back around and leave again.

  Chicago traffic is a motherfucker. There’s no other way to put it. Because the drives were so long, I really only had less than twenty-four hours of real interaction with my family before I had to leave again. That’s the price of sacrificing for the sake of keeping food on the table.

  My friend Bob was a true underdog when he was at Arizona State. He could barely walk out onto a wrestling mat without tripping over the lines. I always pulled for him in my heart, because he was always outmatched despite his best efforts.

  When I arrived at Bob’s company he wanted to bring me in as a supervisor, but I told him the only way I would be able to truly smoke out the problem within his operation would be if he brought me in as a standard tool-and-dye guy. If Bob brought me in as a grunt, the other employees would be honest with me, and it would be easier to find the root cause of the company’s issues.

  Bob loved my idea, and even though I was staying at his house, we drove to work separately to keep up the appearance that I was a typical tool-and-dye guy with no special connection to the owner. The only other person who knew about our plan was Bob’s father.

  As I began the job, I thought a move to Chicago might be in the future for my family. However, after a few months at the office, I realized what was wrong with the company was the ownership team.

  Bob and his father were the cause of all the company’s problems. Bob’s father would literally throw things at his son in front of the employees. With the constant fighting, cursing and bickering, it simply wasn’t conducive to creating a good job atmosphere. They even carried on this interaction at home once the workday had drawn to a close.

  That revelation led to a very tense meeting with Bob and his father.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your employees,” I reported to them. “What’s wrong with the company is the way you two are fight
ing. You’re pulling the employees into your drama, and all they want is to make a good wage in a harmonious environment, and then to go home to their families.”

  Bob and his dad weren’t particularly pleased with my assessment.

  On the same day I delivered that report to them, I returned Bob’s spare house key to him. Then I packed up my bags and returned to Michigan.

  That little bit of honesty cost me my friendship with my best man.

  TEN

  I MOVED TO COLDWATER, MICHIGAN for all the right reasons. There were a few remaining months during which I would be paid on my Michigan State contract, so I only had a limited amount of time to figure out what I would be doing next.

  My next move was to begin working with the Michigan Wrestling Club, and I also started a full-time job in the automotive industry. I was commuting eighty-two miles one way from Owosso to Albion while working for a tool-and-dye and forging-and-stamping plant.

  During the year I spent in Albion, I practically saved the company. I was the teflon guy there; I couldn’t be touched.

  The guy who hired me in Albion went on to bigger and better things in Coldwater. He offered me profit sharing in his company, along with a substantially larger salary than what I was making at the time. Essentially, he was offering all the bells and whistles that a married guy with three children wants to hear from a potential employer.

  He gave me two weeks to make my decision, and in those two weeks, I sold my home in Owosso, bought a home in Coldwater, and went to work. My new home was purchased based on the salary I’d been promised.

  By the end of the first week, I was jobless.

  The new at-will clause had just come into effect, which meant I could be let go at any point with no provocation whatsoever. Before that, I probably could’ve sued the company for putting me through this experience.