by Dan Severn
I sought out a legal friend of mine and asked him what I could do, and he told me the first thing I should do was sign up for unemployment. I had to ask him how to do that, because I’d never been unemployed in my life.
This was a period of time when the United States was in a true recession, so finding a job that offered a salary anywhere close to what I needed to make the payments on my new house wasn’t happening.
However, one thing that did happen during this timeframe changed the entire trajectory of my life. In 1992, a new rule came down from the U.S. Olympic Committee allowing athletes to simultaneously be both amateur and professional as long as you were not involved with a high school or college athletic program. In those cases, you would either be governed by the High School Athletic Association rules or the NCAA rules. I was well past my collegiate eligibility, so I could have my cake and eat it, too.
For me, given the financial situation I was in at the time, this new rule presented me with a real possibility to live the lifestyle of a true professional athlete. I say the word possibility because there are no guarantees in life. Now I had hope and opportunity.
By day I was looking for a job, and by night I would soon be traveling to Lima, Ohio to pursue professional wrestling as a new career path. I pursued it so aggressively because I needed to keep a roof over my family’s head, and I had to keep food on the table.
I WAS the head coach of the Michigan Wrestling Club, and the president of the club at the time was Dennis Kasprowicz, who moonlighted as the professional wrestler known as Denny Kass.
Once we were done performing our normal duties for the amateur wrestling club, I would stick around and pick Denny’s brain for another fifteen to twenty minutes, asking him questions about professional wrestling. Denny painted the deepest, darkest picture you could ever paint to depict the world of pro wrestling.
“Mull it over,” Denny said, “If you’re still interested, I will take you down to a place in Lima, Ohio and introduce you to some people that have a pro wrestling training facility.”
One of the things I do right now at my training facility in Coldwater is train athletes for professional wrestling, but I burst the trainees’ bubbles right from the get go. That’s something uncommon in the wrestling industry, and it certainly wasn’t common during the time period when I was inquiring about training to wrestle.
Back then, you had all of these seedy pro wrestling training facilities that blew so much smoke up your ass. They would tell guys coming in that they would be the next Rock, the next ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, the next Hulk Hogan, or the next ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage.
They’d say things like, “You’ve got it all, kid! You’ve got the guts! You’ve got the charisma!” It was all false. More than ninety percent of these pro wrestling schools were operating under false pretenses to lure you in and take money from you.
Fortunately, that was not the situation with Al Snow. Al was the owner and main instructor at the gym in Lima, which was known as Body Slammers.
That’s where I wound up training, after Denny painted this sick, twisted picture of professional wrestling, telling me that I’d be living a gypsy lifestyle with a band of hoodlums, without knowing whom I could trust, and that I’d probably end up getting seriously hurt somewhere along the line while wrestling a match. In essence, Denny did everything he could to dissuade me from ever wanting to become a pro wrestler.
Pro wrestling is a physical entertainment product where you have to put your full trust and faith in another human being. If they screw up, you’ll get seriously hurt, and if you screw up, someone else will get seriously hurt. Also, even if you do everything right, you’re going to get hurt in the long run regardless, because pro wrestling essentially involves throwing yourself at the ground for a living.
After Denny painted this unattractive portrait of the pro wrestling industry, I mulled it over during the course of a few days, and I decided I was willing to at least visit this wrestling school and meet the people behind it. I still wasn’t ready to dive completely into the pool yet, but that’s the essence of how I was exposed to my very first professional wrestling school.
Al’s original gym was located in a very unsettling part of Lima. Every time I would park my vehicle, I’d always stop and look at it over my shoulder to get one last glance as I was walking away, knowing I would never see it again. Or, if I did see it again, it would be up on cinder blocks as the mere frame of a car, gutted and stripped with the tires missing.
Thankfully, that never happened, but I can’t overstate how bad the area was. Don’t get me wrong; Body Slammers was a great training facility in terms of the quality of the training. Having said that, it wasn’t much to look at. When you entered it, you walked into a dingy little room with bad lighting, and a wobbly ceiling fan hovered above the wrestling ring.
When I say the fan hovered over the ring, I’m saying this thing was close. The fan should’ve had five fins, but by the time I started training there, it only had three. You quickly discovered the reason it only had three fins was due to repeated contact between the fan and the trainees in the ring.
If you picked someone up to give them a bodyslam, they were close enough to the fan that their foot could get caught in it, so the fan was being broken by repeated collisions with the human bodies that trained beneath it.
Honestly, I kept waiting to see if a sewer rat would go scampering along the edge of the wall. That’s what the place looked like to me, and that was my very first impression upon walking into the building.
“Well, did I do it justice?” Denny asked me as we were driving back.
“Denny… you should’ve been an artiste,” I replied. “You couldn’t have painted a more proper portrait of that place.”
I DOUBT if any of the other Body Slammers trainees knew who I was. I’m pretty sure Denny had a conversation with Al just to let him know that he was going to be bringing somebody down to see the facility, but my amateur wrestling background was probably entirely unknown to them. They probably looked on me as just another “mark,” or fan, who wanted to get into the industry.
It was less than two weeks after my first meeting with Al Snow that I’d packed some gear into a bag and began traveling to Body Slammers to train on a regular basis.
Only a short period of time elapsed before I wrestled my first match, because I was pursuing a pro wrestling career as if my life depended on it. I was traveling down to Al’s place two or three times a week for training, and the trek from Coldwater to Lima was a little over two hours long.
So, when you add together the two-hour trip there, the two-hour trip home, and the three-hour training session, that means I had seven hours invested in a single pro wrestling training session. When guys who were supposed to be training would stand around in the ring and just bullshit, I got so pissed!
I’d tell them in the nicest way possible, “Get out of the ring so I can get in there and do my workout. I’ve only got a few hours to train, and I’ve already got four hours of driving time alone invested in this.”
It must have been pretty obvious to anyone who was watching how badly I wanted to be a pro wrestler. Al would see me in the ring alone going through the various wrestling “bumps,” or falls, after the other guys had stopped training. It would be like what you’d see in terms of shadow boxing, except I was doing shadow wrestling. I was trying to see how I could mix some of my amateur wrestling moves with the standard professional wrestling arsenal of clotheslines and bodyslams.
My education about professional wrestling was very limited at that time, because I was simply an out-of-work amateur wrestler looking for another way to make money. The majority of my education about the professional wrestling world would occur long after I trained.
ELEVEN
I WAS ONLY TRAINED BY Al Snow for a very short period of time before he put me in a match. Granted, the match itself was a piece of cake because I was wrestling Al, even though he was wrestling under a mask as his Shinobi alt
er ego. For that gimmick, Al wore a full bodysuit and pranced around as a ninja.
The funny thing about this show is it took place in a prison yard at an Ohio correctional facility. So, my first show was in a prison yard where all of the heels were over with the crowd and getting cheered, and the good guys, like me, were all getting booed. All of the crowd reactions I’d been trained to expect were coming to me as the polar opposite; the evil Shinobi was getting all the pops from the crowd, and I got all the heat.
In this day and age, I don’t know if a wrestling promoter would allow those sorts of risk factors to exist again, where a babyface rookie wrestler is worried about getting knifed in a prison yard during his first match. There were a few guys working at the show who knew exactly how to play to that crowd, and they were over, but that only worked for the heels, or bad guys. For all I know, they may have had actual friends in the audience that day.
I traveled for two and a half hours just to get to the show in Ohio, and I got there an hour before the doors opened. The show lasted a couple hours, and then they paid us. For my very first professional wrestling match, I received $15. I looked at the $15 in my hand while thinking about all the time and money I’d invested, and I said, “Oh my god… this is not going to work.”
By the same token, it really opened my eyes to how aggressively I had to get after this in pursuing a career in the pro wrestling industry and all the other avenues and opportunities that might come with it.
Because I was so adamant about getting started and maximizing my time, and so frustrated about the guys who were there and not taking the workouts seriously, I asked Al if he had a ring that I could buy. Al had four old ring posts available for me to purchase, and I used the dimensions from his existing ring to build my own ring to use at home.
Al was trying to get me booked as best he possibly could. The first time I worked with Al, it was hard for me, as an amateur wrestler, to look as the guy in the ring with me as a partner as opposed to as an opponent. Up until that time, anyone who stepped onto a wrestling mat with me was an opponent, and I was so good at zoning out the crowd to the point that it wouldn’t affect me one way or another. In professional wrestling, things are the exact opposite, where you have to listen to the crowd. It’s like you’re fishing for a certain reaction from the crowd, and when you hear it, you stick with what you’re doing.
It was a tough transition because I had to realize I was in a partnership with the person in the ring with me, and we were working together to do this magical thing while getting a reaction from the crowd.
I WAS in a place of financial desperation where I was willing to try anything in order to provide for my family. That’s around the time when I saw a flier for a local toughman competition. Plain as day, the flier advertised how the winner of the contest would receive $1,000, and at that point, I needed $1,000.
Most of Art Dore’s toughman contests were two-day events. On Fridays, you would compete in one fight, and then you would return on Saturday and progress through the tournament. This was the promoter’s way of milking people for beer and concession money by forcing them to attend the event on consecutive nights in order to see a conclusion.
There were really no rules to these sorts of things, and the participants just showed up, got in the ring, and typically engaged in wild punching and brawling until one of the combatants could no longer continue.
I sat down and watched the first few matches, and I’m seeing all sorts of wild throws, punches, shoves, clinches, and I’m also seeing people being held against the ring ropes. Because of the way the ropes responded when people leaned against them, I could quickly identify the ring as a pro wrestling ring as opposed to a boxing ring.
My Friday night opponent was a huge 300 pounder. As I walked to the ring to face him, the folks in attendance started laughing and jeering at me, largely due to the wrestling singlet I’d worn for the occasion.
Most of the fighters worse athletic shorts, along with either tennis shoes or boxing shoes. I thought my wrestling shoes looked kind of like boxing shoes, but in this environment, the wrestling singlet I had on, combined with my thick, black moustache, gave the impression that I’d walked out of the past.
It was the equivalent to John L. Sullivan stepping into a modern boxing ring, prepared to engage in a match under the Queensberry Rules.
At this point, I had never in my life balled up my fist against a fellow man, but I was assuming that would have to change if I was going to win this toughman contest.
As soon as the match started, this 300-pound oaf lumbered toward me and swung. In response to this, I charged him, driving him back into the ropes with my arms as far around his waist as I could get them while wearing sixteen-ounce boxing gloves.
Because I’d been in a wrestling ring before, I knew the ring ropes would function as a rubber band and act on us to drive our momentum back in the opposite direction. So, before I ever used my rebound belly-to-belly suplex in a professional wrestling match, I pulled it off in a legitimate toughman contest and sent this huge guy flying.
The crowd went bananas. They’d never seen a man in a wrestling singlet launch a guy through the air who looked to be twice his size.
The size difference was partially an illusion, because this guy was fluffy fat; he had no muscle mass underneath him, so there was no dense tissue. Still, the people in attendance were very impressed.
As the guy hit the canvas, he rolled and skidded on his face until his body came to a stop. When he looked up, his face looked like it had road rash.
While the crowd was still roaring, I looked over at the promoter, Art Dore, who was standing there looking at me with his mouth open. I swore he was going to disqualify me for doing something illegal.
Art glanced around at the crowd, and then held the microphone up to his mouth and turned back toward me.
“Well… throw him again!” Art yelled.
From that point, I grabbed the guy, clinched him, mauled him, and gave him no room to get any offense in.
With my amateur wrestling skills, I used bodylocks, overhooks, underhooks, and I finally used hammerfists and some really unskilled uppercuts to get the better of him, not that I knew what I was doing in that department.
I left to go home, and I sat there lying in bed a little bit traumatized by what I’d just done, and knowing that I would potentially have up to five more toughman bouts the following evening.
Unable to sleep, I got out of bed, sat down at my desk, pulled out a pad and paper, and began to calculate my financial requirements. I quickly realized there would be no way out of this toughman contest. Not only did I have to compete in the contest, but for the sake of my family, I literally needed to win.
Saturday night, I cleaned house and won the event.
Thankfully, I made a friend while I was there. One of the competitors I’d been sitting next to invited me over to his place for some much-needed training accessories.
“I’m going to give you my heavy bag,” he said. “I’ve been training with it all this time, and you did what you did without any sort of punching training. So, here you go.”
I went home and hung up the heavy bag, and it wound up hanging in my Coldwater training center for many years until the bag deteriorated so badly that I finally needed to get rid of it.
During the competition, I found myself conflicted, because once a toughman contest starts, it was kind of like the golden rule was operating in reverse: I needed to do unto others before they did unto me.
By the same token, I felt really bad for doing some of the things I was doing. I was trying to beat people in the nicest way possible in a competition that had a not-so-nice format. By no means was I striking people like a boxer would, especially since I had no training in that area, and the huge gloves we were wearing didn’t allow you to do any serious damage. I just kind of used them to poke my opponents to get them off balance and establish a better grip on them.
In this environment, I learned for the first time
that you could do amateur wrestling moves with authority in order to demoralize your opponents, take their space away, and break their will.
AT ONE of the earliest pro wrestling shows I participated in, I met Candy Devine, the girlfriend of Tom Burton, who wrestled for Global Championship Wrestling. She happened to be on a card that Al Snow put together, and whenever I was on a card, I always used my amateur wrestling credentials. She saw my credentials, and passed them along to Tom, who was also working for the UWFi in Japan during that time period.
When I came back from my match, she asked me if my amateur wrestling credentials were real. I assured her they were.
“My boyfriend books athletes to go over to Japan to do shootfighting,” she explained.
I’d never heard of this stuff before, but I still handed her a business card and an athletic résumé. Three days after talking to Candy, I received a phone call from Tom Burton. Ten days later, I was in Nashville, Tennessee doing a try-out match.
The scene of the try-out would be best described as slapstick comedy.
I showed up wearing a sports jacket and a tie, and carrying a duffle bag and a briefcase. I looked like a businessman to everyone there, but you have to understand that this was the standard for wrestling coaches at major universities, and that had been my life up until then.
For the record, I also wound up wearing a jacket and tie to my first UFC show, and the only other person dressed like me on that stage was Ron van Clief.
Here I was at a rathole-in-the-wall type of place in Nashville, and I’m there with half a dozen stereotypical, ‘roided-up-looking wrestlers. They had the long blonde hair and muscles of Hulk Hogan or Lex Luger, and they were also wearing those zebra-striped Zubaz pants.
I looked completely out of place.
Sinji was there with Tom as the representative of the UWFi, and Tom was acting as Sinji’s interpreter. This arrangement was completely asinine since Sinji was speaking in broken English that I could understand perfectly, and then Tom would echo Sinji in a voice so gravely that it was impossible to understand. Tom actually sounded a lot like Don Frye sounds now.