by Dan Severn
In fact, it was only a few years later that Jerry Bohlander used Scott Ferrozzo’s own singlet as a weapon against him in a UFC cage.
“I’m also a professional wrestler,” I informed them. “I’ll wear the uniform of a professional wrestler, which is just a pair of trunks.”
I’d already been through several world class amateur wrestling training camps, and in that setting, your normal workout attire consisted of t-shirts, athletic shorts, wrestling shoes, and maybe knee pads and headgear.
Toward the end of the training sessions, the coaches had us strip off our shirts, and we discovered very quickly how much harder it is to grab hold of a sweaty body than it is to grab onto a clothed body.
I wanted to be as elusive and tough to grab onto as I could possibly be, which is another reason I went into the cage wearing only a set of trunks. At the very least, I knew it would make me very difficult for my opponents to hold onto.
I FOUND out I’d be fighting Anthony Macias in the first round of the UFC 4 tournament the night before the event.
At modern UFC shows, it’s a big deal to have the weigh-ins on the night before the fights, and thousands of people are typically in attendance to watch the fighters strip down to their skivvies, weigh-in and square off.
In the no-hold-barred era, we showed up to a press conference where you were sitting up on a stage with seven other men, and an announcer would ask us to stand up as he read off our credentials, including our heights, weights and fighting backgrounds.
I remember they brought up ‘Big’ John McCarthy to go over the rules, and I remember thinking to myself, “This ought to be a very short speech.” When the fighting got started, there were only two rules.
The first-round matchups were created on the spot by a lottery machine that extracted ping pong balls with the fighters’ names on them. The balls would fly around inside the machine until one popped out, and then they’d announce the name of the corresponding fighter and place his name on the tournament bracket.
This was an entirely random process, and we had fewer than twenty-four-hours to prepare for an opponent and his unique style. There was also no internet for us to use to check these guys out, look up their records, or look for clips of their fights.
At the time, all I had was a mechanical pencil and a sheet of paper which I used to quickly jot down the names of the fighters and their backgrounds so that I at least had something to reference later on.
As far as strategies were concerned, you wanted to dispose of your opponents as quickly as you possibly could so that you could get back to the locker room, try to relax, and then watch the other fighters in your bracket and scout them. That way, you’d have at least some idea of what to expect when you met the next guy in the cage later that evening.
Honestly, imagine trying to prepare for the opponent you’re scheduled to face, but simultaneously watching the fight going on before yours and trying to take mental notes about the winner to use later... if you’re lucky enough to win your first fight.
This atmosphere was very distracting. It was like the Wild West behind the scenes.
Fortunately, I was used to the bracketing system from my days of amateur wrestling, so I understood which fights I needed to watch, and I wasn’t like some of the guys who were standing around watching every single fight, and getting more distracted by the environment than necessary.
Because of my time in professional wrestling, I was more polished than just about any other UFC fighter at that time. I knew how I was going to walk to the cage and what sort of cage presence I was going to give off. I knew how to create intimidation and anticipation through movement and demeanor, and I knew how to play to the crowd.
When my name was announced, I already knew how I was going to raise my hands with my palms out while turning to face the back of the arena, knowing that I would turn back to stare at my opponent while bringing my hands down into clenched fists, as if to say, “Game on.”
As much as I was focused on the presentational aspects of fighting, I was also acutely aware that this was the real deal, so I needed to conserve my energy and minimize my movement. Again, I was facing the daunting task of engaging in a fight with no time limit and no rounds to break up the action. Because of that, I needed to keep my composure and not burn any energy off unnecessarily.
Al Snow was in my corner, but we hadn’t had a real training camp, and what we were doing was unprecedented, so there was really no point to having a cornerman. No matter who was in your corner, they couldn’t really advise you about what you should be doing, because no real cagefighting strategies had been developed yet.
The other silly thing about having someone in my corner was there was unlimited time in the fights, along with no rounds. It’s not like there would be a break between the rounds during which a cornerman could have given me some instruction, brought in a foot stool for me to sit down on, given me a drink, iced an egg growing over my eye, wiped some blood off my face, or have done any of the other things that cornermen would typically do.
Because there were no time limits, if someone took you down, they could just stay in the mounted lay-and-pray position, and there would be nothing you could do about it. They could just pound away here and pound away there, and you had no hope of a round ending to provide relief.
These are the possibilities that raced through my mind as I prepared myself for my first fight.
UNBEKNOWNST TO me, two of my uncles back in Michigan were into the Ultimate Fighting Championship events at the time, and they happened to be watching UFC 4. When they spotted me on TV, they immediately called my parents.
“Marv, do you know where your boy is at?” one of my uncles asked my father.
Since my parents had five boys, Dad had no idea which son was being referenced.
“Which one?” Dad asked.
“Danny!” they said. “He’s about to climb in this cage and fight this guy!”
“What the hell?!” my Dad roared in disbelief.
SIXTEEN
IN MY FIGHT WITH ANTHONY Macias, I legitimized both amateur and professional wrestling at the same time. I could see Macias was a thinner guy than me, but I knew from his background that I had to watch for kicks and punches. Because I’d had more than a dozen UWFi matches, I was at the point where I was now comfortable with the concept of having kicks thrown at me.
As a fighter, you should try to simply react and do, not think. If you find yourself thinking rather than reacting, you’re probably going to lose. You need to understand there’s a point where people are going to stop coming forward, and they’re going to assume their fighting stance.
Once Macias stopped moving forward, and his legs got in position to throw kicks, I automatically knew which direction I needed to move in based on how he was standing.
As short as that fight was, it should’ve been a lot shorter. Anthony’s body was covered in what felt like baby oil, which would be illegal nowadays. I grabbed him for an early belly-to-belly suplex, but my arms slipped from his waist to his armpits.
If I’d pulled off that move, he would’ve done a front face plant, and the fight would’ve been over in seconds. Instead, my head hit the ground first, and I wound up eating some elbows during the ensuing scramble, but I was able to protect my soft facial tissue and not take too much damage.
Quickly, I grabbed Macias and hit my first belly-to-back suplex, which I could tell stunned him pretty good. Then he stood up while I still had him by the waist, and he fed right into another belly-to-back suplex.
“If you thought that first one hurt, wait until you feel this one!” I thought to myself.
The second suplex was probably twice as hard as the first one. I put everything I had into it.
When Anthony rolled over from the second suplex, I could see blood dripping onto the mat. At first, I thought the blood might have belonged to me because of the elbows I took early in the fight. When I saw the replays afterward, I noticed that Anthony hit the mat so hard during th
e second suplex that his body folded up and his own knee came up and struck him in the forehead, splitting it open.
Imagine the force it takes to get hit in the head with your own knee hard enough to draw blood, simply from taking a suplex!
People say I could’ve killed Anthony if the angle on those suplexes had been slightly different, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to win at the cost of another man’s life even though we’d signed those contracts.
In all honestly, during my freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling careers, I’ve seen so many throws that resulted in guys taking way worse landings in outrageous positions on their heads, necks or shoulders. I’m a bit surprised there aren’t more deaths, or at least more paraplegics and quadriplegics in amateur wrestling as a result!
With that being said, I wasn’t worried about killing Macias. I was using that fight to gain a psychological edge over the other fighters, and they were watching me play with another fighter’s body like a cat plays with a mouse.
The official result says that I finished Anthony with a “rear naked choke,” but I didn’t know any real submissions at that point. I just used whatever barbaric squeeze I was able to put on his neck.
At the end of the fight, someone ran up to me and said, “You just blew the crowd away!”.
“That’s one way to make an impression,” I joked, knowing I’d literally made an impression on the canvas with Macias’ body.
WHEN I got back behind the curtain after finishing off Macias, the atmosphere was different. People were standing there regarding me with holy-shit expressions on their faces. They wanted to know who this guy was that could grab other fighters and just ragdoll them.
The crowd had exploded huge for me during the fight, and even the play-by-play commentators were gasping. No one had seen throws so violently executed in the cage before, and it once again gave rise to the fear that someone might actually die during one of these fights. Even though everyone was freaking out, I couldn’t let the change in the mood influence me, because I still needed the money, and I still had a job to do.
I got some fluids in me, and made it a point to rest and conserve energy. I didn’t know how long the other fights would go or how long it would be before I had to get back in the cage. Fortunately, I hadn’t taken any actual damage despite the elbow strikes I’d received.
When I got in the cage with Marcus Bossett for my second-round matchup, my mind-set was more or less the same as it had been getting in there with Macias. I knew I had to watch out for hands and feet, and I knew I’d have to close the distance and clinch him.
Strikers need space to strike, so if I could clinch him, jam him against the cage or take him down, I’d have an advantage. I had three options, but they all required closing the distance.
Bossett went for a spinning back kick, and as soon as he started to spin, I just lowered my base, shot in, and took out his remaining leg. I slapped on another barbaric version of a rear-naked choke, and the fight was over in fifty-two seconds.
This victory put me in the finals with Royce Gracie, the winner of the first two UFC tournaments, and a man who had never lost inside the octagon.
If you recall, Royce went out with a legitimate entourage which the announcers referred to as The Gracie Train. They entered in a line with everyone holding the shoulders of the person in front of them.
In my locker room, I jokingly remarked to my team that we should get two long dowel rods, create some mannequin dummies and staple them to the dowel rods. Then we’d put fifty-six-year-old Phyllis Lee in front, Al Snow in the middle, and then I’d be at the tail end of the train.
“Hell, Phyllis would just trip and fall, there would be a domino effect, and we’d all end up on the ground,” Al laughed.
Seriously, it was right before my fight with Royce, and we were cracking jokes in the locker room.
It really was comical, though, because all of these other fight camps were truly professional outfits. My camp consisted of a horny old lady that looked like everyone’s grandma, but who also had the mouth of a sailor, and Al Snow, a goofy, good-natured professional “rassler”.
It was in between fights where an interviewer approached Al with a camera and asked, “What’s Dan Severn doing right now?”.
Al looked at him quizzically.
“He’s having sex,” Al said, sarcastically. “What do you think he’s doing?!”
ALL I knew heading into the finals was that I was going up against Royce Gracie, the guy who’d won the first two UFC tournaments, and I assumed this would be more of a pure grappling contest than my first two matches had been because of what I’d seen of Royce on the VHS tapes.
Specifically, I’d seen a guy who was not a great striker at all, and all of his matches wound up on the ground. At the same time, I recognized that he always seemed to control the situation.
Very quickly, I took Royce down and wound up in his guard. From that point on, the only person who really knows what happened in there is me. I tried some of the rudimentary submissions I’d thought up during my five brief training sessions, and I quickly realized that none of them were working on Royce.
At that point, it occurred to me that I might actually have to hit him.
The idea that you’re not allowed to strike anyone was thoroughly ingrained in my head from twenty-six-years of amateur wrestling. Frankly, I struggled more with my conscience in that fight than I ever struggled with Royce Gracie.
I sheepishly threw a strike to Royce’s side just hoping I would get some sort of reaction out of him that would make him a little uncomfortable so that he would shift a little bit. When that didn’t do much, I threw a punch to the other side.
At this point, I stared in Royce’s eyes, and I saw that he was looking out toward his dad.
“Dad, I’m hanging in here,” Royce said with his eyes, “but if you wanted to throw that towel in, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
By the rules in place at the time, your corner was allowed to stop a fight if they felt you weren’t behaving in a rational manner.
I followed Royce’s eyes over to his father, Helio, who was standing outside the cage. Helio was holding a towel down by his side, and the two of us locked eyes. He brought the towel up, folded his arms, and shook his head, “No.”.
“You old bastard,” I thought to myself. “You’d actually let me kill your kid in here for the sake of Gracie jiu jitsu’s reputation, wouldn’t you?”
Everyone knows the final result of the fight. After more than fifteen minutes, Royce caught me with a triangle choke, and I submitted.
Did I lose that night because someone beat me that night, or did I lose because I was unwilling to do what was necessary in order to beat another human being that night?
Let’s just say that Christmas came early that year for Royce Gracie. He got a gift from me.
I CAN live with my conscience, but if I could relive one moment from my life, the end of my fight with Royce Gracie would be the moment I would relive because a lot of things I dislike about the progression of MMA can be traced directly to how that moment played out.
In the decades that followed, Gracie jiu jitsu has been elevated and exalted above all other combat disciplines, and many people talk about the alleged Gracie mystique.
When I showed up to UFC 4 and they asked me what my discipline was, I said, “I’m an American wrestler.”
I’m pretty sure the only reason they asked me this is because they wanted to know what to put up on the tale-of-the-tape graphic.
“American wrestling?” they repeated. “What’s that going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess you’ll just have to watch and see.”
In my own mind, I wasn’t even sure what it would do, especially since I was just making things up as I went.
The original owners of the UFC were Rorion Gracie and Art Davie, but it was Art Davie’s brainchild. Rorion Gracie looked at the UFC as a vehicle for marketing Gracie jiu jitsu to the world, and it wo
rked.
After the first few tournaments, everyone wanted to be a Gracie jiu jitsu affiliate, and people were paying money for the Gracie sticker in the window, paying to fly themselves out to Torrance, California, and then paying for private classes with the Gracies to achieve a certain belt and certification level in order to teach the classes. Gracie jiu jitsu became like the McDonalds of martial arts. People were spending all kinds of money to buy their belts, certifications and jiu jitsu gis.
Even when you were doing belt testing and trying to progress from one belt ranking to the next, you had to fly in a Gracie family member to watch you, on your own dime, to give the official thumbs up or thumbs down. On a monthly basis, the Gracie’s were taking a percentage of all the money the affiliated gyms were bringing in. From a business perspective, I take my hat off to them, or more specifically to Rorion, because it was sheer genius for him to take advantage of that kind of opportunity.
When UFC 4 occurred, it quickly became apparent I was the monkey wrench that infiltrated the system and derailed the Gracie train.
Or, better yet, the gravy train.
I’d proven that amateur wrestling was more than a match for Gracie jiu jitsu.
Also, since I was in the finals of that UFC tournament, I was automatically allowed to return for another tournament.
I saw the difference between my paycheck and Royce’s paycheck for that show, and I thought, “Shit… I can do this.” That’s when I resolved to dedicate myself to the sport and put myself through a full thirty-two-day no-holds-barred training camp. That’s when I actually decided to become a truly specialized no-holds-barred cagefighter.
My uncles kept my father apprised of my status in between each fight. When I got home, I had a message waiting for me, imploring me to call my father. Even at nearly thirty-seven-years of age, I was being bitched out by my dad for making him nervous.