by Dan Severn
No matter how old or tough you are, you’re always going to be your daddy’s little guy, or your mother’s baby boy, and even though my dad was verbally tearing me up, I listened with a smile on my face knowing he was only doing it because he loved me and cared about my safety.
SEVENTEEN
BY GOING MORE THAN FIFTEEN minutes with Royce, I’d participated in the longest fight in UFC history at that time. No match before that had gone longer than four minutes, and the average match was over in two minutes. For us to quadruple the previous record was unfathomable to people.
At that point in the UFC’s progression, the company’s officials thought they knew how long a fight could last, but with a format that allowed for unlimited time to determine a victor, they had no way of controlling the ending of the event.
In the modern era, things would have been structured with undercard fights, athlete interviews, promotional packages, and plenty of other filler material to help them manage the time better, but none of this existed in the early UFC.
Later on, I learned through Bob Meyrowitz that the time allotted for the event by the pay-per-view providers had been running out, and they were considering stopping that match. Had they done that, they would have had no choice but to award me the victory because I had the dominant position the entire time, or they would have had to rule the bout a draw.
In several states, the pay-per-view time actually did run out, and people called their local providers asking about the results of the match and demanding refunds.
AFTER UFC 4, the cat was out of the bag as far as everyone knowing what I did was concerned. It was clear to everyone around me that the no-holds-barred UFC tournament had not been just a simple professional wrestling booking.
At that point, I started receiving a lot more phone calls at my house in Coldwater. I took my regular phone number and turned it into a private line because I didn’t want to be bothered. Since it was already in the phone book, any Tom, Dick or Harry could call that number, so I converted it into my office number. That allowed me to screen all the goofballs and allow my family to live in privacy.
I was still trying to protect my kids throughout all of this, and I tried to keep them as naive as possible with regard to what I was doing. As far as they knew, dad had an interesting job akin to that of a traveling salesman. I did the daddy deal during the workweek, which included making breakfast for my kids. My specialities were pancakes and French toast.
Even when I was in town, my family didn’t see me much because I was in the office at the training facility working on projects, answering emails, taking phone calls, and sending faxes. By the time my kids came home from school, dad was normally teaching a class.
I’d see my kids, but rarely did I see them awake. My latest wrestling classes ended at 9:00 p.m., so often, the best I could do was come in to give them a kiss goodnight.
My oldest child, Michael, was in third grade when all of this began to transpire, and one of his friends brought a pro wrestling magazine into his elementary school classroom. As the boys from the class were hovering over the magazine commenting on their favorite wrestlers, Michael pointed to a photo of me and shouted, “That’s my dad!”.
Of course, the other kids insisted to Michael that he was making it up. The teacher even came over, patted him on the head, and sarcastically stated, “Sure, Michael… that’s your father.”
Well, show and tell was a few weeks later, and guess what Michael brought in for show and tell.
The teacher came up to me with a proud look.
“It’s hard to believe someone in a national magazine lives right here in Coldwater, Michigan!” he said.
I didn’t blame him. It was hard to believe someone lived in their tiny city as a total unknown, yet to a select group of fans around the country, I was becoming very well known.
My training facility is a never-ending project, even today. However, what I have out there now is incredible compared with what I started with.
When I first opened it up, it had no running water. When kids came in to learn amateur wrestling, number-one bathroom emergencies were dealt with simply by having them run out to the side of the barn. For number twos, we had to take them up to the house.
The place had one old orange mat in the main room, three crates with a two-by-twelve board sitting on it which served as my bench, and a big, orange jug of water with a stack of styrofoam cups on top of it.
Beginnings don’t get much more humble than that, but as time progressed, my Coldwater barn became a full-fledged athletic training facility.
I’M SURE most of the conversations that resulted in me winning the NWA World Heavyweight Championship happened entirely behind closed doors. I certainly wasn’t privy to any of them.
At the time, the National Wrestling Alliance was virtually non-existent, and three promoters, led by Dennis Coralluzzo, were making the decisions for the organization.
In the aftermath of my showing on behalf of professional wrestling at UFC 4, Dennis came up with the idea to put the NWA belt on me to add some legitimacy to it once again.
The title change happened while I was at a show in Erlanger, Kentucky for Jim Cornette’s Smoky Mountain Wrestling, and meeting Jim for the first time was a real experience.
I kept looking at him and thinking, “Who is this crazy guy?”. He was bouncing all over the place and doing so many thing. He was just so energetic.
As the night progressed, I wound up sitting at ringside, and the announcer made everyone aware of my presence in the crowd along with my credentials as a UFC tournament finalist. In the meantime, NWA Champion Chris Candido was in the ring participating in a loser-eats-dog-food match.
Chris lost the match to his opponent, but refused to eat the dog food. In the process of avoiding the dog food, Chris knocked the dog food into my chest. Enraged, I climbed into the ring and began to gesture angrily toward the champion, and all of this culminated in a match later that night with the title on the line.
According to the storyline, I was in the back attempting to borrow the appropriate gear from other wrestlers just so that I could be properly equipped for my world championship opportunity. Miraculously, I somehow managed to acquire a pair of trunks and boots that fit me (I’d obviously brought my own), I forced Candido to submit to a cross armbreaker, and the first professional wrestling championship I ever won wound up being the NWA World Heavyweight Championship!
When the title change took place, the NWA wasn’t just in a dying state; it was bordering on extinction. Sadly, when they put the belt on me, I didn’t understand the magnitude of what was happening, the history of the National Wrestling Alliance, or the lineage of the belt. I was just striving to make something happen for my family and to put us in a better financial situation, and I was chasing every opportunity I possibly could.
Eventually, after I won the belt, a host of people began to educate me on the importance of the NWA, and since the internet was becoming more available, I would sit at home and read about the history of the NWA and learn about the legacy I was now a part of.
Almost immediately, because I was a real wrestler and a real fighter, people began to make comparisons between me and Lou Thesz - the longest reigning NWA champion of all time, who was also known to be a world class shooter in his day.
Lou was the traveling world champion back when the National Wrestling Alliance consisted of several powerful regional territories. Lou would show up in the territory and wrestle the regional promotion’s champion to make the regional champion look good… if he wanted to. If Lou didn’t like you, or if you attempted to challenge Lou for real in the ring, Lou would take you out.
Make no mistake about it; Lou Thesz was the man of the NWA. Many wrestling fans these days sadly don’t know who Lou Thesz was even though they all know who Ric Flair is. All I can say is, as many times as Ric Flair claimed to be the man, Lou Thesz was the man.
Seriously, if you don’t know who Lou Thesz is, look him up. He had a legitima
te stranglehold on the world championship, because he was cut from the same shoot wrestling cloth that I am. He was as real as it got.
The more I learned about Lou and the NWA, the more honored I felt to hold the championship.
I knew I was only getting the opportunity to be NWA champion because of my success in the UFC, but by the same token, I knew the NWA was trying to leverage my newfound fame to try to raise their own legitimacy and rekindle public awareness about their brand.
It was like a horse race where they were betting everything on me as the guy to get them to the finish line.
As I got to know Jim Cornette over the years, my respect for him just continued to grow. I always admired how he maintained his childhood love for professional wrestling. Whenever he talks about it, you can tell he loves it. By the same token, he has been mistreated by professional wrestling so much, and backhanded by this industry over and over again only to continually come back to help it again and again. He’s practically a battered housewife.
EIGHTEEN
THE ONLY PLACE I KNEW I could go to properly prepare for the UFC 5 tournament was Tempe, Arizona. Arizona was where I’d done all of my training during my college wrestling years, and I was still a member of the Sunkist Kids Wrestling Club, so it seemed clear to me that Arizona was the place to go.
Between the Arizona State wrestlers and the Sunkist Kids wrestlers, I knew there would be plenty of opportunities for me to get some workouts in. As soon as I flew into town, I rented a car for a month and found an extended-stay hotel. However, I wasn’t there very long.
My friend Ed Knecht, a former teammate of mine from the ASU team, was now a professor at Grand Canyon University. He was also running some sort of business program that educated students on how to successfully run a combat sports center, complete with marketing and accounting classes mixed in with the combat training.
Ed found out that I was in town, and he introduced me to a guy named Richard Hamilton. Richard was running some sort of business program that educated students on how to successfully run a combat sports center, complete with marketing and accounting classes mixed in with the combat training. He generously offered me the opportunity to stay and train at GCU.
I don’t know what sort of strings Richard pulled to make it all happen, but I was given a student apartment, which included a bed and a couch as the only furniture.
For entertainment, I brought two VHS tapes with me, which were copies of the first two UFC events. I secured a black-and-white television and a VCR, and the only things I watched for that entire month in Arizona were those two VHS tapes, over and over again.
Clearly, I was focused on the task at hand.
As I planned my workouts, I started putting together my own training manual, and I was putting my training camp together on the fly. I would go running by myself on the soccer field at GCU, and I also used their campus weightlifting facility.
The Sunkist Kids were utilizing the facility at a place called North Phoenix Baptist Church. When you think of a church, you don’t think of a place that would have a wrestling program based out of it, but this was a megachurch with a congregation of around 25,000 people.
This church had multiple basketball courts, racquetball courts and weight rooms. However, the most shocking thing about this place was what was going on in the basement.
The basement of North Phoenix Baptist Church was the training ground for a set of no-holds-barred combat programs!
One of the no-holds-barred programs was actually aimed at children, and it was called Rosy Cheeks. It got that name because it was an open-palm striking class, and when the kids smacked each other in the faces, rosy cheeks would be the result.
Adding to the disbelief of this situation is the fact that one of the most prominent anti-UFC advocates of all time, Senator John McCain, was also a member of the church. I have to assume he had no clue that a no-holds-barred class for kids was taking place in the basement of his very own church.
I even went to a few of the church services just to see if I could meet McCain and try to have a conversation with him. Whenever he spoke to the media, he would paint grim portraits of UFC fighters as thugs and hoodlums whose rise in the world of competitive sports was a harbinger of society’s doom.
Thanks in part to Senator McCain, no-holds-barred combat wasn’t even regarded as a sport. On the other hand, John McCain was also a huge advocate for the sport of boxing, so it’s possible that he was being prompted by boxing organizations and their sponsors to do away with a potential rival before it could gain too much traction.
I had a multitude of training partners during the Sunkist Wrestling practices, and some of them would go on to forge their own path in the world of MMA. Most notable among them was ‘The Specimen’ Mark Kerr.
At the time, Mark wrestled in the 198-pound weight class. He was muscular and leaned out. About eight months later, Mark approached me in Los Angeles while I was eating with some friends and I didn’t even recognize him. He didn’t look like Mark Kerr anymore; he looked like the thing that had eaten Mark Kerr.
Mark had muscled up like there was no tomorrow, and his weight got to north of 260 pounds. When the Smashing Machine documentary came out, which focused on Mark Kerr, Mark Coleman, Kevin Randleman, and the rest of Team Hammer House, you knew you were looking at guys who were dabbling in steroids and all sorts of other chemical enhancement stuff.
It was easy to identify Mark’s muscle growth as having been steroid induced, because steroids had been around amateur wrestling for a long time by the mid-90s. Guys weren’t even bashful about using steroids; they would inject themselves in the open in front of everyone.
BY THE time my training was over with, I was a true no-holds-barred fighter. Richard Hamilton started lining up workout partners for me for later in the evenings. There would be a dozen guys on the side of the mat wearing headgear, boxing gloves and shin pads. Their only job was to punch me, kick me, and keep me at bay, because I was a grappler.
Rich would stand there instigating the entire time.
“Keep Dan off of you!” he’d yell. “Keep him at bay! Use your hands!”
I was wearing my own boxing gloves, shin pads and knee pads, and these guys would rotate in on me as my training partners for two straight hours. I would clinch them, throw them down, and deliver kicks and punches.
Some of the guys would really pepper me with punches, and human nature just instructed me to put those guys down on the mat a little harder than I typically would. That was my way of letting them know that I was playing with them, but if they pushed me too hard, playtime would be over.
One guy pissed me off so much that I threw a legitimate punch at him and it broke the guard on his headgear. Afterward, they had me autograph the broken headgear, and then they mounted it on the wall.
The thing was, I was playing very nicely with them. I was being very respectful of them, and I understood they didn’t want to look bad in front of their peers.
Sometimes, Todd Prince was there provoking me.
“Get up, Dan!” he would shout.
It was nice to have him there, but most of the time, I was really by myself, just training, and preparing for the challenge before me.
NINETEEN
BY THE TIME I SHOWED up at Charlotte’s Independence Arena for UFC 5, it seemed like they’d changed the rules to hinder me. If I wore my wrestling shoes, I wouldn’t be allowed to stomp or kick anyone.
“It’s not exactly like I’m losing anything from my arsenal by not being allowed to kick,” I laughed.
After winning the NWA championship at Jim Cornette’s Smoky Mountain Wrestling show, I’d started getting booked out east in New Jersey for Dennis Coralluzzo’s promotion. I appeared for him at least twice before making my return at UFC 5, and I made sure Dennis was with me to carry the NWA belt out into the arena as I made my way to the octagon for the tournament.
My decision to have Dennis carry the NWA title belt to the cage caused a lot of consternati
on with the UFC’s top brass. They did not want any sort of association with professional wrestling, because their promotional spots for the show even included statements like “We’re real!”.
My entourage had grown to a total of six people, which was the maximum number we were permitted to have in our corner at the time. In addition to Phyllis and Dennis, I also had Todd Prince, Geza Kalman, Eric Hebestreit, and David Matt.
“You guys can create whatever kind of three-ring circus you want,” I told Phyllis and Dennis. “Just make sure you keep the people in the crowd away from me, because I need to get myself into the zone.”
Todd, who I’d known since my sophomore year of high school, was one of the guys there with me, and he had to explain to people that I wasn’t there to sign autographs or take photos. If I lost, no one would want my photo or autograph anyway.
Todd was “the cooler” who kept people away from me, including Dennis and Phyllis.
“You guys don’t have a fuckin’ clue as to what Dan’s about to go through, but you’re all happy to ride his coattails when he wins, right?” Todd sneered at them. “You’d better back away from him right now, because if he loses, you’re not going to want anything to do with him.”
I understood Phyllis and Dennis were using me in a sense, which was fine. That was how the business end of things worked in both the fight business and the professional wrestling business.
MY FIRST fight in the UFC 5 tournament was against Joe Charles, and I immediately launched myself into attack mode.
Before the fights even started, I examined the cage to figure out where the hardest spots were, and when I caught Joe with a double-leg takedown and got him moving backward, I was looking for one of the solid ring posts.