by Dan Severn
When I spotted the post, I rammed Joe right into it. I was like a football player driving my shoulder into him. I wanted to be able to hit Joe with something hard. Once I got him down, I immediately went to work looking for an opportunity to throw elbow shots toward his head.
Once Joe turned around and began to try and climb the cage wall, I slapped on a rear naked choke, and that was it. Big John McCarthy literally had to stop me.
Thankfully, I’d made short work of Joe without taking any damage. I was like the realest possible version of Bill Goldberg, because the only thought on my mind was “Who’s Next?”.
Well, the guy who was next was Oleg Taktarov, and knowing as many Russian competitors as I’d known in my life, I’d already assumed he’d be next. When they announced him as a sambo practitioner from Russia who had been undefeated for a decade, I assumed I would have to half kill him in order to beat him.
Early on in the fight, I was able to snap Oleg down in a front head-and-arm lock, and then I grabbed him in a partial cradle. This is where I mixed the no-holds-barred aspects into my arsenal, and I brought my knee up and caught Oleg in the head, which I knew must have dazed him.
As a strategy, I wanted to ball Oleg up against the cage wall so that he’d have to move toward me in order to get away from the fence. To Oleg’s credit, he was doing a solid job of countering me, and he actually worked himself into position to grab me in a potential armbar submission. However, in that fighting era, grabbing the fence was legal. As long as I held onto the cage, there would be no way he could complete the hold.
Oleg began to grab toward my kneepads while I was standing over him in the standing position, and I quickly realized my knee was now completely exposed. With my exposed knee now hovering directly over Oleg’s head, I thought to myself, “Hey… why not?”. I dropped a pair of knees right onto Oleg’s forehead. The knee drop would’ve done significant damage under any circumstances, but the bone-on-bone impact had the potential to draw blood.
When I dropped the first knee, I was actually being somewhat nice about it, because I didn’t want to kill the guy. However, Oleg kept squirming and struggling as if the knee drop hadn’t done much damage. Finally, I dropped a second knee on Oleg, and the skin on his forehead immediately split open and blood began to spurt forth.
It legitimately bothered me to have split Oleg open, because I wasn’t happy with the idea of hurting a fellow competitor, but I desperately wanted to prevail. Again, amateur wrestlers aren’t in the habit of throwing strikes like that on a regular basis, and this was easily the most damage I’d ever done to another man’s face.
So much blood flowed from Oleg’s forehead that it filled both of his eyewells. He couldn’t see me, and I could have dropped plenty of other knees.
Eventually, Oleg turned his head to let the blood drain from the corner of one eye, and to drip from the corner of his nose. This exposed his temple, the thinnest plate of the skull. For an instant, it was as if a cartoon devil and a cartoon angel appeared on my shoulders. The devil was saying, “Drop a knee now!” and the angel was saying, “No, Dan… Don’t kill him!”.
The angel won. I didn’t drop the knee to Oleg’s temple. The match only lasted a few more moments because Big John stopped the proceedings. Oleg couldn’t do anything to me, and I was basically killing him.
It was a heck of a way to earn my first TKO win ever. For historical purposes, this is where ‘The Beast’ was born. As I walked away from Oleg’s bloody body, I saw the crimson blood splashed all over my hands, face and chest, and none of it was mine.
The bloodthirsty UFC crowd was rabid at that moment, and I raised my arms to them to show them the blood that now decorated my body. Actually, I was pissed that I was having to appeal to this audience by resorting to these tactics, and my gesture was meant to be the equivalent of the “are-you-not-entertained” pose of Maximus from the Gladiator film, except I did this well before Russell Crowe ever picked up his sword on a movie set.
That moment was captured by many photographers, and it became the iconic Dan Severn moment inside the cage.
My final opponent was, Dave Beneteau, a replacement fighter who’d won a non-tournament fight earlier in the evening, and then subbed into the semi-final round as a replacement for the injured Jon Hess.
This was the second time alternates were being used in the tournament in a way that kept them from having an unfair advantage over fighters who had been participating in the tournament from the onset. Steve Jennum famously made a mockery of the original format when he won the UFC 3 tournament despite appearing in only one match as a substitute for Ken Shamrock.
At least I was going against an opponent with two victories under his belt that night.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d actually met Beneteau in Canada a decade earlier during my amateur wrestling career. I knew Dave had a wrestling background, but I hadn’t realized before the fight that his background also included boxing.
My strategy for the fight was to stay inside of his striking range by keeping the combat at close quarters, with the ideal situation being to pin him up against the cage and hopefully snag a takedown.
At one point, we were against the fence and Dave threw a wicked hook that missed me completely thanks to a well-timed duck. I’m not sure how I got out of the way. If Dave connected with that hook, I’m convinced he would’ve knocked me out.
Fortunately, I brought him down against the wall and applied a keylock submission on him.
Dave tapped out, and that was it.
I was so happy to have completed my mission, and I waved to my cornermen right away to climb into the ring and celebrate with me. I owed a lot to them.
Dennis Corralluzzo climbed into the ring to make sure the NWA championship was on my shoulder. The UFC 5 tournament title belt was also presented to me, and I held it up alongside the NWA championship for all the world to see.
There’s no doubt about it; the NWA and the entire world of professional wrestling definitely got a big rub out of the exposure that came from my UFC 5 tournament victory.
At the end of UFC 5, Jeff Blatnick came up to interview me in my moment of glory. Jeff had won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympic Games in Greco Roman wrestling in the 220-pound weight division.
He’d been one of the guys I’d shoved around in the practice room during my rage-filled period leading up to the Olympic Games.
“Dan, I was with you in 1984,” Jeff said. “I know what you went through. Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that by 1995 you’d be king of the cagefighting world?”
Only Jeff and I knew what he was talking about, and I gave him a smile of deep satisfaction.
In the closing comments, Jim Brown said, “When Dan Severn first came on the scene, he was just a wrestler who relied on his wrestling ability. He was so technical and so clinical. But this time we saw a different Dan Severn. A very aggressive striking, headbutting, and knee dropping fighter. We saw someone who was like a crazy animal. He was an animal. He was a beast.”
WHEN I was first christened as ‘The Beast’ I wasn’t happy with it. To me, the name sounded much too negative, and I didn’t want anything around me that could potentially have a detrimental effect on any aspects of my businesses.
This entire time I was competing, I was teaching a variety of classes at my training facility, including amateur wrestling. I wanted people to know that I stood for something righteous and good.
In addition to teaching the classes at my facility, I was also hosting several law enforcement training seminars. In the law enforcement world, they use a lot of acronyms, and I started thinking up ways to turn ‘The Beast’ into something positive.
I came up with Teacher, Humanitarian, and Educator to describe myself, and then I went to work on using “Beast” to describe my message.
I decided “Beast” would stand for Believe in yourself, Educate yourself, Adjust your attitude, Study hard and Teach others.
This way, when it came to presenti
ng ‘The Beast’ to others, especially outside of a combat setting, I could make it clear that I stood for positive things.
TWENTY
EVEN THOUGH I’D WON THE UFC 5 tournament, my everyday life really didn’t change at all. The UFC’s market was so niche that no one who frequented my immediate surroundings in small-town Michigan knew anything about it.
I’d go to the bank half expecting the owner to roll out the red carpet and hand me a cigar because the UFC 5 tournament champion had made an appearance and was depositing his winnings, but it never happened once.
Because I never left Coldwater for a bigger city, I never really took advantage on some of the opportunities that would’ve presented themselves if I’d lived in a major media market.
After winning the UFC 5 tournament, I assumed I would be fighting Royce Gracie in the next Superfight the UFC put on. After all, we were the only two men to ever legitimately win a UFC tournament.
The only problem was, with the Gracie family leaving the UFC, it was proposed that I would fight Ken Shamrock, which wasn’t a matchup that appealed to me in the slightest.
To me, a Superfight should pit a champion against another champion, and at that point, Ken Shamrock had never been a champion of anything in the UFC, nor had he even been a runner up.
The best thing Ken had ever done is earn a draw with Royce in a long, boring-ass rematch from their first fight. In the second round of the first UFC event, Royce made Ken submit to a choke in under a minute. At UFC 3, Ken returned and won two matches, and then quit in the middle of the tournament, claiming an injury.
Ken had never won anything. I wanted to fight Gracie.
I can’t overstate this. I’d been in international wrestling tournaments where champions from each country would square off in true superbouts, so the concept of a Superfight wasn’t a new idea to me.
Just because the UFC had some ‘roided-up freak who looked good in a pair of trunks, they thought they had something marketable. They were impressed by Ken because he had the body of a chemically-enhanced athlete, which he was.
The fact that Ken had been the King of Pancrase in Japan didn’t mean anything to me, because everyone in Japanese wrestling circles knew what the deal was with Pancrase; Pancrase’s fights were fake.
If the shootfighting in Pancrase had been real, do you honestly think an “experienced fighter” like Ken Shamrock would have lost his first fight to Royce Gracie - who never threw any meaningful strikes, and who Ken outweighed by 50 pounds - in less than one minute?
Ken using his Pancrase results to inflate his MMA record would have been like me adding my UWFi results to my record. Those companies are both professional wrestling promotions and not MMA organizations, let alone no-holds-barred promotions.
Prior to the fight with Ken, I continued to defend the NWA championship at professional wrestling shows on the east coast, and I honestly didn’t do any special training to prepare myself for the fight.
Unlike the National Wrestling Alliance of the past, when the NWA champion would receive a plane ticket paid for by the promoter whose territory he was about to visit, I had to drive from Michigan to states like New Jersey and Maryland for my matches and a $500 payday. When it was over, I was expected to cover the cost of my hotel room and fuel by myself.
That means when I did a Saturday night show out east for Dennis Coralluzzo, I would leave my house around 1:00 a.m. and drive all the way to the venue. I was happy to do it, because I felt like I was bringing home a week’s worth of wages during a twenty-four-hour period.
Later on, I learned that I should have been making more money for the shows, but I was content with what I was making at the time.
Once I got to a town, I’d try to find a gym in the area, because often if you said you were a professional wrestler, they would let you come in and lift weights for free. Then I’d try to find a football field, or some other patch of green to run on, and I would get in a distance run or do some sprint intervals.
At the shows, I would get in an hour early to set up my concession table, which included my championship belts, 8 x10 photos, and t-shirts, and then I would hit the ring as the people were filing into the building.
Over time, people would come to understand what I was doing. From a personal wellness standpoint, I was doing routines to keep my body limber. I was shadow wrestling and going through gymnastic routines such as bridging, along with all sorts of other techniques, but it became part of the show for the crowd. It was their understanding that this is what a world champion is supposed to do.
The most I ever saw any of the other wrestlers warm up was to do “curls for the girls” on the elastic bands in the back. This helped their muscles to stand out, but it didn’t do much to help their bodies in a functional sense.
Before long, I would get applause from the crowd at the conclusion of my warmup, and then I’d go over to my table, sell merchandise, take pictures with the fans, and sign autographs.
To make a long story short, four days before my first fight with Ken Shamrock, I worked a match for the NWA championship against Yoshihiro Tajiri in Toms River, New Jersey. The day after that, I drove back to Michigan, and the next day I flew out to Casper, Wyoming for the UFC Superfight Championship fight.
Somewhere along the way, I started to feel really sick. I’m someone who doesn’t get sick very often, but I’m more susceptible to getting sick when I’m worn down, and my schedule had definitely worn me down.
I probably shouldn’t have fought Shamrock that night, but I understood the UFC had sold the show largely on me fighting Ken as the headline event, and I wanted to live up to my obligation.
With Royce Gracie no longer on the UFC roster, there was no one else they could have put in that spot to replace me that would have drawn any money or helped the fight to live up to its Superfight billing.
Before our fight, this radio personality brought Ken and I into a room simultaneously and started asking us very pointed questions about our strategies for that night’s fight. To me, the whole thing seemed odd, and I decided to excuse myself while Ken was answering the guy’s questions, assuming that I would get a chance to be interviewed later.
I thought I was doing everyone a favor by leaving so Ken could speak plainly. Before I left, I turned to one of the other radio people who was there, and I said, “When you’re ready to speak with me, I’ll be right outside the door.”
As soon as I stepped outside, Ken went nuts. He ranted about how what I’d done was one of the most disrespectful things that had ever happened to him, and then he stormed out. To me, what I was doing was simply common sense, but he went off into one of his steroid-induced tirades, made a mountain out of a molehill, and then went off to pout about it.
As soon as they invited me back in, I explained to everyone what my reasoning was, but I certainly didn’t apologize to Ken. Did I care that he was upset? No. He didn’t mean anything to me then, and he still doesn’t.
When I walked out to the cage that night, I was feeling so lethargic that if I’d wrestled the pillow in my hotel room, the pillow would’ve won.
The short version is that Ken caught me early in a guillotine choke, and I tapped. He beat someone that night, but he didn’t beat the real Dan Severn. I lessened my stock by participating in that fight, and in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been an arrogant ass, found the doctor to confirm my poor condition, and then pulled out of the contest.
At the same time, it’s my fault, because I was doing all of these other shows and events to try to keep money coming to my family. So, if making as much money as I could for my family cost me the first fight with Ken, I can live with that. I never turned down work then, because I wanted to make as much money as I could while there was still money to be made.
The result of this fight still hurts me, but I can joke about it now. When I talk in seminars about being susceptible to a guillotine choke, I mention the time a guillotine choke cost me $82,000, which is what Ken walked away with as the winner�
��s share.
The thing that pisses me off most is the result of the fight legitimized Ken Shamrock in the eyes of many UFC fans, which is the last thing I’d ever wanted to have happen.
TWENTY-ONE
ONE MONTH AFTER MY FIGHT with Shamrock, I was in Japan participating in one of the most memorable wrestling tours of all time. My NWA championship defense against Tarzan Goto is the craziest match I’ve ever been in, and it was part of the most mind-boggling overall experience I was ever involved in during my professional wrestling career.
The funny part about the whole deal was that I was on this American squad, including Terry Gordy, Terry Funk, and Mick ‘Cactus Jack’ Foley, that was over in Japan for eight or nine days. All of the other guys worked seven or eight dates with only one day off, and I was there with them the entire time while only being booked for one match.
We were part of the group of foreigners assembled for the International Wrestling Association’s King of the Death Match 1995 Tour in Japan, and in establishing the craziness of the entire spectacle, it seems almost fitting how the entire thing was kicked off by a parade during which Terry Funk rode around on a horse.
Most Americans, and particularly the millennials, would have a hard time believing how worked up a nation could get over a professional wrestling event.
Every day I was off training by myself because no one else was traveling with me, and each night, I was in the arenas watching the matches. This was the tour when I got to see Tiger Jeet Singh in action, which amazed me, because I got to see Singh run through the crowd and backhand a fan while he still had a sword in his hand!
The backhanded fan would stand right back up with a bruise or a mark on his face, and he would make a big deal out of showing it off to everyone around him. He so proud to have been maimed by Tiger Jeet Singh! The stuff you could get away with in Japan was stunning. You could never, ever get away with that shit in the United States.