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

by Dan Severn

  The one day all of the American wrestlers were off, Mick Foley was in the gym with me watching me go through my exercises and shadow wrestling. We were limited in terms of equipment, but they had mats and a ring for us to train on, so I would be doing calisthenics, free squats and things of that nature to work up a sweat.

  Out of the blue, I heard Mick’s voice.

  “Can you teach me some moves?” Mick asked.

  Keep in mind, these are probably the first words Mick ever spoke to me.

  I looked back at him in surprise.

  “You’re Cactus Jack!” I exclaimed. “You’ve been wrestling professionally way longer than I have. How can I ever teach you any moves?”

  Keep in mind, by this point, Mick had already been involved in a main-event run in Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling against guys like Sting and Vader, who were both huge stars in the world of professional wrestling.

  “Dan, I really can’t wrestle,” Mick explained. “But, I can endure pain.”

  From then on, I always watched Mick’s matches from a completely different perspective. Every night I was going to these shows and making appearances simply to be recognized from in the crowd as part of the build up to my title defense against Tarzan Goto.

  Mick was wrestling multiple times in this Death Match tournament, and one of the matches was a thumbtack match against Terry Gordy. Since I’d never seen a thumbtack match before, I snuck out into an obscured part of Kawasaki Stadium to get a closer look.

  As the match began, I watched the official dump out a bag filled with thumbtacks into the ring. The entire time, in my mind, I’m thinking to myself, “This is professional wrestling; those thumbtacks can’t be real!”

  At the conclusion of the match, I headed backstage, and in came Mick Foley. Mick always wore a full-legged set of tights, and he had a t-shirt to go with it.

  The Japanese young boys approached Mick, and they began to pull the t-shirt out and away from his body. As they did, you started hearing the sound of tiny pieces of metal hitting the floor. It quickly registered what was happening, especially as one of the thumbtacks rolled toward me and came to rest by my feet.

  I reached down to pick up the thumbtack, and as I held it in my hand, I thought, “By God, these are real! These are real thumbtacks being pulled out of Cactus Jack’s body!”

  Then, the young boy picked the thumbtacks out of Mick’s ass, which finally gave Mick the ability to take a seat on a nearby stool. As he sat there, a few more young boys approached and began to pick thumbtacks out of Mick’s skull and his face.

  During the thumbtack removal, I walked up to Mick and asked, “Hey, Cactus, just how often do you get a tetanus shot?”

  “Every year, Dan,” Mick deadpanned. “Every year.”

  I walked away hoping Mick and Terry were being paid a lot of money for what they had endured that evening. In matches that dangerous, there are so many opportunities for infections to occur, alongside a host of other things that can go wrong.

  Mick was definitely right about not being able to wrestle in the classic sense. Mick couldn’t wrestle to save his soul, but could he ever take punishment!

  I was at the Royal Rumble the night he took ten or eleven chair shots to the head from the Rock. It was sad to read that later on Mick was suffering from short-term memory loss and was having difficulty getting down on his hands and knees to play with his children. He was still a young guy when he started experiencing those problems, so it makes me nervous about what time is going to do to him going forward.

  The saddest thing is, getting thrown from great heights and sliced with sharp objects has literally nothing to do with professional wrestling! But you had to hand it to Mick for his durability. You could rock him and sock him, and he kept coming back for more.

  Keep in mind, this thumbtack match wasn’t even the finals of the tournament, nor was it the main event of the evening.

  In the co-main event, I finally took to the ring to defend the NWA World Heavyweight Championship against Tarzan Goto. Compared to everything else that had gone on that evening, our match was comparably tame.

  Goto and I only talked about a few things before the match, and everything else would be improvised. Early in the contest, I took him down, ostensibly applying a rear-naked choke to his throat. In reality, I was helping to cover him up from the eyes of the fans.

  Earlier, I’d dropped knee strikes to Goto’s head, which was a callback to the knees I’d dropped on Oleg Taktarov during our UFC 5 match. Goto decided he needed to get color, which simply means he needed to cut his own forehead to get the blood to flow.

  The entire time I held Goto down, he was slicing up his forehead. I couldn’t have been any closer to him as he was carving himself up, and the number of times he bladed himself was just sickening.

  When Goto was done gashing himself, he dropped the blade on the mat, and the referee discreetly picked it up.

  The match continued for what seemed like forever. We went over the guardrail into the crowd, and then we adlibbed the rest of the match. I had no idea what would happen when we went brawling through a Japanese crowd, but when we went into the audience, people pulled their chairs back, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea in front of Moses.

  Goto and I worked our way a dozen or more rows back into the crowd and began battling with chairs. Eventually, he had me down and started potatoing me with chair shots as hard as he could. I had to use a chair to shield myself from his chair shots, all the while being conscious of the fact that if my fingers got caught in between the chairs, which were both metal, I could end up losing them, or they could at least end up getting broken.

  Once Goto was done whaling away on me, he stacked several chairs on top of me before heading back to the ring. Angrily, I got up and screamed, “Goto!”.

  Then I started throwing chairs toward the ring. If metal chair tossing ever became an Olympic event, I was more than ready for it.

  I threw the first chair with all of my might, and I overshot the ring. It bounced out and went into the crowd. Fortunately, I was in Japan where they like that sort of thing. After throwing several more chairs into the ring, I climbed in, and Goto and I resumed our steel chair battle.

  Before too long, we got back to wrestling. I survived a few of his signature facebusters then I choked him out to retain my championship. The match got over very well with the Japanese crowd.

  Once the match was over with and I’d gotten back to the locker room, I took my boots off and walked straight into the shower with my trunks, knee pads and socks still on. I desperately wanted to get all of the blood off of me, because I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t know what these guys have, if anything.”

  I think even from the earliest days of the no-holds-barred-era UFC, we had to take a physical during which they tested us for everything, including HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C. If it wasn’t from the very beginning, it was shortly thereafter. Nowadays, there are regulations requiring these tests, including EKGs.

  Here I was in a professional wrestling environment watching guys carve one another up, or carve themselves up, and puncture themselves with thumbtacks and barbed wire, when no such disease testing had taken place.

  Fairly recently, Hepatitis-C-infected wrestling legend Abdullah the Butcher, a guy who basically grew up in Metro Detroit since he’s from just across the river in Windsor, Ontario, was successfully sued for millions of dollars by Hannibal, a fellow wrestler. Abdullah bladed himself, then bladed Hannibal with the exact same blade he’d used on himself, thereby infecting Hannibal with Hepatitis C.

  The point is, it’s not like these fears of infection are baseless.

  In the tournament finals against Terry Funk, Mick and Terry both went through explosions, barbed wire boards, and a battery of other perilous obstacles. In the process, Mick partially tore off his one good ear! He had already lost most of his other ear during a match against Vader a year earlier.

  Both Terry and Mick had to go to the h
ospital afterward, and the medical staff opted not to put gauze on Mick’s third-degree burns because it simply would have stuck to the wounds.

  The day we flew home from Japan, Mick was wearing a t-shirt that looked like he’d just pulled it out from under a pile of bricks. Upon closer inspection, you could see red spots on his shirt from the puncture wounds caused by the thumbtacks and barbed wire. He also had gauze wrapped around his head, along with a huge lump of gauze pressed against his ear. In his hand was a dingy, brown duffle bag, and it wasn’t even a good one.

  Literally, Mick looked like someone who had just been in a war, and we were about to get on a standard passenger plane! As non-politically correct as this may sound, Mick looked like he might have been a terrorist, or at least a violent criminal who had nothing else to live for.

  All of our seats were randomly assigned, but nobody wanted to sit next to Mick, who had open, festering wounds on his arms. For the sake of the other passengers aboard the plane, Mick was moved up to first class so he could sit by himself.

  TWENTY-TWO

  OBVIOUSLY I WASN’T HAPPY WITH the way my first fight with Ken had gone down, so my preparation for the 1995 Ultimate Ultimate Tournament would take me to Arizona yet again.

  This training camp was different from my last camp inasmuch as I didn’t have to piece together anything new this time. Instead, I was able to head right down there with an idea already in mind of how to accomplish my training goals.

  Because of this, I was able to get in better workouts earlier in the preparation process, and my training was able to take on different aspects in terms of training for transitions and training for more standing exchanges.

  The training locations remained the same, and most of my training partners returned as well, although there were some new faces among them. This is because the students in Richard Hamilton’s classes were completely new, so the thirty or so students he was teaching were involved in the duration of my training.

  This meant I would grapple with student after student after student. My conditioning was off the hook! I was also running and lifting regularly at this point, and I quickly got to the point where I knew I was ready.

  The Ultimate Ultimate in Denver, Colorado was the first UFC event I was entering where neither Royce Gracie nor Ken Shamrock was involved, but it didn’t enter my mind at all at the time. Part of the reason might have been because this was the first UFC tournament where you knew the name of your first-round opponent ahead of time. Also, it’s not like Ken should have been involved in the tournament anyway. The event was designed to feature former tournament champions and runners up, and Ken had been neither.

  Before I’d even started training, it was announced that I would face Pat Smith - a 6’, 200-pound kickboxer from Colorado. However, Pat didn’t pass his medical evaluation, and they informed me on Friday, the day before the tournament that I would now be fighting Paul Varelans.

  “Who?” I asked when they told me.

  My team and I had no idea who he was, so I made them drive out to a local Blockbuster Video store to try to find a VHS tape with Paul Varelans on it. By then, a lot of the Blockbuster stores were carrying tapes of the first few UFC shows. One of my guys found a tape, and we rented a VCR from the hotel in order to do some research on Paul Varelans.

  Paul’s nickname was ‘The Polar Bear’ for a very good reason; the man was huge, standing 6’8” and weighing 340 pounds.

  This new opponent made me rethink my entire first round strategy. If I went for a shoot on him and he sprawled, I could potentially get hung up underneath a guy who weighed 340 pounds.

  I decided the best thing was to come out throwing some hands, and then I would try to hit him with a high double leg attack, which is called “tree topping” an opponent. At least that way, I could hopefully catch him with all of his weight going backwards and trip him, or I could pin him up against the cage.

  The point is, this wouldn’t be one of those matches where I was going to come to the center of the cage, stop, and then wait for my opponent to set his feet. Instead I was going to keep moving forward. That was the extent of the game plan I was able to develop for The Polar Bear.

  Fortunately, things played out almost exactly as I’d envisioned. I was able to bypass Paul’s hands, get the high double, and he just went straight down after attempting to kick me. Thanks to him throwing that kick, he made my job easy for me. It was like trying to knock down an ostrich that’s standing on one leg; it has no sense of balance.

  Now that I had the big mammoth of a man on the ground, I went right into a combination neck crank and choke where his arm was trapped. It’s like an amateur wrestling headlock where you slide your opponent’s own bicep across his face and use it as a smothering device.

  I squeezed Paul’s head with all my might, and I was envisioning his head popping like a pimple. I felt a tap on my back, and Big John jumped down to stop the action. I saw blood come out of Paul’s nose as I let his arm go, and I saw a trickle of blood run down from his nose. I assumed it was because I pulled his arm across his nose so hard that it broke.

  Fortunately, the first fight only took about a minute. There was some concern amongst my teammates that fighting at the mile-high elevation might affect me, but I’d heard that if you came into an elevated climate and perform in a competition immediately, it wouldn’t diminish your conditioning as severely.

  By this point, I already knew I was fighting Tank Abbott in the second round since it took him only one minute to beat the UFC 3 tournament winner Steve Jennum in the evening’s first fight.

  I had absolutely no respect for Tank Abbott. Obviously, I had to respect the power of his fists, but I had no respect for him as a human being.

  During his first UFC fight, Tank knocked out John Matua with one punch. As Matua was lying on the mat, defenseless, with his muscles involuntarily stiffening up, Tank had the audacity to strike the man in the face again and then mocked him afterwards.

  That sequence tells you everything you need to know about Tank Abbott.

  When I saw that, I made a mental note that if I ever faced Tank Abbott, his evil would beget an even greater evil in the form of me, because I knew I could flip the switch and make him pay for everything he’d done in the cage to others, although I would still have to operate within the limitations imposed by the two restrictions.

  The plan going in was to avoid Tank’s fists, get him in a clinch, jam him up against the fence, or take him down. Those were the three options I was looking for.

  I was very surprised when he sprawled when I first shot in on him, and I wound up eating a knee to the head.

  Aside from that, I think he only ever made contact with two other strikes. He caught me with a reverse headbutt and a reverse elbow aside from the knee.

  I got him over by the cage wall, and I was able to sweep his feet out from underneath him, taking him down.

  The activity rule was just starting to take shape, meaning if there was no significant activity taking place on the ground, the referee had the option of separating the combatants and having them stand back up.

  Obviously, having the fight returned to a standing position was of no benefit to me, so I knew I needed to go to work. My attitude was that I’d punched my time clock in once I’d taken Tank to the ground, and I wasn’t going to let it get brought back to a standing position again.

  I remember some guy told me somewhere along the way, even though I never verified the figure, that I hit Tank Abbott with 276 elbow strikes with my right arm alone. By modern rules, the 12-to-6 downward elbow strike that I was using would have been illegal.

  In addition to elbows, I threw knees until my legs got tired, then I threw headbutts, then some more elbow strikes, and I just kept raining down on him until the match was nearly over.

  It’s very hot under those lights, and I was so active that I lost about eight pounds of water weight in this fight alone. I just never stopped striking.

  After so much time spent down o
n the mat, I got to be pretty good at seeing where the openings were, but I was still being mindful of not throwing any strikes where I would run a risk of breaking my hands.

  I also threw some open-handed strikes to Tank’s head, and a lot of people thought I was trying to bitch slap him. What I was actually doing was trying to cup my hands and drive air into his ears, which would have burst his eardrums and disrupted his equilibrium.

  As devious as this sounds, I still wasn’t looking at this as a fight. I was thinking of it as a competition that allowed me a great deal of latitude in how I went about trying to win.

  “Come on, Dan!” Tank groaned at me.

  “Come on, what?” I thought to myself. “Come on and let you up, Tank? It’s not gonna happen.”

  I had some great guys in my corner, and I asked them to yell out to me when there were three minutes left in the fight. When that happened, I allowed Tank to get to his feet, jammed him against the fence, and threw some knees into his legs.

  In the final minute, I tried to jerk him away from the fence three times, but I couldn’t do it. The rules still allowed fighters to hold onto the cage walls back then, and Tank was holding on for dear life.

  All of this action was designed to set Tank up for a big belly-to-back suplex finish. I don’t think it would have hurt Tank too badly, but from an entertainment standpoint, I know the audience would have blown the roof off the building if I’d managed to connect with a big throw.

  When it became clear that Tank wasn’t going to let go of the fence, I just pushed away from him and moved back toward the center of the cage as the last few moments ticked away.

  For the first time ever, there were judges adjudicating the fight, so rather than ruling the fight a draw because there was no conclusion, the judges would have to select a winner.

  The entire time the three judges were deliberating, I was wondering what the criteria was for choosing a winner, since I don’t ever remember it being explained which measurements could or would be used to determine who the winner of a fight was.