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

by Dan Severn

  “Let me out!” Tank screamed to the official by the cage door.

  “Tank, you have to come on back!” Big John said to him.

  Tank wasn’t hearing it. He climbed up over the cage wall and left, because he and everyone else in the arena knew who’d won the fight.

  As satisfied as I might have felt about giving Tank a beating, my mind was concerned with two other issues at that moment. First of all, I had one more fight remaining before I could lay claim to the tournament championship and the $150,000 prize. Second, and far more importantly at that exact moment, I had to make sure I could get back to the locker room safely.

  I’d arranged for my four cornermen to meet me by the cage door once the fight was over. They encircled me and put a towel over my head in a tent-like shape as I exited the cage and made my way onto the arena floor. I wanted to be as inaccessible to the crowd as I could possibly be.

  As dirty as Tank was, he had a cult-like fan following, and not everyone in a fighting environment is a particularly good sport about their guy losing, especially when there’s alcohol being served in the stands. I didn’t want to take a longneck beer bottle upside the head!

  In the finals of the Ultimate Ultimate tournament, I had a rematch coming up with Oleg Taktarov, who won the UFC 6 tournament a few months after I’d beaten him in the finals of the UFC 5 tournament.

  In Oleg, I knew I had a very strong opponent with a competitive Russian mindset. Just as I’d reasoned before our first fight, I knew I would probably have to half kill Oleg in order to beat him again. I didn’t think I would be fortunate enough to once again be able to drop knees on Oleg’s head from up against the cage, and he should be credited with not giving up the first time; that match was halted by Big John. My objective heading into the rematch was to inflict damage on Oleg in any way I could, because there was a prize of $150,000 set to be awarded to the winner.

  The fight with Oleg went the full thirty-minutes, and I headbutted him around 300 times. These weren’t full, blatant headbutts like you’d see in a professional wrestling contest. These were short-range, close-quarter-combative headbutts designed to break his nose, make him bleed, smash his cheekbones and make them swell to blur his vision, and cut his eyebrows. In essence, the plan was to strike him as many times as possible using the hard parts of my head across the soft tissue of his face.

  Twenty minutes after the fight was over, the UFC officials rushed Oleg to the hospital because his skull was starting to swell. They were concerned about potential brain damage or a concussion.

  By contrast, I was able to just pop two ibuprofen, and I was good to go. I’ve always been accused of being a bonehead, but this was one of the few occasions where my boneheadedness had come in handy.

  As the winner of the Ultimate Ultimate tournament, I’d won the most competitive UFC tournament of all time up to that point. It was cool getting the big cardboard check, and it was even cooler getting the real check later on.

  ONCE AGAIN, I strolled into the bank with the big-money check, expecting the red carpet treatment, and I didn’t even get a free calendar. It’s very anticlimactic when you’re expecting the bank teller to say, “Holy shit!” when she sees the check, and instead she stamps it twice and says, “Thank you; have a nice day.” Maybe she would’ve been more impressed if she’d known what I had to do to get that check.

  There was no band or confetti, save for what existed in my imagination.

  Outside of Coldwater, I was beginning to get recognized by either wrestling fans or MMA fans as I made my way through airports and other places. Thanks to my moustache, I had a pretty distinctive look that made me easy to spot.

  I did an experiment a few years ago when I let my hair turn its natural grey color, and no one knew who I was anymore. As soon as I dyed it back, they’d recognize me again. Also, I’d wind up getting treated far differently when people thought I was older. I don’t know if that qualified as age discrimination, age consideration, or both.

  When I’d actually get recognized, sometimes it would be in some of the craziest places. One time, a guy recognized me while standing next to me at a urinal. As we were both handling our respective business, he reached over to try to introduce himself and shake my hand! I laughed and offered him an elbow bump instead.

  “Maybe we should wash our hands first?” I suggested.

  “Hell, I’ll just shake it off for you if you want,” he offered.

  That was way more help than I really needed.

  Sometimes it’s nice to be recognized, but sometimes, you wish you could just blend into the woodwork.

  TWENTY-THREE

  BY THIS TIME, I WAS well aware of what happened when Shane Douglas won the NWA World Championship and then discarded it in favor of the ECW World Championship. I’m not sure if Dennis had in mind to use me as part of an East Coast turf war with Paul Heyman and ECW, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. Dennis was definitely a shit-pot stirrer, and in me, he definitely had a strong pony to ride.

  There are plenty of situations in pro wrestling where you have the stereotypical small promoter who is able to speak very big and bold because he has some huge wrestlers to hide behind, and there wasn’t anyone in wrestling at the time who was much safer to stand behind than me.

  ECW was starting to gain notoriety by doing a bunch of crazy shows, and they’d developed a cult following. Eventually, I actually wound up visiting an ECW show, and I met Paul Heyman and some of his guys. All of them treated me like gold.

  I certainly didn’t go there in an adversarial role, but Dennis had told me enough things about Heyman and his crew that I had a certain apprehension about what might happen once I arrived. I didn’t know if it would be a friend or foe type of situation.

  Paul Heyman treated me very well, and knowing how he is, you could almost see the wheels turning in his head as if he was thinking about possible ways to use me with his roster, or thinking of ways to add someone like me to his roster.

  I never worked on an ECW card, but there are plenty of scenarios that would’ve made sense. Heyman had Taz, ‘The Human Suplex Machine’, which would’ve been a match made in heaven. Taz would’ve had to contend with the real ‘Human Suplex Machine’.

  In essence, Taz was ECW’s version of me. Taz first started out as the Tazmaniac, which was a wild-haired, barefooted, islander type of gimmick. Then he was rebranded as a UFC-style suplex machine on December 19th, 1995, just three days after I’d won the UFC’s Ultimate Ultimate 1995 tournament. Taz’s finishing move was essentially a rear naked choke, which is what I put away my first few UFC opponents with.

  And, before you think I’m being critical, I have to say Taz did a great job with his gimmick. I just wish the WWE had taken notes on the way Taz was being booked in ECW, because they could have given me the exact same gimmick and it would have worked just as well, because in my case, it wouldn’t have been a gimmick.

  Then again, when the WWE actually did got ahold of Taz, they didn’t use him right, either.

  ONE OF the instructors who works for me, Peter Jeanette, came up to me recently in my Coldwater training facility and asked me a question.

  “Has this town ever done anything for you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I responded.

  “Well, you’ve won so many things in your career,” he said. “If you go to other communities, it will say, ‘Now entering such and such a place, home of such and such a person.’”

  For the longest time, there was a sign exactly like that outside of Coldwater in honor of a Nascar driver named Scott Brayton. Scott crashed and died during an Indianapolis 500 practice run on May 17th, 1996. His death took place on the exact same day that I fought Ken Shamrock in Detroit.

  I WENT into my fight with Ken Shamrock with one simple objective in mind. I needed to erase the smudge that he’d put on my record during our first fight. Unfortunately, there were other things brewing in Michigan that day that were not only distracting me from preparing for the rematch wit
h Ken, but they were threatening to rob me of my opportunity at revenge altogether.

  Senator John McCain’s attempts to derail the UFC were having a direct influence on the UFC 9 card, and at 4:30 p.m. on the day of the fight, a verdict was reached by the Detroit courts. The ruling of the court stipulated that the show could go on as scheduled, but with modified rules in place.

  My team was sitting around at Cobo Center in Detroit, and we had no idea whether or not that night’s scheduled event was actually going to happen.

  Upon his arrival at Cobo, Big John McCarthy went into each of the fighters’ locker rooms and explained the gist of what went down.

  In essence, John came to each of us and elaborated about what type of strikes and submissions were now legal and illegal, per the court’s ruling. While relaying the court’s message to me, John informed me that if I performed any of the tactics that had just been deemed illegal against Ken Shamrock in our title fight, I would be “warned.”

  Being the Curious George that I’ve always been, I asked him exactly how many times I’d be warned.

  “Severn, you will be warned,” John sighed, in an exasperated tone.

  “Yeah, but what does that mean?” I persisted.

  John didn’t really give me an answer, so I made sure to go out and watch the first few fights just to see how the new rules would be enforced.

  During Cal Worsham’s fight against Zane Frazier, I was seeing headbutt after headbutt.

  “Warning!” the referee cried out. “Warning! Warning!”

  The match wasn’t being stopped, no points were being deducted, and I quickly realized there were no actual repercussions for using any of the “illegal” moves in our fights. If the worst thing that was going to happen was the referee would scream “Warning!” over and over again, then it was still “Game on!” as far as I was concerned.

  I would be more than happy to take a warning if it wouldn’t be followed by any consequences. I just needed to make sure I got my warning’s worth.

  Nothing about my strategy for that evening was changed by the new rules.

  Keep in mind, I’d still never had a conversation with Ken, and I didn’t know anything about him other than the fact that he’d come out of a fake shootfighting company in Japan and had never won a real MMA tournament in his life.

  His sole claim to fame was in achieving one fluke victory over one top guy in his entire career. Me.

  Before I came to the cage, I made a last-second change as far as who my corner person would be. A lot of negative things had happened involving my training camp, and I didn’t want Richard Hamilton out there with me.

  One of the things Richard had done was that he’d had an altercation with Don Frye, and he asked Don to leave my training camp. The bottom line with Don is that he is basically my brother. No one could be that disrespectful to Don and still remain on board as a highly trusted member of my team.

  Instead of Richard, my buddy Todd Prince accompanied me to the cage. He’d always been there for me in my life, and he was also a great motivator. As a cornerman, he had one of those voices that carried, which meant I could easily hear him over the din of the crowd.

  Just before we walked out, I told Richard that Todd would be my cornerman, and I’m sure it threw him for a loop, but I wasn’t there to make friends at that point in time. This fight was very important to me, and I needed to make sure I had the right guy in my corner.

  My fight with Ken marked the first time I’d ever worn gloves, at least in a UFC cage. The primary reason I wore the fingerless gloves was for purposes of psychological warfare. I wanted Ken to be worried about what I’d been working on since our last fight, and by wearing gloves, I would be making him a little more wary of strikes, and he would be less focused on defending against my takedown attempts.

  There were other elements that went into my preparation for the rematch with Ken, and it all centered on what my team and I perceived to be a feature of Ken’s fighting style we could exploit.

  Before time limits were put in place, the average length of a UFC fight had been around two minutes and twenty-two second. Once limits were imposed on the allotted time, a brand new component came into play.

  While watching footage of Ken, I noticed that he never really pressed the action. Instead, Ken preferred to allow his opponents to make the first move, and then he would counterattack. In light of this, my plan was to move around to mirror whatever Ken was doing, and to circle him.

  In other words, I was going to force Ken Shamrock to make the first move, and if he didn’t I would just continue to circle him for a long, long time. I prepared myself for the fact that the crowd would be irritated about the way the fight was going if Ken didn’t initiate any action, but I wouldn’t allow it to affect me.

  The result of this was that I circled Ken for about twelve minutes while the crowd yelled at us with disapproval. When they weren’t booing, they were chanting “Bullshit” and “Let’s go Red Wings!”.

  Bob Meyrowitz actually asked Big John to push both Ken and I back to our corners and then ordered us to fight.

  “You came here to fight, so fuckin’ fight!” John screamed.

  “John, why don’t you just take your shirt off and we’ll make this a three-way match!” I replied.

  Ken had no idea what I was doing, but we had succeeded in pissing off not only the fans, but the UFC officials as well. A couple of fans even threw garbage into the cage. In my mind, this was just an added bonus. Things were going exactly as I’d envisioned, because Ken was beginning to get unnerved as I circled him. In fact, I circled Ken so many times that I’m surprised I didn’t wear a rut right into the mat.

  “Come on!” Ken yelled at me through his mouth guard. “Come on!”

  There was no way I was going to bring it to him, because I would have been playing right into his standard game plan. He would have to bring it to me.

  Finally, Ken became so frustrated that he actually started to break, and he lunged toward me. Once he started coming for me, I shot on him. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as I’d planned, and he sprawled on me.

  When things finally settled on the mat, Ken had a full mount on me, which usually spells disaster for the fighter who has been mounted.

  Fortunately, I’d been training specifically for ways to handle an opponent while mounted, and the easiest solution was not to allow him to create any space that permitted him to strike you.

  From the bottom, I managed to get a modified bearhug on Ken, so whenever he tried to posture up, my body went right along with his. When Ken tried to strike down at me from this position, he only managed to get in a few glancing blows without connecting with anything vital. In the meantime, he was expending a lot of energy with very little payoff.

  No one had ever diffused a man during a UFC match while he held a mounted advantage like that before.

  While this was going on, Big John stooped down to check on us, and I poked my head out from under Ken’s body to address him.

  “It’s a helluva way to make a buck, isn’t it?” I asked him, rhetorically.

  With that, I slipped my head back under Ken’s body.

  I could tell John was completely dumbfounded by what I’d just said to him in that moment. In fact, Ken couldn’t believe it either, because his body relaxed a little.

  Once I felt Ken relax, I spun around while he still had the full mount, exposing my full back to him. Nine times out of ten, this is the kiss of death, because the fighter on top will slip in a rear naked choke, and it’s game over.

  As I felt Ken’s weight shift forward to apply the choke, I hit a tripod position where I elevated my hips, which neutralized Ken’s forward motion. Ken slipped forward onto the mat. He spun, and I wound up inside of his guard.

  The fight went thirty-minutes in total, but the forty-five-seconds we were in that position won the UFC Superfight Championship for me.

  I rained down on Ken with punches, palm strikes, forearm smashes and everything els
e I could, and I never heard a single warning from John McCarthy.

  In that moment, I could see a completely different, fearful look in Ken’s eyes, and it was clear to me that he knew I owned him.

  From there, we got back to our feet, and Ken and I went back to circling each other once again until the time expired.

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure if I’d won the fight or not, because there was still no strict criteria for what constituted an advantage. Ken held me on the ground for a longer period, but had done no damage. I’d inflicted real damage on Ken while I had him down, but it was over a shorter duration of time.

  By a split decision, I was announced as the winner, and I became the last ever UFC Superfight Champion in the process.

  It’s true that I could never fully erase the blemish on my record caused by my earlier loss to Ken, but at least this victory made me feel like I’d righted a wrong.

  IN HIS autobiography, Ken claimed he wasn’t going to fight in our UFC 9 match because he was suffering from a torn lateral meniscus, a partially-torn ACL, a broken nose, and cracked ribs. Therefore, he thought he couldn’t win the fight, because all of his weapons had supposedly been taken away from him.

  My response to him is: even if these injuries were legitimate, they didn’t take the pill and the syringe away from you, did they, Ken?

  In other words, Ken doesn’t mind giving himself an unnatural advantage over his opponents by using chemicals, but when he’s chemically enhanced and dealing with a minor injury, somehow he’s at a net disadvantage when fighting against a clean opponent.

  This guy is such a hypocrite. It boggles my mind that he thinks or hopes that everyone else is that stupid.

  Thanks to injuries I suffered during my amateur wrestling career, I never stepped into the cage with either one of my anterior cruciate ligaments. Never. One has been gone for more than thirty years, and the other has been gone for more than twenty.

  So, boo hoo hoo that you got hurt, Ken Shamrock.