by Dan Severn
I would have a lot more respect for Ken if he just admitted that he was a drug user who didn’t believe in himself enough to fight without an added physical or psychological edge, but he’s not man enough to do it.
It also bothers me that people have been considering Ken and I to be rivals for my entire career, so I’m going to put this rivalry talk to rest right now.
As of this writing, Ken’s career record stands at 28 wins, 17 losses and 2 draws. If we subtract the fake Pancrase fights from Ken’s record, that eliminates 17 wins and 3 losses, and it bring his career record to 11 wins, 14 losses and 2 draws. When Ken returned to MMA after his stint in professional wrestling, he was thirty-six-years old. That makes him the same age as I was when I started my career in the cage. Since then, Shamrock’s record has been 5 wins and 11 losses, and the guys he beat have a combined lifetime record of 59 wins, 104 losses and 3 draws.
Oh, and I almost forgot, he tested positive for steroids immediately after one of those “wins,” and it still stands as an official victory on his record.
At the end of the day, Ken’s success came through a syringe, a bottle of pills, and a record inflated by fake fights.
Usually the pendulum swings both ways. You’ll enjoy all of the good things the use of chemicals will get you early on, and then it swings back and smacks you in the face.
I plan to stay around for a while. I hope Ken is able to do the same.
TWENTY-FOUR
I FIRST MET ANTONIO INOKI in passing during one of the early UWFi shows I appeared on, and for a Japanese wrestler, Inoki was surprisingly tall.
Inoki is one of the most important figures in the history of professional wrestling, period. He helped elevate the popularity of the genre, and he also participated in a number of worked MMA matches back in the 1970s in an attempt to raise professional wrestling’s credibility as a fighting style in Japan.
In his own way, Inoki could be considered the father of mixed martial arts in Japan.
The most famous of Inoki’s early MMA matches was against Muhammad Ali, except that match was real, and contested under so many rule restrictions that neither man wound up looking good. The fight was a legendary flop.
Regardless of this, Inoki is a massive wrestling legend in Japan, and I thought it was fantastic that he selected me to be his tag-team partner at the World Wrestling Peace Festival in Los Angeles against Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Oleg Taktarov.
Fujiwara was a shoot-style wrestling legend in his own right, and I really liked him. He always had a sourpuss type of face out in the ring, but he was truly a great guy.
As we were going into this festival, I had no clue whether or not Oleg knew a single thing about how to work a professional wrestling match. Going out to the ring and doing modified shooting is one thing, but that alone wasn’t going to make Antonio very happy.
When you’re working with me, you truly can’t be in safer hands because I’m going to make sure I protect you. However, it’s still going to be one of the most snug matches you could ever be involved in because I’m not fully distanced from the shoot world, and I’m not used to working as loose as a normal wrestler. A lot of people have been concerned about that over the years.
Even though Oleg and I had been in two UFC fights against each other, there was no concern that one of us might shoot on the other one. We were both in the locker room long before the match took place, and Oleg seemed far more concerned about his entrance and his costume than the actual match.
I was having so much fun at Oleg’s expense because he had this bear-shaped costume they wanted him to wear. I kept making fun of him for being the Russian Bear, and Fujiwara was coming by making faces at the both of us. We were just having fun in the locker room making jokes, and I was asking him how long that umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck when he was born, and other ball-busting things of that nature.
At the end of the match, I was allowed to get the submission win over Fujiwara for my team, which is shocking considering what a rarity it was that anyone but Inoki would get to claim responsibility for a first-hand victory in any match involving him.
The fact that Inoki would even have asked me to participate in the main event of the show with him as his partner spoke volumes about how my stock had risen since leaving the UWFi less than two years prior. I was now in contact with New Japan Pro Wrestling and All Japan Pro Wrestling about potential appearances, along with several other overseas companies. It was obvious that my gamble of leaving the UWFi to participate in the no-holds-barred world of the UFC had raised my value as a wrestler all over the world.
I’m sure I felt some special sense of satisfaction that I was now viewed as a star in the Japanese wrestling world, but it’s not like I was able to truly slow down and enjoy it. There wouldn’t have been more than a quick acknowledgement to myself that things had improved, which was manifesting itself in the form of better treatment, and more importantly, better payoffs.
FOLLOWING MY victory over Ken Shamrock to capture the UFC Superfight Championship, I won five consecutive fights that were not contested inside the UFC octagon.
This is one of the most jarring examples of how the era in which I was the UFC Superfight Champion is completely different to what modern MMA fans are used to.
Nowadays, all UFC fighters would be signed to exclusive contracts that would not only prohibit them from competing for other promotions, but they would simultaneously limit the number of events the fighters could expect to compete in over the course of a year.
Bob Meyrowitz and the Semaphore Entertainment Group now owned the UFC, and they were going through a variety of growing pains, including modifying the official rules to make them more palatable, and combating the sustained attempts by Senator John McCain and others to have UFC programming removed from all pay-per-view providers.
Aside from having to deal with these problems, I don’t think the UFC’s management team was all that concerned with signing the talent to exclusive deals since they had no real competition, especially in the U.S.
Even though I was the UFC’s champion, I felt like a mercenary who was being paid to go beat up people in other promotions, although the cold sort of emotions that it would take to maintain that view really aren’t in my wheelhouse. Again, whenever I’m asked to size up my career for people, I tell them I wasn’t too shabby for a guy who was never in a real fight in his entire life.
What I was doing was competing. As long as there were rules involved, no matter how few, that created a clear point of differentiation between competing and fighting.
To me, whether the fights were real and they took place in the UFC’s cage or another company’s cage, or if they were worked professional wrestling matches, all of these events represented a payday to me.
The only thing that was crystal clear to me was that I could not get hurt, because if I did, I would no longer be able to feed my family, and the domino effect would run through every component of each business I was developing.
Simply put, if I got injured while in the process of losing the UFC Superfight Championship, the NWA would have stripped me of its championship as well, and I also wouldn’t be able to host any combat training seminars. Any minor injury to me at that point could have brought all of my moneymaking to a screeching halt.
From a preparation standpoint, this was a sobering reminder that I should just stick to utilizing my strengths while remaining sharp on my feet. This wasn’t always easy when I was sometimes learning the abilities of my opponent only as he made his approach to the cage.
BEFORE MY first ever fight in Brazil, which took place on October 22, 1996, I’d been lying in bed on antibiotics for three days with a respiratory infection. The only reason I even got out of bed was because I had to get on the plane and fly to South America for my fight.
At the press conference, I was sweating profusely, drinking as much water as I could to replace the fluids, and I kept hacking my lungs out.
Over the course of twenty-four
-hours, they changed my opponent on me three times, and I really wasn’t feeling well enough to have been paying any real attention anyway. As a result, by the time the moment of the fight came around, I honestly had no clue as to whom I would be facing.
On fight night, I was standing in the cage while a group of Brazilians started heading out of the locker room and into the arena. I was thankful, because at that moment my opponent would finally be revealed. Obviously, they could only let one person into the cage to square off against me.
Thank God the announcer gave the attributes of my opponent, Mario Neto, in both Portuguese and English, because that was the only tip off I received as to his fighting capabilities. In essence, they announced that he was a “street fighter,” which didn’t tell me a whole lot other than fact that he likely had some punching acumen, and maybe some kicking ability as well. I simply made the conscious decision in that moment to focus on his hands.
In total, the fight lasted for forty-minutes, which included the thirty-minutes of scheduled fighting time, and the ten-minute overtime session. Mario didn’t do anything to me, but in the condition I was in, after taking him down a few times and beginning to tax myself physically, coughing became my most potent offense.
I would literally push away from him while I was coughing, then politely walk over to the cage wall and spit the phlegm chunks out onto the ground outside the cage. After all, it wouldn’t have been very well received if I’d been spewing phlegm inside the cage, or launching it into the audience.
Late in the fight, the crowd was either getting pissed off at me for not finishing Mario off, or pissed at him for not giving them a good showing against the American. I’m not sure which. All I knew was I started hearing strange clanging noises coming from behind me. I looked back, and I could see a fan was throwing long-necked beer bottles toward us from the stands, and they were bouncing off the cage.
“Son of a bitch,” I thought to myself.
Here I was doing the best I could. The only reason I’d even gotten out of bed was because I had to do this fight, I was seriously kicking this guy’s ass regardless, and now I had to deal with some destructive asshole fan who wanted to lob long-necked beer bottles at me.
I walked toward the cage, hawked up the biggest ball of phlegm I could, and spat it as far as possible in this guy’s direction. The crowd got a little more fired up after that. But seriously, my attitude toward that guy in that moment was, “Fuck me? Well... fuck you!”
I was in a foreign country where I couldn’t speak the language, so I knew I was kind of SOL at that point. It didn’t matter how tough I was; if I pissed off enough people, by sheer numbers, they would get me one way or another. Fortunately, it never came to that.
I wound up winning the fight, but this was during that transitional phase where the sport was kind of starting to change, timetables were coming into play, and even with things becoming a little more civilized in some settings, you still had to be concerned about starting a riot.
TWENTY-FIVE
WHEN I KNEW I WAS FIGHTING Mark Coleman on February 7, 1997 to determine the first-ever UFC Heavyweight Champion, only one thought entered my mind: Oh great… another steroid freak.
Just by years of experience, I know what can be done naturally and unnaturally. It’s possible to have a great physique naturally, but there are certain traits you can look for on a person that will indicate steroid use.
I think Coleman even got busted for steroids during his amateur days, and now he was entering the world of no-holds-barred fighting where there were no rules governing drug use.
However, what concerned me most about Coleman was that I would now be going against another high-level wrestler. I was always good at analyzing the way strengths and weaknesses matched up, and if I was going up against a top amateur wrestler who was my equal in size and grappling ability, but also younger than me, I knew my wrestling ability would be neutralized and I would have to devote more time to developing striking skills.
I didn’t know if Mark was adept at punching at all, but I just sort of made an assumption that he was, because wrestlers tend to be sure of themselves in general, and the combination of testosterone and alcohol has led to more than one barroom brawl.
In my mind, the wrestling advantage was his, and I would have to make it up with other skills. Unfortunately, I was still running on a schedule that was geared toward making paydays. I wasn’t allocating any sort of training camp time toward preparing for the Mark Coleman fight.
I just figured I’d somehow pull out the win like I had so many times before, even though I really didn’t know how. I was trusting in an ability that had served me well in my amateur wrestling career, which was my knack for instinctively coming out on top when an opportunity presented itself during a scramble.
This time, it didn’t happen.
Mark was able to get a headlock on me, and he had extraordinary power. It wasn’t the fact that he was squeezing and cutting off air; it felt like he was literally going to pull my head from my shoulders. It was the sort of otherworldly strength that you only get from chemical supplements.
I don’t cry about losses. In my career, I’ve experienced plenty of losses. I just know that when I’m entering a fight on equal footing with my opponent, I know I have a good chance to win, but some of my most high-profile losses have come against serial steroid abusers.
Even though I knew I’d been wronged, I went into Mark’s locker room after the fight to shake his hand and congratulate him. I didn’t think our series of fights was even close to being over. I was sure our paths would cross again.
Our paths never did cross again inside of a cage, but when I retired from the world of MMA, I placed a condition on my retirement. I reserve the right to come out of retirement to fight against one or all of the following people: Mark Coleman, Ken Shamrock, and Royce Gracie.
If I could fight the three of them, all in a row, I would be able to leave the sport as a satisfied athlete. These would be the last three matches of my career, and I wouldn’t leave a shadow of a doubt with anyone, including myself, as to who the king really was.
In our careers, I’m the only one of the four not to test positive for steroids.
BEFORE THE fight with Coleman, Big John asked me if I had any questions, and I asked him my famous “how-many-eggs-does-Mary-have-in-the-basket?” question. I’ve had more referees end up with dumbfounded looks on their faces from the words that have come out of my mouth than probably any other fighter.
I’m known to say crazy things either before fights, after fights, or even during fights, and it’s likely that no one has heard more crazy things come out of my mouth than Big John.
John is very professional when he comes up to you to give pre-fight instructions. Normally, when he’s going over the rules, he’ll ask you if you have any questions, and then he’ll turn from you to talk to your cornerman.
The very first time John asked me if I had any questions, at first I couldn’t think of anything. As he was turning away from me to talk to my cornerman, something popped into my head.
“Yeah, I have a question,” I said. “Where did all that money go that my parents paid for piano lessons?”
John said he heard it, but when he turned back to look at me, he decided it couldn’t have come from me because I had my game face on.
The second time he asked me if I had any questions, I just said to him, “You know, if you would just give me the winning lotto numbers, I wouldn’t have to be doing this.”
John stared at me like he thought I was crazy.
Over time, John learned that I wasn’t crazy at all; I was just relaxed enough to the point where I could rattle off one liners before, during, and after my matches.
Once I was fighting an opponent while having a full-blown conversation with John. He just shook his head and said, “You are either the craziest or most confident fighter I’ve ever met - and I’m not sure which one - in order for you to do what you do out there.”
/> When they finally started prohibiting groin striking, I asked John, “What if I start to strike my own groin? Will you disqualify me then?”.
John shook his head and said, “Severn, you’re the only person who would come up with something like that.”
AS MUCH as it sucked to lose to Mark Coleman, that fight represented a natural progression in the way MMA was evolving. More and more amateur wrestlers were starting to add other ingredients to their combat arsenals, and they would come to dominate inside the cage.
In one of his books, Mike Chapman credited me with turning the sport of amateur wrestling into a martial art overnight. He credits me as the person who unleashed the sport of amateur wrestling on the world of mixed martial arts due to the high degree of success so many amateur wrestlers have had in the world of MMA.
If you look at the MMA rankings in just about every weight class, typically nine out of the ten best guys in every weight class have had an amateur wrestling background. This is especially true of American mixed martial artists.
It’s easy to take a high-level athlete and teach him other skills. The top athletes have good work ethic and a drive. Being a coach for as many years as I have, I can teach a lot of guys techniques and tactics, but it’s the guy that can turn on the animal competitiveness who is successful. It makes a world of difference.
There has been a myth developed thanks to mixed martial arts to where guys and girls who think they’re tough can wait until they’re eighteen-years-old, find a coach, start training, and work their way into a position where they’ll one day make a lot of money and become a UFC champion.
When you look at the American fighters who are successful in mixed martial arts, particularly at the highest levels, they tend to have been highly skilled amateur wrestlers from an organized background. If they come from overseas, they may have a background in something like sambo or jiu jitsu, but even in these cases, their skill levels in these disciplines are extremely high.