by Dan Severn
Whatever damage you receive now is going to haunt you later in life.
For some reason, so many of the young guys think somehow they’re saving face by not tapping out. I’ve tapped out in matches. I know when my goose has been cooked, so why do I want to take unnecessary damage when I don’t have to? If I’m caught, and I know there’s no way out, I tap out and lose, but I do so knowing I will come back at a later date and compete again. That was always my mind-set when I tapped out.
This attitude of avoiding unnecessary punishment is one of the reasons for my longevity, and one of the reason I was able to persevere long enough to accumulate more than one-hundred victories in my career... all of which came after I’d already reached the age of thirty-six.
THIRTY-FOUR
FOLLOWING A HARDCORE-STYLE WRESTLING match is difficult to do, and that isn’t just because of the accessories involved in the matches.
I remember watching a match where the two guys in the ring ahead of me were cracking these six-foot long, fluorescent tubes over each other’s heads, and somehow my opponent and I were supposed to follow it. When I saw that, I turned to my opponent, who was standing next to me behind the curtain leading to the backstage area.
“Change of plans,” I said to him. “We’re never leaving our feet. I don’t even care if they sweep the ring after this. There are so many fine pieces of glass out there, and I’m not being paid to bleed.”
During this era, they would actually pay you more if you bled, but I wasn’t about to sit there and carve up my forehead like Tarzan Goto. I hoped I’d never need money that badly where I’d have to maim myself to get it, or that I’d need to resort to carving myself up to get a reaction from the crowd.
I watched a match where Mad Man Pondo went up against Ian Rotten during one of Dennis Coralluzzo’s shows at a truckstop. It was probably for one of the IWA Mid-South shows, and there was more talent booked for the show than there were spectators in the audience.
This was a four-corners-of-death match during an outdoor summer show where it was very warm outside, and the smell of diesel fumes filled the air. Outside the ring were thumbtacks, mousetraps, sliced up barbed wire, and broken glass. This match probably went on for twenty minutes, and nothing that happened made one iota of rational sense. The only thing that was clear was they were trying to make use of every weapon available, raking barbed wire against each other’s foreheads and so on.
The end result of this was two men bled, for what? Nothing. There was nobody there to watch the show. This sort of thing makes no rhyme or reason in the context of wrestling, which is supposed to be worked. What Ian Rotten and Mad Man Pondo did was put on an exhibition of how many different ways can two guys torture each other for real.
I’m certainly no hardcore wrestler by any stretch, but I’ve been put through a table, and I’ve put people through tables. At least once in each scenario, it involved Sabu.
Sabu was the nephew of the original Sheik, Ed Farhat. Ed was a professional wrestling legend, and a Michigan native who owned the NWA’s Detroit territory for years. Ed was also a hardcore wrestling icon who licked snakes, carved up his opponents with pencils, and threw fire into his opponent’s faces.
Sabu definitely took several elements from his uncle’s arsenal and raised them to an extreme level. Almost all of the spots he called seemed to involve a chair or a table, and sometimes both.
There are so many wrestlers who live in this world where sometimes it’s hard to see where reality ends and fantasy begins. Wrestling was traditionally about not hurting each other while convincing the audience the action was real. Sabu’s matches seemed to inch closer to the brink of making sure the audience knew you had actually hurt each other for the sake of their entertainment.
One of the things wrestlers are known to ask one another in small groups is, “Who do you think is next?”.
What they’re really speculating about is the next wrestler to die.
When you look at lifestyles, I’m shocked that Sabu is still alive. The shock is partially because of the crazy risks he has taken and the physical damage that comes with it, partially because of the high likelihood that he could actually die failing to execute one of his somersault dives, and also because most wrestlers who perform such damaging spots end up addicted to painkillers.
Painkillers, muscle relaxers, uppers and downers have been an even bigger problem for wrestlers than steroids have.
The lifestyle of being on the road for 187 dates can put guys in a position where they require something to pick them up and get them going in the morning, and we’re not talking about needing just a simple cup of coffee.
When they wake up, they’ll take some kind of amphetamine to get themselves to the gym to work out, because like I mentioned before, pasty-white fat guys don’t typically get over very well in the business. Then they’ll take a steroid or something else to boost their testosterone before they start lifting weights.
For their injuries, the wrestlers will take muscle relaxers and pain pills to kill their pain, and then they need to counter the effect of the amphetamines by taking something to help them sleep, either on the plane, or in their hotel rooms at night.
When you combine all of this with alcohol, or any other popular recreational drug of choice, it creates a chemical cocktail that has taken out more wrestlers than anything else.
By comparison, smoking a joint is nothing, but some guys will smoke weed before a match. It still affects their ability to perform in the ring, so you wonder why they can’t just do it after the matches are over and it’s time to celebrate. Or they’ll drink a six pack of beer or a bottle of Jack Daniels before a match.
I’ve taken prescription painkillers for different injuries and during my recovery from the surgeries they resulted in. Man, do they ever work!
I have been hurt far worse in my amateur wrestling career than in my other careers, but I’ve also been hurt worse in my professional wrestling career than I have in my cagefighting career.
It may seem like that shouldn’t be possible, but it’s the truth. In mixed martial arts, you’re simply going out there to get results. It doesn’t have to look pretty, and no one is asking you to fill a window of time.
In MMA, the fight can end as quickly as you want it to. All you have to do is finish your opponent quickly, if you can, and if you get in trouble you can tap out and take the loss. It can all be over quickly.
Professional wrestling is an entertainment product, and you may be asked to do matches that are five minutes long, all the way up to hour-long broadways and iron man matches. That’s a long match of give and take, and it’s expected to have some semblance of a storyline. You’re going to be bodyslammed, and you’re going to take bump after bump after bump, which is just the technical way of saying that you’re definitely going to be knocked down.
Given the gradual wear and tear on a wrestler’s body from constantly falling down over a period of several minutes nearly every night, is there any wonder why so many of them turn to prescription drugs as a solution to the problem?
HOWARD BRODY is the guy from the NWA who contacted me and told me I’d be heading to Japan to wrestle with Steve Corino in a tag-team match involving NWA World Heavyweight Champion Shinya Hashimoto and a partner of his choosing.
Hashimoto was a stiff-striking Japanese wrestler who liked to throw a lot of kicks. He was a legitimate Elvis fan who had incorporated some traits of Elvis into his ring attire, and also into his hairstyle, particularly his long sideburns.
Over the course of his career, Hashimoto had won just about every major championship title in Japan, and his physical style had earned him a huge fan following. He was so popular, in fact, that he’d broken away from the major companies and formed Pro Wrestling Zero-One, which had become the NWA’s affiliate organization on Japanese soil.
During the course of this flight to Japan, somehow the plans were changed so that I would now be wrestling Hashimoto in a main event singles match for the NWA cha
mpionship.
According to Howard, the NWA wanted Hashimoto to drop the championship back to a wrestler who could tour its territories in the U.S. Hashimoto was unimpressed with the wrestlers the NWA had offered as highly-ranked contenders for him to lose the championship to, and instead, he personally requested that I come over and beat him for the belt because of my legitimate background and legacy as a dominant NWA champion. The Japanese still regarded me as the real deal.
At that point, when the NWA had been pushing guys like Jerry Flynn and Mike Rapada as worthy holders of the NWA championship, I can understand why Hashimoto would feel concerned about his reputation if he was to lose to one of them.
Jerry Flynn had been used as a jobber in the WWE, and he’d been a midcarder at best in WCW, and Mike Rapada’s biggest success had been as a jobber in WCW.
Given options like these, I can understand why a Japanese legend like Hashimoto wouldn’t want to tarnish his reputation by suffering a defeat on his very own show to wrestlers who had never even been taken seriously as midcarders in the U.S.
The only thing I really remember about the match was that I ate some pretty stiff kicks, but by this point, I was used to that kind of treatment in Japan.
Ultimately, Hashimoto would pay a stiff price for working such a stiff style. He died from a brain aneurysm in 2005.
After bringing the belt back from Japan, Howard soon made me aware that the NWA-TNA weekly pay-per-view shows were going to be the exciting new means of getting exposure for the National Wrestling Alliance and its championship.
The ticket sales for the first NWA-TNA show were lackluster, and they wanted to put a NWA championship match on the first card. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, since title matches should normally have some kind of a build-up.
At the time, my schedule was posted on my website, so people always knew my availability for bookings well in advance. They could see I was already booked on that night. They kept pressuring me and pressuring me to attend the NWA-TNA premiere, and when I wouldn’t relent, they threatened to strip me of the championship.
The simple fact that they were threatening to strip me of the belt pissed me off so much, I really had no interest in working with them ever again at that point.
“That’s fine,” I told them. “I have too much going on. You guys don’t want me as the champion, and you’re trying to screw me over and make me look like my word is no good.”
We never got into the details of the match, including a planned opponent or the finish. At the time I was stripped of the belt, I’m not sure if their plan was to put the championship belt on Ken Shamrock, but that’s precisely what happened at the conclusion of the ‘Gauntlet for the Gold’ match that closed the first NWA-TNA show.
In retrospect, I wish I’d asked them to send whomever they thought their best guy was to Michigan to get the belt from me. I have mats, a cage, and a ring in my facility, so anyone they thought was a top contender could have taken his pick. We could have figured out if he had what it took to represent the NWA championship belt properly.
In reality, money had been transferred to the NWA offices. All the boys involved knew Jeff Jarrett was running the NWA-TNA company. Jeff’s daddy, Jerry Jarrett, had bought him a company to be the champion of.
You can call me jealous if you want to, but I come from a blue-collar background where you punch the clock, work as hard as you can, and hope you get recognized for your dedication. To me, success should be dependent on what you know and not who you know.
In modern wrestling, it doesn’t matter all that much whether you’re a good, safe, or dependable worker. If people own the promotion, they get to dictate the rules, and they decide who gets to play the game. It’s like the kid who owns the ball and makes the rules, and when he’s sick of the game, he takes his ball and goes home.
Jeff’s dad bought him a company, and since Jeff ran the company, Jeff got to make himself a star.
In the four years that TNA Wrestling controlled the NWA championship, Jeff booked himself into six reigns totaling 1,006 days and presented himself as the real deal, even though his most believable move involved smashing a guitar over people’s heads.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE FIRST THREE INDUCTEES INTO the UFC Hall of Fame were Royce Gracie, Ken Shamrock and myself. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who has never tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. In the meantime, Art Davie has never been given true credit for inventing the UFC. He should definitely be in the UFC Hall of Fame.
If you’re going to induct people because they wear crazy outfits and sell lots of t-shirts, why don’t you induct the person who gave people the forum and the opportunity to sell all those t-shirts?
I’m referring to the induction of ‘The Mask’, the member of the Tapout crew. The induction may have had some merit, because he helped develop another means by which MMA fighters could generate income, but why isn’t the inventor of the UFC in the Hall of Fame?
I’m certainly honored to be in the UFC Hall of Fame, but there are a lot of other people who should be in there as well.
The first questions you should ask yourself when evaluating the validity of any hall of fame are, “Who is on the selection committee for the hall of fame?” and “Who has the voting privileges to decide who gets to be inducted?”
I’m a member of several different halls of fame, and I’m typically sent a ballot and asked who should be inducted next from amongst the list of names on the ballot, usually with some sort of restriction as to how many people I can select. They’ll also ask the voters to write in the names of people they think are worthy of being added to the ballot.
These aren’t things that happen with the UFC Hall of Fame, which make it a rather biased hall of fame in a lot ways.
As of this writing, there are only twelve people who have been inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame, and one of them is a t-shirt designer. For a major sports company that has been around for more than twenty years and has such a rich history, there are several other critical inductions that need to be made, and they should start with the company’s founder.
“Have you ever been inducted into the Michigan chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame?,” Denny Kass once asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
“How could they not have you in there?” he queried.
“Denny, I just don’t think about those things,” I said.
Should I be in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame? Sure. Do I lose any sleep over it? No.
At present, I’m in more than twenty halls of fame, and most of them are related to martial arts. It’s an honor to be inducted into an organization’s hall of fame, but most inductions are highly political. A lot of them even want money from me in order to induct me!
When I receive a letter from an organization inviting me to be inducted into its hall of fame, it’s normally accompanied by a request for $300 or so to cover the cost of my award and another $125 dollars to cover my meal.
If it’s going to cost $425 of my own money for me to get inducted into somebody’s hall of fame, I’d rather spend an evening at home with my family and throw the pizza party of a lifetime for them that they will all appreciate.
After receiving a number of letters like this, I called one of the organizations back and asked them how honored I should really be feeling if I was having to buy my own award from them, and then they were going to put my name on the marquee to make money from advertising my appearance.
I’ve also received plenty of Facebook posts asking me if the WWE has ever asked to induct me into the WWE Hall of Fame since I’m “the first true crossover MMA and professional wrestling star,” or “the modern manifestation of Lou Thesz.”
Would it be cool to be in the WWE Hall of Fame? Yes. Do I belong there? If the idea is for the WWE Hall of Fame to be an all-inclusive hall of fame recognizing overall bodies of work and contributions to the wrestling industry, then I should probably be in there.
While I was with the WWE, I feel they dropped the ball in terms of how they promoted me. From a historical standpoint, there’s no question I’m the first true crossover star who straddled the fence between pro wrestling and MMA. Anyone who doubts that claim simply needs to remember the five-month period when I debuted at the UFC 4 tournament and made it to the finals, won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, and then carried the belt with me to the cage when I won the UFC 5 tournament.
For historical purposes, the first person the WWE ever recognized on its broadcasts as both a reigning world heavyweight wrestling champion and a former UFC champion was me, and not Brock Lesnar.
Speaking of Brock Lesnar, all fans of today’s wrestling product know his story, and I get asked about him constantly.
He was a national champion at the University of Minnesota, and the WWE recruited him directly into the developmental system where he was groomed by Jim Cornette in Ohio Valley Wrestling. When he was brought up to the main roster, the company smashed him over everyone, and had him beat the Rock for the WWE championship. Later, Brock got sick of the WWE’s road schedule, and left to pursue a pro football career that didn’t pan out the way he expected it to.
Of course, Brock showed up in the UFC as the professional wrestler who was said to have no chance in a real fight, and within three fights, he won the UFC Heavyweight Championship.
After winning only two of his last four UFC fights, Brock returned to the WWE with Paul Heyman as his “advocate,” and Brock doesn’t even need to say a word on the microphone in order for people to think he’s the most legitimate guy on the company’s roster. Frankly, he is.
Any jealousy I may feel toward Brock Lesnar and his push by the WWE stems from a few very simple facts.