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

by Dan Severn

  The sad thing is, the WWE didn’t ask me to do this; the NWA promoters did. They were more concerned about the injury angle than the WWE creative team that came up with it, and I was significantly more involved with the independent promoters as far as how the WWE injury angle could play into the NWA shows to make the product better. Yet, the WWE’s creative team still never asked me for input once.

  That would have been a good opportunity for the WWE to take advantage of my neck injury and have Owen beat me for the NWA championship while I was injured. Then he could have shown off the belt before I came back to seek my revenge. That seems logical to me. It’s a simple story that is easy to tell and easy to understand, and it would have been substantially better than most of the dumb things the creative team had us doing at the time.

  ONE COOL thing that came from my time in the WWE was the release of a Dan Severn action figure.

  I didn’t even know the WWE had released the figures, so when I found one, I bought it, tore it out of its package, and shoved it into the pile of my son Michael’s toys, along with his Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Later, when I heard Michael smashing and banging his action figures together, I came out and sat next to him.

  “Hey, Michael, I see you’ve got Michelangelo and Donatello, but who’s this guy right here?” I asked him.

  As he looked up, I pointed toward the brand new Dan Severn action figure that was lying next to his other toys.

  “I don’t know,” Michael said.

  I picked up the figure, which sported a big black moustache, and I held it right next to my face.

  “He doesn’t look like anybody you know at all?” I prompted.

  Michael looked very closely at the face of the action figure and examined it.

  “No,” he said, and resumed playing.

  I ULTIMATELY left the WWE due to creative differences. The general cycle of wrestling is that good guys ultimately become heels and bad guys ultimately become babyfaces. It happens over and over again.

  At the time, I was technically a babyface wrestler, but I was a no-nonsense babyface who took care of business and didn’t do anything goofy. Well, I knew I’d inevitably get pitched something goofy as a plan to turn me heel, and I already had some ideas in mind of what I could do as a heel wrestler and be okay with it.

  When members of the creative team finally approached me for a heel turn, their idea was so outlandish and stupid, I really didn’t know how to respond.

  “We want to put ‘666’ across your forehead,” they explained. “It’s the mark of the beast.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I said, shaking my head.

  “It’ll be great!” they insisted. “We’re going to make you one of the Undertaker’s disciples and put you in the Ministry!”

  I held my hands up, gave them the traditional T-shaped gesture for a timeout, and whistled them for a penalty.

  “It’s not gonna happen!” I said. “I live in Smalltown, U.S.A. I’m not going to have any negative repercussions on my family, or any of my businesses, or myself, because of some satanic crap you have me doing on TV.”

  The last thing I needed was to be out eating with my family and to have some local pastor come up to me sprinkling holy water on me.

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  “Do you know how much money you could make with this angle?” they prompted.

  I still declined. Some of these guys live in wrestling’s creative bubble for so long that they’ve lost their way. They don’t understand how some of us still needed to be able to function in the real world, and how things we did while performing on television might affect our families and private lives away from the ring.

  I wasn’t just some character; I was a known professional athlete.

  They asked me to think about it, and I came back one week later even more adamant that it was the wrong move for me.

  “If I was one of your normal pro wrestlers that didn’t have any earning potential outside of the ring, I’d probably be all for it,” I said.

  In that era, guys like Charles Wright could stay with the WWE for something like fifteen years. In his time with the WWE, first Charles played a voodoo priest called Papa Shango, then he ripped off Kimo Leopoldo and pretended to be a real fighter named Kama, and finally he played a pimp called the Godfather. The WWE could continuously recycle Charles with a retooled gimmick, a new costume and a new storyline, and most fans wouldn’t even have known or remembered what his old gimmick used to be.

  Even a talented pro wrestling legend like ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin would go through several iterations of his character, from ‘Stunning Steve’ to ‘The Ringmaster’, before finally being repackaged and pushed with a marketable look and style that suited him.

  Dan Severn wasn’t a gimmick. Dan Severn is my real name. I was Dan Severn twenty-four-hours a day, seven days a week, and I made money in a variety of ways outside of the pro wrestling ring by trading off of my real name. I couldn’t separate the wrestler or fighter from the real person.

  If I’d done that goofy ‘666’ gimmick as one of the Undertaker’s disciples and then they decided to cut me loose, that would’ve been the last impression I would have been leaving with a lot of people. I’d worked too hard to build the reputation I had, and I didn’t need their money that badly.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ONCE IT BECAME CLEAR THAT my time with the WWE would be drawing to a close, they started having me lose to ‘The Lethal Weapon’ Steve Blackman on every house show.

  Steve is a nice guy, but he had a mind like a cullender, which is another way of saying he was completely incapable of holding information. I had to keep telling him what we were going to be doing in our matches every night even though we were having the exact same match in every town, and the only thing that changed night to night was the location.

  It was during this little house show run that I started to bring out a more heelish character. Several of the road agents remarked that they couldn’t believe how animated I was being as I interacted with the fans on the way to the ring, trying to get heat and draw their boos.

  The agents may have been stunned by how animated I was being on the tail end of my WWE run, but it’s not like they’d given me much of an opportunity to display that type of a character beforehand. If the WWE had tweaked little things about my presentation here and there, I could have been their version of Bill Goldberg, only more believable.

  My final match in the WWE was February 21st, 1999, and I teamed with Owen Hart and Jeff Jarrett to beat Steve Blackman, the Godfather and Val Venis. Two months later, Owen Hart was dead. He fell while being lowered from the ceiling at the Over the Edge pay-per-view show in Kansas City, and broke his neck.

  I wasn’t there when the accident happened, but a host of people contacted me afterwards, including media outlets that wanted my opinion. All I could tell them was it was a horrible tragedy, and Owen was too good a person to have died at such a young age.

  My understanding is Owen felt he had to do these sorts of gimmicks because he didn’t want to participate in a different storyline that would have involved some sort of a love triangle between himself, his tag-team partner Jeff Jarrett, and his valet Debra McMichael. Owen didn’t want to deal with the real-life repercussions that sort of thing might have on his wife and children. Owen deeply loved his family, and didn’t want their lives affected by some convoluted professional wrestling nonsense.

  If that’s the case, I can totally relate to it. Vince Russo was trying to make things weirder, more abstract, and too uncomfortable for the wrestlers that had to live these things out in real life, particularly for those of us that went by our real names and lived in small towns that might believe some of that crap.

  By the way, when Vince Russo was presented with the scenario I mentioned regarding why Owen was stuck dropping from the ceiling in the first place, I loved hearing him say he was unaware of any case when someone was punished for not going along with what the creative team propo
sed. Owen’s death came only two months after I was punished for not going along with Russo’s creative wishes, and my punishment was getting jobbed out to Steve Blackman.

  There is a theatrical element to wrestling, but it can carry over into real life, and some of the people who had been involved in the company forever didn’t realize what real life was anymore.

  In the era of the Iron Sheik and Sergeant Slaughter, the company could tell a very simple story about patriotism that carried over from real life, and it was easy for people to get behind it. In the Attitude Era, the creative team got too far away from the basics and made certain things too complex simply for complexity’s sake.

  DO YOU want to know the greatest missed opportunity from my run with World Wrestling Entertainment?

  From the time I signed with the WWE to the time my contract expired, my record in MMA fights was seven wins, no losses and one draw. That’s right; I was undefeated in the eight MMA fights I competed in during the time I was a member of the WWE roster.

  Everyone who knows Jim Ross knows that he loved to play up the realism of the wrestler’s athletic achievements away from the squared circle. He’d hype up the credentials of football players who never even made it into a National Football League game, just as long as they’d once been drafted, or if they were at least a solid contributor to a college team’s roster.

  Obviously, J.R. was, and still is, great on commentary. I think he would’ve enjoyed telling my story to the viewers. In me, the WWE had someone who had not only been a star in mixed martial arts, but at that time I was still a star who was winning at a high level, and J.R. wasn’t allowed to breathe one word of this to the viewers.

  I hate to ask these sorts of questions too often, but who knows where the wrestling product would be today, or where I’d be today, if the WWE had just acknowledged the success I was having in another professional sport while I was employed by them?

  It’s pure speculation on my part, because there’s no way of knowing. It’s just frustrating when you’re working for a company that doesn’t know what they have. I was a real shooter capable of doing worked matches. There aren’t very many of us.

  If Twitter and Facebook existed during my run, along with everyone having the ability to take photos and videos with their phones, there would have been no way to keep my successes outside of the WWE a secret from anyone.

  SHORTLY AFTER my WWE stint was over, I was in California having lunch with a few people. Among them was WCW star Bill Goldberg. As we were all sitting there BSing, engaging in conversations and finding common ground, Bill Goldberg reached across the table and nudged me on the shoulder.

  “Thanks,” Bill said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Dude… I was you!” he proclaimed. “All I did was watch what you did and mimicked what you did. You just destroyed people.”

  Bill went on to say a lot of the antics he used when he came to the ring came from me. One of my amateur wrestling buddies actually taught him how to execute his signature “spear” move, which was really nothing more than a super aggressive double-leg takedown.

  In essence, Bill explained how his pro wrestling character was a hyper-exaggerated version of Dan Severn’s UFC persona, with a jackhammer suplex added on as his finishing maneuver.

  So, for those of you keeping score at home, ECW struck gold with Taz, and WCW struck gold with Goldberg. Both men were directly influenced by Dan Severn, and yet the WWE did nothing with the real Dan Severn once they had him on their roster. But, I guess that’s okay, because when the WWE finally had both Taz and Goldberg on their roster, they didn’t do a very good job of pushing either one of them.

  They really wouldn’t get another opportunity to push another version of my character for another decade, when ‘The Beast’ Brock Lesnar made his return from the UFC.

  Does that nickname look familiar to anyone else?

  THIRTY-TWO

  TO THIS DAY, WHENEVER I travel, my carry-on bag contains four championship belts inside of it: Three Ultimate Fighting Championship belts, and my personal NWA World Heavyweight Championship belt.

  And, I still have the same issues at the airports that I had back when I was in the midst of my wrestling and MMA heyday. As my bag goes through the metal detector at the airport security checkpoints, the guards can’t really see through the bag, so they always take me off to the side.

  “What’s in the bag sir?” they’ll ask.

  “Some championship belts, just like you’d see in professional wrestling,” I’ll reply.

  I always refer to the belts as professional wrestling belts, because I assume more people can relate to that.

  When I used to say, “I have UFC belts in the bag,” no one knew what that was at first. Nowadays, they’re far more likely to know what I’m talking about when I mention the UFC. Now I’ll hear, “I thought you said these were professional wrestling belts... these are UFC belts!”

  Then the guy will call his security buddies over, and they begin ogling the shiny gold belts. Some of them will even say, “You’re The Beast! Oh my God!” Every time I go through security, this happens, and people are shocked that these are the original belts that I won way back in the early days of the UFC.

  Of course, back then the only real opportunity I had to make my carry-on bag lighter involved losing championships.

  By the time I dropped the NWA championship belt to Naoya Ogawa on March 14th, 1999, I’d been the champion for 1,479 days. During my first reign with as the NWA champion, both the WWF and WCW world championship belts had changed hands seventeen times apiece.

  When I first acquired the NWA championship, there were only three remaining NWA promoters who operated within small areas. By the time my reign ended, more than twenty additional independent wrestling promotions had either sprung up as NWA affiliates, or were carrying the NWA letters in their names.

  The strength of the new National Wrestling Alliance couldn’t be remotely compared with its strength during the organization’s heyday as the preeminent organization in the world. However, what emerged during my tenure as the traveling NWA champion was a new breed of small, outlaw, independent wrestling promotions, some of which are still in operation today.

  So, if I wasn’t the last of the true traveling NWA champions, I could probably be called the first king of independent wrestling, who used the NWA championship as a unifying symbol that tied the independent promotions together.

  However the experts choose to contextualize my reign as NWA champion is fine with me; I certainly left the NWA and its championship in a better position than when I found them.

  Since I was no longer on WWF’s television programming, the NWA board of directors probably decided their best bet was to get their brand some more international exposure.

  I knew dropping the strap was an inevitability, and I actually thought it was cool to have the title change take place in Japan where it could get some international recognition. As a multi-time world champion in Judo, and as an Olympic silver medalist, Naoya Ogawa had an exceptional combat sports background. He was also undefeated in MMA bouts at the time, and he was being personally groomed by Antonio Inoki to be Japan’s next big star. If I was going to drop the belt to someone, it was nice to drop it to someone as legitimate as Ogawa.

  The cycle of professional wrestling is for the champions to put over the next generation of stars. The only thing I wanted to be sure of was that the match would be competitive, and I wouldn’t get squashed while passing the torch. I made sure it was as epic a contest as I could make it, and then I put Ogawa over clean in the middle of the ring, with Antonio Inoki providing color commentary during the broadcast, and with wrestling legend Dory Funk refereeing the match.

  Two months later, Ogawa and I had a rematch at a NWA Southwest show in North Richland Hills, Texas. Naoya didn’t speak a lick of English, and I’m certainly no expert in Japanese. He and I were sitting in a small back room at the venue, along with promoter Ken Taylor and Ogawa’s int
erpreter.

  Through his translator, Ogawa proposed that we would do a three-minute match where we would trap each other in dueling ankle locks, roll out onto the arena floor, and then we would both get counted out. After I agreed to this, Ogawa and his interpreter left the room while Ken looked at me, shocked that I had acceded to the terms of the match so readily.

  “Danny, this match is going to suck,” Ken said, confrontationally.

  “Yes it will, Ken,” I conceded. “The first three minutes of this match are going to suck.”

  “What do you mean?” Ken said.

  “How much time did you slate for this match to go?” I asked him.

  “Thirty minutes,” Ken replied.

  “Okay, the first three minutes of this match are going to suck,” I repeated. “As far as the twenty-seven-minutes after that are concerned, I don’t have a clue as to how they’re going to go. We’ll find out right now what Ogawa’s background really is.”

  I explained to Ken how I intended to go along with Ogawa’s plan for the match, except I would let go of his ankle when the referee’s count reached seven and climb back into the ring.

  As expected, the first three minutes sucked, but I broke the official’s count and climbed into the ring. Ogawa responded by climbing in after me, and I spend the next twenty-seven-minutes throwing Ogawa around for real.

  Don’t get me wrong; I was still trying to work with Ogawa. I was feeding into some of his throws and trying to make him look as best I could, but we had no way of communicating with each other verbally. Again, to paraphrase Scott D’Amore, I was working a shoot, and shooting a work.

  Ogawa and I went the full thirty-minutes, and he retained the belt. As he sat there exhausted, I got the crowd to chant, “Five more minutes!”. Since I was legitimately getting the better of him physically, Ogawa couldn’t have been too happy when his interpreter explained to him what the fans were chanting and sent him back into the ring for five more minutes. When time expired the second time, I had Ogawa hanging half out of the ring while I was choking him and throwing forearms at his chest.