Former WWE Superstar Dan Severn was a recent guest on the Prime Time with Sean Mooney podcast. The former UFC star opened up about his time competing in the early days of MMA where almost anything went. Highlights appear below.
(Transcription Credit: Michael McClead, WrestleZone)
Severn Reveals The Highest Number Of Matches He Wrestled In A Single Day:
Let’s talk about the number of matches in a day. The current rule right now is that you are now limited to 5 matches in a day, 5 max. The max I ever did was 17 in one day. That was during my high school days when I was looking to gather a great deal of attention.
On Fighting Chemical Free:
What might boggle your mind even more, to do a 20 year career, I’m lifetime chemical free and speaking of the wacky world of professional wrestling, that says a lot right there. Even in the MMA world, you see people get in trouble for PEDs and things of that nature. I’m lifetime chemical free.
On Early MMA Contracts:
I kept a copy of one of the contracts because I knew that people would question it one day. It even states in smaller print at the bottom of the contract, ‘In the event of your accidental death, as long as you don’t bite somebody or stick a finger in their eye socket.’ There’s a whole lot of other ways you can take a man’s life without violating those two rules.
On Being Asked To Fight At A Dog Fighting Show:
I had all kinds of companies that were contacting me. Here’s the absolute craziest one. I get contacted to do a show in Mexico. This group were offering some crazy money and they want no rules. They wanted to be badder than what the UFC was, kind of anything goes. You can actually wear Levi jeans and cowboy boots. This event was going to take place in an over sized cockfighting pit. They were gonna start with roosters, progress to dogs, and then main event with human beings, all still in blood, in the same sand. They are offering me some crazy money and I go, ‘Let me think about this.’ I said, ‘You know, at the time of payoff, is it gonna be cheaper to pay Dan Severn or cheaper to put a bullet in his head?’ That’s what crossed my mind. I turned it down.
On Making Moral Choices While Cage Fighting:
It was the first time they saw real knees dropping off the head of another human. There was so much blood dropping off of Oleg Taktarov’s forehead, it filled up his eye wells. He couldn’t see me. I could drop knees and he would have never seen them coming. If anyone ever gets a chance to review that match at UFC 5, you’ll see three different times where I stop and look out there, ‘Why is this match continuing on?’ When Oleg finally turned his head sideways to let the blood run from the corner of one eye out to the side of his nose, he exposed his temple. It even crossed my mind, ‘Drop a knee now,’ but if I dropped the knee at his temple, I could have potentially killed him. To me, it’s like, ‘I want to win, but I’m not there to do something like that.’ I only had one match my entire career where evil begot a greater evil.
Readers may listen to Sean Mooney’s interview with Dan Severn in its entirety below:
