Dan Severn announced via his website that he has officially retired from MMA competition. Severn was a mainstay in the early days of the UFC. He was the first man in the organization to show the true strength of amateur wrestling. His fights showe…
Severn was a mainstay in the early days of the UFC. He was the first man in the organization to show the true strength of amateur wrestling. His fights showed that martial arts weren’t all fancy kicks and karate chops, and that being able to take people down and control them was essential.
Severn elaborated on the circumstances of his retirement:
The number one goal I set for myself in 2012 was to be finished with my Mix [sic] Martial Arts Competition career. I was attempting to do my own self-directed retirement tour in the last couple of years reaching out to only three people…Mark Coleman, Ken Shamrock, and Royce Gracie. I spoke to two of them directly (Mark and Ken), and through representative (MGR) for Royce. It seems as though these matches will not take place for whatever reasons and my life will go on to the next chapter.
Coleman, Shamrock, and Gracie were three of Severn’s biggest foes.
A stalwart Royce Gracie weathered Severn’s attack for over 15 minutes in the finals at UFC 4. Gracie eventually caught the wrestler in a triangle choke and won the tournament.
Ken Shamrock handed Severn his second loss in the Octagon, making him tap to a guillotine choke in only two minutes, 14 seconds. However, Severn claimed revenge at UFC 9, edging Shamrock in a split decision.
Severn and Mark Coleman fought in the first-ever UFC heavyweight title fight. Coleman defeated Severn via a neck crank.
“The Beast” may have faded into obscurity after that fight, but he didn’t succumb to inactivity. Over the course of his career he racked up over 100 victories inside the cage and fought in over 120 matches total.
In fact, it was Severn who welcomed former UFC light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin into professional MMA. Severn defeated Griffin in the latter’s pro debut.
Severn’s in-cage accolades—UFC 5 tournament champion, Ultimate Ultimate 1995 tournament champion, UFC Superfight champion—are commendable, but what he did outside the cage was just as important.
It’s these outside-the-cage tasks that Severn seeks to continue in earnest now that he’s retired:
I will still be involved with MMA working with various companies to support the industry, and help take it on to the next level in such roles as: Play by play color commentator, Commissioner, Goodwill Ambassador, doing appearances, etc, etc.. just no longer the competitor. The MMA workshops and seminars will continue.
Just as Apollo Creed told Rocky Balboa, “It’s too bad we gotta get old,” it is too bad that the legends of UFC’s early days must succumb to corporal decay. Fortunately for Severn, he escaped the sport without any serious maladies, and his legacy will live on as long as the sport itself.
While we all love mixed martial arts, we can hardly deny that its premier organisation has had its fair share of mind-numbingly boring fights. Whether we’re talking pre-Zuffa or post-Zuffa UFC, both incarnations have offered up some of the most t…
While we all love mixed martial arts, we can hardly deny that its premier organisation has had its fair share of mind-numbingly boring fights.
Whether we’re talking pre-Zuffa or post-Zuffa UFC, both incarnations have offered up some of the most tediously dull bouts in combat sports history.
So without any further rambling, I present to you the five most boring fights in UFC history.
After watching several cartoonishly corny videos (the first above, more of which we will subject you to after the jump) we’re not sure what “Warrior Island” is, exactly, but from the little we can glean it is even more stupid than X-Arm. If you’re not familiar with X-Arm, watch this and realize the magnitude of the above claim.
We’ll mostly let the videos speak for themselves but it appears as if something called Global Proving Ground (GPG, to help this future pop culture phenomenon get rolling) is pitching a reality competition television show that will, in some way, include martial artists pitted against one another on an island. They are holding tryouts – you don’t want to miss the audition tapes below – and we, the ardent GPG fans will vote on who we want to see on the island, or something to that effect.
Oh yeah, they are also trying to bilk “fighters” out of $9.95/month for supposedly expert advice from a tatted up doctor that looks like every annoying guy at any MMA event ever.
In the opening trailer we see several shirtless, fat men running pained and barefoot through some vaguely Polynesian beach forest, at least one emaciated looking dude doing the same, and an unidentified Dan Severn jogging with a gray t shirt on.
The camera cuts to other exotic locations where actors perform the clunkiest sparring demonstrations you’ve ever seen: The world’s least flexible ninja doing Karate, two guys battling ever. so. slowly. with Wu Shu swords on the Great Wall of China, or something, while tinny-sounding sword clashing audio is superimposed over the video. Wait until you see the thrilling Pankration demonstration or the two guys who don’t know what Sambo is, demonstrating what Sambo is.
The audition tapes contain one perfectly nice gentleman that says he’s practiced Kung Fu every day since 1970. As he prances around delicately, completely off balance for fighting at almost every juncture, take comfort knowing that, no matter how bad your day is going, at least you haven’t wasted 42 years of your life doing something useless every day.
Audition tapes and an appeal from Dr. Douchebag after the jump.
After watching several cartoonishly corny videos (the first above, more of which we will subject you to after the jump) we’re not sure what “Warrior Island” is, exactly, but from the little we can glean it is even more stupid than X-Arm. If you’re not familiar with X-Arm, watch this and realize the magnitude of the above claim.
We’ll mostly let the videos speak for themselves but it appears as if something called Global Proving Ground (GPG, to help this future pop culture phenomenon get rolling) is pitching a reality competition television show that will, in some way, include martial artists pitted against one another on an island. They are holding tryouts – you don’t want to miss the audition tapes below – and we, the ardent GPG fans will vote on who we want to see on the island, or something to that effect.
Oh yeah, they are also trying to bilk “fighters” out of $9.95/month for supposedly expert advice from a tatted up doctor that looks like every annoying guy at any MMA event ever.
In the opening trailer we see several shirtless, fat men running pained and barefoot through some vaguely Polynesian beach forest, at least one emaciated looking dude doing the same, and an unidentified Dan Severn jogging with a gray t shirt on.
The camera cuts to other exotic locations where actors perform the clunkiest sparring demonstrations you’ve ever seen: The world’s least flexible ninja doing Karate, two guys battling ever. so. slowly. with Wu Shu swords on the Great Wall of China, or something, while tinny-sounding sword clashing audio is superimposed over the video. Wait until you see the thrilling Pankration demonstration or the two guys who don’t know what Sambo is, demonstrating what Sambo is.
The audition tapes contain one perfectly nice gentleman that says he’s practiced Kung Fu every day since 1970. As he prances around delicately, completely off balance for fighting at almost every juncture, take comfort knowing that, no matter how bad your day is going, at least you haven’t wasted 42 years of your life doing something useless every day.
Audition tapes and an appeal from Dr. Douchebag after the jump.
The biggest dufus in the videos, however, is the interviewer who, when he comes in to frame, we realize is wearing a camouflage hat, a black gi and an American flag-colored belt. This is the guy in charge, ladies and gentlemen.
They also have a mentally disabled kid auditioning. So there’s that.
Not only is this sham of an organization ok with insulting an audience and trying to swindle perfectly healthy adults, they’re also fine with stringing along mentally disabled folks. That kid is only guy in the video with credibility, as far as we’re concerned, and we hope that off camera he beat the crap out of everyone else in the room.
It’s no secret that MMA fans are a fickle bunch. All sports fans are. It kind of goes with the territory. Some people may argue that it’s a sign of being ungrateful, and while that argument may be viable in some instances, it isn’t always. …
It’s no secret that MMA fans are a fickle bunch. All sports fans are. It kind of goes with the territory.
Some people may argue that it’s a sign of being ungrateful, and while that argument may be viable in some instances, it isn’t always. Fans have a right to speak out and be heard, and within reason that should hold weight.
One particular area that is puzzling, however, is that MMA fans at times almost seem to resent the growth of their sport. At their core, they’re happy that others are starting to jump on board and see it for how exciting and engaging it is, but there’s also just a hint of frustration at concessions being made for fans who are newer to the game.
No other sport seems to be so preoccupied with grouping fans into generations, or trying to link knowledge of their sport to the date someone joined a message board about it. It’s nothing to pop over to The Underground—the most prominent forum in MMA, and, along with its sister forum The Otherground, perhaps among the most entertaining on the internet—and see good points gunned down aggressively because they came from a guy who signed up in 2011.
And don’t even start on the dreaded 10ers.
Obviously that’s a very small portion of the population of fans, but it does represent a decent sample of the attitude.
Ask a jiu-jitsu white belt what got him into the sport, and there’s a far better chance that he’s going to tell you Royce Gracie and UFC 1 than Kenny Florian and the original Ultimate Fighter, even if the latter is actually true. And he’s definitely telling you it was Royce if it was actually Mayhem Miller and TUF 14, because no one could ever admit to being such a noob and live it down.
It raises the question: what about this sport, this culture, makes it such a crime to be part of a new wave of fans? Why is it that some fans who’ve been around for so long feel the need to cast down those who haven’t?
It makes for an interesting yin and yang.
These long-term fans are entirely over the moon that the sport is garnering ESPN recaps and FOX-televised main events. There’s no way they’re not, not after reading old Tripod websites for PRIDE results in 1999 or swapping poorly bootlegged UFC tapes during the dark ages at the turn of the millennium.
And yet a small part of them feels the need to defend this old guard from the very mainstream attention that has been coveted for so long. Part of said attention is new fans, many of whom can’t identify a kimura and don’t understand that training in a gi is actually beneficial to a fighter’s technical acumen, but rather just want to see heavyweights knock each others heads off.
That’s fine. Whatever puts butts in the seats. They can love knockouts as much as they want, because the nuances of the sport are intoxicating enough that those fans will learn to love them in short order.
Does this mean that someone who started watching at UFC 84 couldn’t possibly know more about the sport than me? Absolutely not. Who cares if they do anyway? What does getting there before that guy actually entitle me to? I’d have to say nothing.
Am I more entitled to knowledge and fandom than a hockey fan because I worked in hockey for a few years? Is my grandfather more entitled to be excited by home runs than me because he can remember Roger Maris and I only had juiced up lunkheads to cheer on as a boy?
Again, I’d have to answer in the negative to both.
Then again, I took the time to make the point that I’ve been on board since the early days of MMA, didn’t I? How much further of a step is it for me to tell a new training partner to get off the mats because he’s inspired by Demian Maia instead of by Rickson Gracie?
The sport is growing, friends. We might as well grow with it, because it’s what we’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.
(My qualifications? HERE’S my stinking qualifications!)
It looks like we’ll have to start drafting up new t-shirts to falsely promise you guys, because according to a recent interview with MMAFighting, UFC President Dana White was rather frank about his desire for both former light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz and former lightweight and welterweight champion B.J. Penn to be placed in the UFC Hall of Fame in the near future. Though the jury is still out on whether or not Penn will return to the octagon following his hasty retirement in the aftermath of UFC 137, DW had nothing but positives to say about “The Prodigy” when asked on the possibility of his placement in the HOF:
Definitely. The thing about B.J. Penn is that what he brought to the lightweight division, there was a point in time when we first bought this company when people thought guys in the lighter weight divisions couldn’t be stars and couldn’t see pay-per-views and couldn’t cross over. B.J. Penn was definitely that first crossover guy for us. He’ll be back. It’s tough, when there are 16,000 people in the arena chanting your name, it’s tough to walk away from that. B.J. Penn is a fighter. You hear some of these guys, and Tito was one of these guys, he said he wanted to be famous. B.J. Penn is a fighter.
So there you have it, Penn will join long-time rival Matt Hughes, as well as Randy Couture, Ken Shamrock, Dan Severn, Mark Coleman, Royce Gracie, Chuck Liddell, and Tapout co-founder Charles “Mask” Lewis in that deluxe octagon in the sky. After a pair of unsuccessful title bids at 155, Penn won the welterweight title in his welterweight debut by defeating the then untouchable Hughes by first round rear-naked choke at UFC 46. Penn would vacate the UFC shortly thereafter, citing a lack of challenging fights, and would not taste UFC gold again until beating the ever-loving shit out of Joe Stevenson at UFC 80 to claim the vacant lightweight strap. He would defend the belt three times until being upended by Frankie Edgar at UFC 112.
When addressing the possibility of Tito Ortiz joining those illustrious ranks, White did not shy away from the pair’s well-documented rocky history, and in fact stated that, in retrospect, it helped make the UFC what it is today.
Hear more from The Baldfather after the jump.
(My qualifications? HERE’S my stinking qualifications!)
It looks like we’ll have to start drafting up new t-shirts to falsely promise you guys, because according to a recent interview with MMAFighting, UFC President Dana White was rather frank about his desire for both former light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz and former lightweight and welterweight champion B.J. Penn to be placed in the UFC Hall of Fame in the near future. Though the jury is still out on whether or not Penn will return to the octagon following his hasty retirement in the aftermath of UFC 137, DW had nothing but positives to say about “The Prodigy” when asked on the possibility of his placement in the HOF:
Definitely. The thing about B.J. Penn is that what he brought to the lightweight division, there was a point in time when we first bought this company when people thought guys in the lighter weight divisions couldn’t be stars and couldn’t see pay-per-views and couldn’t cross over. B.J. Penn was definitely that first crossover guy for us. He’ll be back. It’s tough, when there are 16,000 people in the arena chanting your name, it’s tough to walk away from that. B.J. Penn is a fighter. You hear some of these guys, and Tito was one of these guys, he said he wanted to be famous. B.J. Penn is a fighter.
So there you have it, Penn will join long-time rival Matt Hughes, as well as Randy Couture, Ken Shamrock, Dan Severn, Mark Coleman, Royce Gracie, Chuck Liddell, and Tapout co-founder Charles “Mask” Lewis in that deluxe octagon in the sky. After a pair of unsuccessful title bids at 155, Penn won the welterweight title in his welterweight debut by defeating the then untouchable Hughes by first round rear-naked choke at UFC 46. Penn would vacate the UFC shortly thereafter, citing a lack of challenging fights, and would not taste UFC gold again until beating the ever-loving shit out of Joe Stevenson at UFC 80 to claim the vacant lightweight strap. He would defend the belt three times until being upended by Frankie Edgar at UFC 112.
When addressing the possibility of Tito Ortiz joining those illustrious ranks, White did not shy away from the pair’s well-documented rocky history, and in fact stated that, in retrospect, it helped make the UFC what it is today:
Despite my personal problems with Tito, he belongs in. He was the champion when we first bought this thing. The fact that Tito is still here, Tito and I have had our moments, but it doesn’t change what he did for the company. The beef between me and Tito, Chuck and Tito, the fact is, that played a huge role in helping making this thing as big as it is.
In case you’ve all forgotten, there was a time when Tito Ortiz was more than just a punching bag for future and former world champions and the butt of endless commentary based jokes. After decisioning Wanderlei Silva and winning the light heavyweight championship at UFC 25, Ortiz defended the strap more times than any fighter in the division’s history (5), scoring victories over the likes of Evan Tanner, Yuki Kondo, and Vladimir Matyushenko. Recently, Ortiz announced that his trilogy-completion bout against Forrest Griffin at UFC 148 would be his last bout as a professional.
And even Donald Trump will tell you that Ortiz is a hell of a businessman. Aside from being one of the most consistent pay-per-view draws in the promotion’s history, Ortiz’s trilogy with Ken Shamrock as well as his epic pair of bouts with “The Iceman” have been responsible for more UFC merchandising profits than any other fighter can lay claim to.
So what do you think of these additions to the HOF, Potato Nation? And secondly, who do you think deserves a place in the Hall of Fame beside these two gents in the near future? Be advised, the first person to say Jon Jones is going to get their ass whipped.
(Yep. Just a couple of total badasses, right there.)
Do you know what today is, gentlemen? It’s the last day of Movember, which means that tomorrow you can finally shave your upper lip and return to a somewhat normal life. To celebrate, we’re proud to present the fourth and final installment of Dan Severn’s mailbag column, in which the famously-moustached UFC Hall of Famer shares his wisdom on worked fights, steroids, the death penalty, Chuck Norris’s beard, getting buck-ass naked in a parking lot, and more hot-button issues. Our deepest gratitude goes to Dan for gracing this website with his sense of humor and weird stories for the last month. Show him some love at DanSevern.com and his Facebook page.
But before we get into that, a couple parting notes about Movember. If you grew out an impressive mo’ this year, we encourage you to enter Break.com’s Show Off Your Mo contest for a chance to win a Samsung HD camera, and feel free to post a moustache pic on CagePotato’s Facebook wall. And if you still have some money left to donate, please consider doing it on KarmaAteMyCat’s CagePotato Mo Bro page. Karma’s tireless efforts have already raised $664 at the time of this writing — amazing work, bro — and he’s trying to break the $800 mark by the end of the day. Need more incentive than helping to fight testicular and prostate cancer? How ’bout this: Today’s biggest donor will receive a CagePotato t-shirt and, if you want it, a chance to write your own contributor column on CagePotato.
And now, the stunning conclusion of “Ask Dan”…
RwilsonR asks: Have you ever seen/been involved in/know anyone involved in any worked fights? Was this ever common practice with any promotions you have fought for?
(Yep. Just a couple of total badasses, right there.)
Do you know what today is, gentlemen? It’s the last day of Movember, which means that tomorrow you can finally shave your upper lip and return to a somewhat normal life. To celebrate, we’re proud to present the fourth and final installment of Dan Severn’s mailbag column, in which the famously-moustached UFC Hall of Famer shares his wisdom on worked fights, steroids, capital punishment, Chuck Norris’s beard, getting buck-ass naked in a parking lot, and more hot-button issues. Our deepest gratitude goes to Dan for gracing this website with his sense of humor and weird stories for the last month. Show him some love at DanSevern.com and his Facebook page.
But before we get into that, a couple parting notes about Movember. If you grew out an impressive mo’ this year, we encourage you to enter Break.com’s Show Off Your Mo contest for a chance to win a Samsung HD camera, and feel free to post a moustache pic on CagePotato’s Facebook wall. And if you still have some money left to donate, please consider doing it on KarmaAteMyCat’s CagePotato Mo Bro page. Karma’s tireless efforts have already raised $664 at the time of this writing — amazing work, bro — and he’s trying to break the $800 mark by the end of the day. Need more incentive than helping to fight testicular and prostate cancer? How ’bout this: Today’s biggest donor will receive a CagePotato t-shirt and, if you want it, a chance to write your own contributor column on CagePotato.
And now, the stunning conclusion of “Ask Dan”…
RwilsonR asks: Have you ever seen/been involved in/know anyone involved in any worked fights? Was this ever common practice with any promotions you have fought for?
DAN SEVERN: I’ve certainly been approached about being involved in an MMA “work.” I also have matches that people have called “works” for a variety of reasons, that weren’t at all. Sometimes I’ve toyed with my opponents instead of just going for the kill, which has maybe looked a little suspect. I’ve been involved with promotions in which I would carry an opponent into the second round before finishing them because it would make a better show. Now those were situations I decided on my own; my opponent had no idea that was happening. I’ve also had opponents hug me at the end of a match to thank me for not killing them. Sometimes when you outclass your opponent, there is a way to win that might not fit with what the viewer expects but it saves your opponent some embarrassment and makes for a better show.
intercept 440 asks: Hey Dan, what do you make of Chael Sonnen testing positive for steroids? Do you believe Chael is a better wrestler than you?
[Ed. note: To be fair, Sonnen tested positive for an elevated level of testosterone that was never conclusively linked to steroid use.]
I actually did not know that Chael Sonnen tested positive for steroids but it’s unfortunate. I do believe that wrestlers have the upper hand in MMA because of their understanding of body control, which is more important than striking and submissions. When people test positive for steroids, I see that as a sign that they do not believe in their own capabilities. I’ve seen a number of chemically-enhanced fighters from my time-period, especially because there wasn’t any testing taking place. In fact, most of my losses — not all of them — came at the hands of people who were chemically-enhanced. If people get busted for steroids they likely don’t believe in their own abilities so they should probably move onto other things. You’re not a true champion if you have to take steroids in order to give you a physical or psychological edge.
flyingogoplata asks: Your stache versus Chuck Norris’s beard…who wins and how?
Actually, I think I just sent Chuck Norris a tweet recently. Believe it or not, I’ve had a Chuck Norris poster up in one of my weight rooms for a few years now. Truth be told though, Chuck Norris has so many cooler one liners attached to his name then Dan Severn has. For example, to my knowledge, no one has made a poster dedicated to the impressiveness of my mustache yet like they have for Chuck Norris. Maybe one day a poster will be made that gives my mustache the win but right now it’s Chuck’s world.
BuckWild asks: Being a world famous fighter has to provide some interesting and unusual moments. Please share one or two with us.
Back when it was still the No Holds Barred-era I was took part in match located in a remote rock quarry. The weather was terribly stormy and there was a serious threat of lightning. The “locker room” for the fighters was literally the parking lot so I had to change and get buck-ass naked in between two cars. There I was putting on my cup and shorts while people were walking to and from their cars. I had to put my hoodie up for at least a little sense of privacy. When the match was finally getting ready to start I remember having to smack myself just to try and kill some of the mosquitoes that had started swarming around. The promotion didn’t even have any facilities to even go to the bathroom; however, the most pressing concern was resolved for most of the audience when the beer finally arrived.
Jesus Frijoles asks: Who is your favorite author?
There was a time when I was really into reading Alfred Hitchcock books — that would have been in my high school and collegiate years. After that, I started getting really into self-improvement books like the ones written by Anthony Robbins. I’m a big believer that the mind is the greatest asset that we have as humans. My professional life just became so complicated and I had taken on so much responsibility that self-improvement books were one of the ways that I learned to be more efficient at completing tasks and setting goals.
I’ve been setting goals since my freshmen year in highschool when I read my first amateur wrestling magazine. The first magazine I read really opened up my mind because there were a lot of things that I had never been exposed to before as an amateur wrestler. The magazine talked about the psychological aspects such as game planning and other important elements such as cardiovascular training and nutrition. I was blown away at how much knowledge there was to the sport that I hadn’t known before. When I started learning to ask “why” certain techniques were used in different situations, that’s really when my ability as a wrestler flourished. There are little nuances that I am able to add to many moves; the only way I’ve been able to create my own effective style is by understanding the “why.”
DangadaDang asks: Do you believe in Hammurabi’s philosophy of “an eye for an eye” or are you more of a Bas Rutten “two eyes for an eye” kind of guy?
Well I do believe that there are always repercussions for the things that we decide to do, whether they are positive or negative. For instance, I believe in capital punishment in many cases. Right now in the United States we have an excess of a million people incarcerated, costing just shy of 30,000 a person. When you look at what they are contributing to society, it is absolutely nothing. People may say that capital punishment is inhumane but one needs to look at the inhumane act that was committed in the first place. I am a true believer that the world would be a better place if certain people were not here.
Speaking of which, intercept440 asks: How long do you think Joe Son will last in prison? and will he die from strangulation, shank, or a broken neck?
I think he will last in the sense that he will survive but there’s a good chance that he ends up as somebody’s bi-atch.
RwilsonR asks: What advice would you give to young aspiring athletes who would like to begin a professional career in MMA?
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Make sure you have a plan A, B, C and D to go along with it. Everybody starting in the game wants to become a champion and a superhero. However, the reality is, so does your opponent and someone’s going to come out on the short end of the stick. I’ve always looked at my MMA career as a hobby. Sometimes it’s become more than a hobby but that’s still how I’ve always tried to look at it. I had other things that were my mainstays; MMA was a diversion. If you do think that you stand a chance at being a champion or serious contender, you need to surround yourself with the right people to motivate you. A lot of young athletes have goals and aspirations but without the right help around you it’s going to be a hard road.
Dan Severn announced via his website that he has officially retired from MMA competition. 
