Strippers, PEDs and a Guillotine for the Ages: The Night Ken Shamrock Won the UFC SuperFight Championship

28 Years Ago, UFC History Was Made

King of Pancrase Champion Ken Shamrock (Art By James Frazier)

Twenty-eight years ago, two pro wrestlers from competing Japanese shootstyle brands faced off for the UFC’s Superfight championship. For Ken Shamrock, it was the highlight of a career that mostly saw disappointing results at the highest levels. For Dan Severn, it was a disappointment that drove him for years to come.

Please enjoy this excerpt from my book Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man.

Severn had burst onto the UFC scene with his standout performance against Gracie at UFC 4. No one, including Shamrock, had managed to give Royce so much trouble—and Severn did it with almost no training and very real concerns about whether or not participating in this new sport was moral or ethical.

“I struggled with my conscience more than I did with my opponent,” Severn said. “Even when I did throw strikes, you can see it’s half-heartedly. Yes, I tapped out. But did I lose to another man? Or did I have to tap because I was unwilling to do what I needed to do in order to win? That fight still haunts me, even today.”

Some UFC executives privately agreed with Severn’s self assessment. In some ways, he was a precursor to today’s UFC fighter, a former collegiate wrestler who had the tools to compete in this new sport. But, at least initially, Severn didn’t have the kind of natural aggression that drove so many of the UFC’s early participants. 

“A lot of the early fighters were tough guys who fought a lot outside the cage. Like Ken. And he would tell you that about himself,” former UFC President David Isaacs says. “He was absolutely game and he meant business. Ken was very intense and you knew he was a guy who fought regularly and enjoyed it. Dan Severn was the exact opposite. I would bet Dan has never been in a fist fight in his adult life outside of competition. Dan is not that kind of guy.”  

If he wasn’t that kind of guy, Severn was at least smart enough to pretend he was, making “the Beast” persona his new calling card, pulling extravagant faces after each win. Whether he was trying to convince the audience or himself is a question only he could truly answer. But by the next event, Severn was at least able to do what needed to be done without compunction, wrecking Oleg Taktarov’s face en route to winning the UFC  5 tournament. 

With that win under his belt Severn, it seemed, wasn’t especially thrilled to be facing off with Shamrock instead of confronting Gracie in a rematch of their UFC 4 classic.

“To me a SuperFight should pit a champion against another champion,” Severn said. “And Ken Shamrock had never been a champion in the UFC. He’d never even been a finalist.” 

In his book, The Realest Guy in the Room, he went even further, not just disparaging Shamrock’s accomplishments, but calling there legitimacy into question:

Just because UFC had some ‘roiled up freak who looked good in a pair of trunks, they thought they had something marketable. They were impressed by Ken because he had the body of a chemically-enhanced athlete, which he was.

The fact that Ken had been the King of Pancrase in Japan didn’t mean anything to me, because everyone in Japanese wrestling circles knew what the deal was with Pancrase; Pancrase’s fights were fake.

In his book, Severn further claims he took Shamrock lightly, working a pro wrestling match with Tajiri just two days before flying to Wyoming for their UFC 6 showdown. In reality, it appears he actually took a full three weeks off prior to his fight and the Tajiri bout he mentioned actually occurred the previous month. 

Shamrock, too, was fresh and ready for the bout, having skipped Pancrase’s June event in favor of training for Severn. He and his team had identified a weakness in Severn’s game and had drilled relentlessly to take advantage of it. 

“Ken and I went out to Wyoming ten days early to get used to the altitude,” Bessac says. “I was training exclusively with Ken to beat Dan Severn. I would do exactly what Dan Severn did when he shot in and that's why Ken damn near popped his head off.  Dan did just exactly what we expected him to do.”

Before the fight, things nearly got out of hand between the two competitors. Not only was there an unflattering flyer disparaging Shamrock floating around the fighter hotel that had Ken’s blood up but Severn actually got up and walked out of the press conference while he was speaking. 

"He walked out during the press conference because no one was asking him any questions,” Shamrock says. “He didn't seem to understand that was because he wasn't very good at engaging with the media. He'd have one word answers to questions. He was just really flat with no personality, so they were more interested in what I had to say.”

That left Shamrock to trade banter with Severn’s matronly pro wrestling manager Phyllis Lee.  

“I was just going to beat him,” Shamrock told Lee. “Now I'm going to hurt him.”

Before the fight, Lee had looked to secure every advantage for her client, even reaching out discretely to some Lions Den fighters to see if anyone would be willing to jump ship. 

“She tried to get me before Ken and Dan had their fight,” Whites says. “I think she wanted me to give her and Dan some of Ken's secrets for when they fought.I was like, ‘man, please.’ 

“He was stronger than Dan, hanging out with bodybuilders. We didn't have the same size or strength so he made us get stronger so it would be more realistic and he brought a bunch of bodybuilders in to help us.”

Shamrock too had put on significant weight before the fight, topping out at 220 pounds in an attempt to be able to match Severn strength for strength in the clinch. With Gracie he had no qualms about admitting to himself that he could lose if he didn’t perform perfectly. He had learned the hard way that Gracie jiu jitsu warranted that kind of respect. With Severn, he just couldn’t see how he could fall short.

"People talked about how he was favored,” Shamrock says. “But in my mind I just thought 'how's he going to beat me?' Is he going to take me down? And I'm going to lay there and let him beat on me?

“I had submission skills. I was stronger than he was. I'm a decent wrestler—not as good as he is, but my submission skills are a lot more valuable and better than his. So I'm thinking to myself 'how is this guy going to beat me?’” 

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Acclimated, ready and strong, Shamrock felt confident enough both wear purple Speedos into the Octagon and to spend some time at play in the days before the fight.

“Ken wasn't answering his phone for two days,” Frank Shamrock remembers. “So (Tina) was flying out a day early. We get the call and are like ‘oh, shit!’ There was some stripper chick that Ken picked up at the night club the night before we were fucking lowering her out the window while one of the boys was rushing to the front to distract Tina.”

While the Lions Den was able to remove the other woman from the room, the detritus left over from a night of passion was harder to hide.

“Tina came and knocked on the door and Ken wouldn't let her in because he had no clothes on,” Bessac says. “Then, when she walked in the door there was a pink gym bag laying on the floor. She was like, ‘Who the fuck's bag is that?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, that's my bag.’

“There was a lot of that and I heard all about it because Tina and my wife Simone were friends. We would get sick of it, because Tina would call our house at like six in the morning, drinking Tequila and being like, ‘I just caught Ken cheating again.’ It got really out of control.”

The interpersonal drama didn’t appear to impact Shamrock in the ring. Introduced as the Pancrase champion  despite the Suzuki loss, he came to the cage in a beautiful purple Pancrase robe to go along with his trunks, Bob, his brother Frank, mentor Funaki and leg lock specialist Gokor Chivichyan by his side. 

He outwrestled Severn early, shooting for a takedown of his own and then lowering his base as the two jockeyed for position. Severn’s 40-pound weight advantage seemed immaterial. When he shot in for his predictable single-leg, Ken went for the kill—and missed. 

Cursing himself, he backed up to the fence, wary of being in open space with a wrestler of Severn’s caliber. He hoped that Severn hadn’t noticed he was being set up for a guillotine choke and would be foolish enough to try it again. In a game where a single mistake could be deadly, Shamrock was hoping one of the best in the world would make two in a row. 

"I wanted him to come after me, like he'd done in all his other fights,” Shamrock says. “That was the gameplan, to get him to shoot. Because he kept his head down and he did it every time.

“It was actually a shocker that he did it again. After I had come so close to getting it, he did it again. I thought I had missed my shot.”

Gifted a second chance, this time Shamrock didn’t miss. He grabbed a perfect guillotine, leaving the supposed sportsman little choice but the kind of desperation punch to the family jewels you’d expect from a street fighter like Tank Abbott, not a classy former Olympic hopeful like Severn.

"He hit me right in the nuts,” Shamrock says. “That was his last punch though, because he was going out. The choke was in good and I've got big biceps so I cut off his oxygen."

Severn dropped to his butt and tapped out. After John McCarthy helped the two men separate, they embraced and shook hands, the bad blood gone, at least for a few months. 

“I didn’t mean any disrespect,” Severn told him. 

“No worries brother,” Shamrock responded. 

It was easy to be magnanimous. After ending each of his three previous Octagon nights in disappointment, the fourth time was finally the charm. Ken Shamrock was UFC SuperFight champion at last.