IGX

One of the early memorable moments in UFC history was in the first round of the UFC 4 tournament in Tulsa, Okla., on December 16, 1994, when 36-year-old Dan Severn got behind the much smaller Anthony Macias.

Severn, dressed in black trunks and boots like the pro wrestler that he was, sent Macias flying with three straight belly-to-back suplexes, before choking him out in 1:45.

Severn, who at the time was a part-time pro wrestler, whose main job was working as a caterer. But he was the first true world class wrestler to compete in the UFC.

He went on that night to quickly submit Kung Fu master Marcus Bossett. This put him in the tournament finals against Royce Gracie, who by that time, after already winning two of the first three UFC tournaments, was the undisputed king of the sport.

That was also a classic match for its time as Severn immediately took down Gracie, who was nearly 60 pounds lighter, and pinned him to the ground for nearly 16 minutes. In his sport, wrestling, he won decisively, but this was a different game. Unlike his previous opponents, who put up little resistance to whatever rudimentary submissions Severn had, Gracie’s defensive guard was a different animal.

In those days, the show was billed as style vs. style, and Severn’s mentality was he was coming in to use his style, wrestling, a rougher version and taking leeway with tactics he knew, such as a choke or arm triangles, that he saw as part of his game even if they weren’t legal in a wrestling match. Mentally, he found it difficult to start throwing punches, something he had little training in, and something he didn’t think represented his sport.

There was no such word as mixed martial arts, unless you were talking about Japanese pro wrestling. It was just Ultimate Fighting, an almost underground pay–per-view cult phenomenon that was starting to gain traction in the deepest corners of the sports shelves at Blockbuster Video Stores.

UFC was a melting pot where guys from different sports backgrounds would test their styles in almost-anything-goes combat. Matches were fast, basically kill or be killed. Aside from Gracie, who was way ahead of the curve since he was taught from birth by his father, who started competing in a Brazilian version of the sport in the 1920s, and came from a family well versed in the style, nobody knew any defense.

There were no rounds, because, well, there didn’t need to be when matches usually ended in two or three minutes. There were no gloves, with the mentality being that in a real street fight, which this was supposed to replicate, you don’t have time to tape your fists and put gloves on. There were no time limits in matches, but there was no concern about the pay-per-view going long. The problem, if anything, was the fights were like a violent version of rushed sex. You get in, quick adrenaline rush, go as fast as you can and it’s over.

When Severn was still pinning Gracie, the show went past the three hour mark. For most of the 120,000 or so homes that purchased the event on pay-per-view, the screen suddenly went blank with the last vision being Severn still on top of Gracie.

Unless you knew a friend in one of the few cable companies where someone working for the company was actually watching the show, and made the adjustments to allow the show to continue until it was actually over, you likely would have assumed Severn ended up winning.

Gracie locked a triangle on Severn, who tapped out at 15:49. Without question, by surviving against a much bigger and stronger man, while on his back, it was the match that, more than any other, made Gracie’s legacy.

After it was over, Gracie walked over to Severn, went to hug him, and whispered in his ear, “You’re the toughest man I’ve ever gone against.”

“Through all the stuff I was doing with the Ultimate Fighting Championships, when I started it, I never knew how long it would last,” said Severn. “I never looked at this like a career. I took one match at a time. If you told me then that I’d be doing this at 54, I’d say, `You’re freaking nuts.’ But it worked out that way. The key is, I haven’t been seriously injured, and I haven’t been seriously damaged. I’ve got good health and been smart in my matches, and it let me go out on my own terms.”

While Severn did lose to a smaller man, it was a lesson he learned from. At the next UFC show, on April 7, 1995, in Charlotte, Severn, now called “The Beast,” tore his way through three competitors in nine minutes total time to win the next tournament on what was, at the time, the most successful non-boxing sports pay-per-view event of all-time.

That night solidified Severn was one of the sport’s big four early superstars. The other three were Gracie, Severn’s biggest rival, Ken Shamrock, and the popular David “Tank” Abbott, who fans loved, but whose bark was far more dangerous than his bite.

But age was working against him. Severn was competing without an ACL in either knee, both done in by his amateur wrestling career that left him with bone chips, bone spurs, five knee surgeries and advanced arthritis in the joints. Given those issues, after that fight, he was only able to fight another, well, 17 years.

“My surgeon has photos of both of my knees on his wall, autographed,” Severn joked. “He said that I shouldn’t even be walking, let alone competing.”

He went on to have more success in UFC after winning the UFC 5 tournament. Relying on his wrestling base, as a superbly conditioned heavyweight, he fought 52 minutes in one night without tiring in winning three fights over Paul Varelans, Abbott and Oleg Taktarov, to capture the 1996 Ultimate Ultimate tournament. At the time it was the biggest tournament in the sport’s history.

He followed that by beating Shamrock in a fight that became legendary for how it was possible to have only two minutes of action in a 30 minute borefest. He became UFC’s second singles champion, the title that morphed into the current UFC heavyweight championship. Eventually, he was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame, joining numerous other Halls of Fame he’s been inducted into between MMA, pro wrestling and for his exploits in amateur wrestling.

Severn publicly announced his retirement from MMA in an e-mail correspondence sent out as the clock struck midnight to end 2012. A year earlier, he had sent out a similar e-mail announcing that this was going to be his last year competing in the sport.

Severn hadn’t fought since April 28, when he defeated Alex Roxman by decision in Davenport, Iowa. He had no clue at the time it would be his last fight, but by October, had told those close to him that he realized it was.

It was listed as his 101st professional victory, although record keeping in the early days of the sport is hit-and-miss. His listed final career record is 101-19-7. Some of his listed wins may have been pro wrestling matches, and there are likely a dozen or two dozen wins, and possibly a loss or two, in fights that fell below the radar. He is believed to be in second place on the all-time wins list behind Travis Fulton, who is listed as having 247 wins in 307 fights.

“A conservative estimate is there are 15 to 20 wins that may not have been recorded,” said Severn. “I was doing fights long before there was a Sherdog or Full Contact Fighter data base. One day, when I have nothing better to do, which I’m hoping doesn’t come until I’m 90 or 100, I may look back at my planner to see how many fights I really had and what my record really was. There were times when they had recorded losses in fights I didn’t lose. Maybe, because of my age, I’m not as in tuned to looking at web sites.

“Companies were contacting me from all over the place. I had a pager. I’d get calls and have to be ready with 24 hours notice to get to the airport, to a destination I’d just found out about, transported to a location to be determined, against an opponent I just found out, with a purse I just found out. They were almost all an underground type of thing.

“Once, I had an opportunity to fight in Mexico. It was in a cockfighting pit. The idea of the show was to start with rooster fights, then do dog fights, and finish as the main event with human beings. This organization wanted no rules at all, and you could wear jeans and cowboy boots. I turned that one down. I thought, `I may win, but I may not get out alive.’”

Severn, who turns 55 on 6/8, still hasn’t retired from competing and performing. He said he will do one more year of pro wrestling, and retire from that genre. Like what he just did, he’ll likely be sending out an e-mail at the close of this next year announcing his retirement there. He has a son, now in seventh grade, competing in wrestling, so has considered the idea of training with him, and perhaps entering age group wrestling competition, given that competing in sports is something that he’s done since 1969 when he followed his older brother into wrestling.

But his immediate goals are to work both in the industry, whether it’s television commentary, working as a commissioner, he’s putting together a reality show with young fighters in late February, and is looking to up his business training law enforcement personnel in ground fighting techniques.

“I’m taking the skills I acquired over all these years and using them in a different principle,” he said, noting people can contact him at DanSevern.com for seminars and other work of this type. “All kinds of things are somehow related, motivational speaking, anti-bullying campaigns, different aspects of my career will come into play with stories I can tell and experiences I’ve had.”

Severn has strong beliefs regarding how he was able to still compete. While a decade removed from facing “A” level competition, the ability to go on an 11-fight winning streak between the ages of 51 and 53, against competitors who weren’t even born when Severn targeted his first sports retirement date in 1984, is nothing to sneeze at.

If there is a secret, Severn noted that his mentality would be the opposite of that of Chuck Liddell, who he noted was a guy who had a lot of spectacular knockouts, and also got knocked out spectacularly on several occasions.

“To utilize an old saying, you live by the sword, you die by the sword,” he said. “Liddell at one point was close to two records in UFC, knocking out the most people, and being knocked out the most. That’s not a dual record you want to have. Every time you get hit in the head, you will suffer some type of damage, even if it’s superficial. You can take blows to the body, but the head, no. The little piece of Jell-O called the brain isn’t meant too be jostled around like that.”

Severn advocates doing something that many top fighters, like Liddell, sneer at, which is, when in trouble and getting punched in the head on the ground, instead of taking the extra blows and having the referee stop it, to tap first.

“There are guys 15 or 20 years my junior, and you try too have a conversation with them, and it’s almost inaudible. Some can’t even complete a sentence and make a point. It’s a tough conversation. In today’s mixed marital arts matches, you don’t see actual tap outs from punches. You see one athlete will turtle up, and the other guy on top is picking angles and choosing his shots until the referee stops it. The mentality is that it’s more honorable to have a referee stop the fight than tap out to strikes. I think if you take a half-dozen or a dozen unnecessary shots, the problems may not show up right way, but they will show up over time. Even the damage I’ve received, maybe five to 20 years down the line, it may come to the surface.

“The key to my success is the theory of `duck,’” he said. “I haven’t really been hit that often in the course of my career. I did have a crazy number of matches but I wasn’t getting damaged.”

To understand Severn’s MMA career, you really have to go back to his amateur wrestling career. Growing up in Coldwater, Mich., he was part of a sports family. His father was a good athlete, although he never wrestled. But he followed his older brother into the sport, and the Severn family may have been the only family where five brothers were all All-American wrestlers in both high school and college.

“We all did so well the coaches tried to recruit my sisters, who were big, strong farm girls, to go out for the wrestling team,” he joked.

But Dan was the star, an absolute machine in high school. As a senior in 1976, he was national champion at 191.5 pounds in both freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, as well as, long before the Junior Dan Hodge Trophy existed, he was named the Outstanding High School wrestler in the nation. Before his 18th birthday, he was already ranked top six in the nation in the open division and placed in the Olympic trials.

As a freshman at Arizona State, he went 26-0, pinning five of six previous national place winners that he came across, and was ranked first in the nation, when he suffered a torn ACL late in the season.

“I was setting the world on fire,” he said, garnering far more media attention locally than amateur wrestlers in that era would normally get. “Every Tuesday morning, they would take me downtown to a press conference. That was standard for football players and basketball players, but not for a wrestler. I was 18 years old, and all these microphones would be shoved in my face. I wasn’t looking for attention. But I went to college for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t go for a degree. I was a high school wrestler who wanted to find out how I’d do at a Division I school. I didn’t think about school until I was injured and the surgeon said, `You will never wrestle again.’”

He came back two years later, minus one ACL. He was one of the best wrestlers in the country, but never fully regained the form he had at 18.

In 1980, he pinned three of four opponents in the NCAA tournament, before losing in overtime to Neil Lohan, in the finals. He qualified for the finals of the Olympic trials, but with the U.S. boycotting, didn’t compete, not interested in being a team member that would only be symbolic.

In 1981, he was part of one of the deepest heavyweight fields in NCAA tournament history, included future Olympic gold medalists Bruce Baumgartner and Lou Banach. Baumgartner was seeded first, Severn second and Banach third. Severn lost in a crazy semifinal, 20-10, and Banach then pinned Baumgartner to win the title.

Severn started coaching at Arizona State, preparing to end his career with a run for the 1984 Olympic team in the 220-pound weight class. Even decades later, those in amateur wrestling talk about what happened. With Severn, it led to a bitterness that wasn’t ever fully erased.

Severn and Banach were the top two wrestlers in the country, and were scheduled to meet in a best-of-three series to determine the U.S. rep in the Olympics. Banach won the first, Severn the second.

In the third match, there was a point of controversy as Severn was in control and put Banach on his back.

“There were three referees, and they were conflicted,” he said. “One thought I pinned him. One gave me points for back exposure. And one didn’t give me any points.”

After an intense debate, the referee who decided he hadn’t scored any points won out. With 50 seconds left in the match, instead of being a few points up, he was a few points down, and never caught up. He filed a protest, hoping to, at the very least, get one last match to solve the controversy. There was a precedent, as several other protests from those trials led to wrestle-offs for the Olympic team berth.

But he was turned down. At the time, the feeling was that Banach was the country’s best hope for a gold medal even though, as the best-of-three series showed, in a match between the two of them, there was no guarantee Banach would prevail.

“I would have retired in 1984 from competition had everything gone the way it should have gone,” he said. “I should have been on the Olympic freestyle wrestling team and I should have won the gold medal. Instead, I went to Los Angeles as the alternate, and saw the guy I thought I beat win the gold medal. It was really tough for me to swallow that. That’s what kept me going on.

“Lou was very good. Who is to say I would have won the third match, but if they scored the match correctly, I was winning at the time. Me, being a poor farm kid, I didn’t have the connections for attorneys. You kind of hate that in a sport you love so much that it would come down to politics, but that’s what it did.”

The result was Severn was more determined than ever. He followed with the three strongest years of his career.

“Realistically, you’d have to call it Dan Severn residue,” he said about himself at the age he entered the UFC, nothing he was already eight years past his athletic prime. “If you wanted to see a real animal, you should have seen me between 1984 and 1986.

“I had issues from being screwed over and I was never going to allow it to fall into the hands of officials again,” he said. “I hurt a lot of people in matches. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but I was being so intense. I was pinning people left and right. I ended a number of people’s careers with blown out limbs.”

He won a number of international tournaments and national titles over the next three years. In 1985, he placed sixth in the world championships. During his career he won 13 different AAU national championships between freestyle and Greco-Roman.

In 1988, he tore his other ACL prior to the Olympics, but he proudly notes that from 1976 to 1992, he was always in the top six in the nation every Olympic year.

Severn entered pro wrestling before there was a UFC. As silly as this sounds, until the early 90s, if an amateur wrestler went into pro wrestling, they were considered a professional athlete and thus disqualified from eligibility. Severn had considered pro wrestling as a way to make money, but after 1987 ruling by the International Olympic Committee that barred Japan’s freestyle champion, Yoshiaki Yatsu (who later fought for Pride) from international competition due to his pro wrestling background, Severn nixed the idea because he still had the Olympic dream. After the IOC reversed that position, Severn, who was still looking at doing one last Olympic run in 1996 until he became a UFC star, did some pro wrestling.

He became something of a name in Japan, working for a company called UWFI, that used a lot of American and Russian amateur stars doing a more believable style of worked pro wrestling. Severn actually appeared on UWFI pay-per-view events in the U.S. before he had ever heard of the UFC.

“In a lot of ways, it was a fluke,” he noted about being the first world-class amateur wrestler to enter the UFC. “At the time, a buddy of mine watched some VHS dates of the first two UFC’s. I was living in Coldwater, Mich. We didn’t even have pay-per-view capabilities. He brought over some old VHS tapes. I thought about doing it, but I saw people getting soccer kicked in the face and stomped. But then I saw Royce Gracie winning it as a grappler, and thought if I applied what I knew, I could use my skills to do well in this.

“In one of the martial arts magazines, UFC at that point in time was taking out full page ads asking people if they wanted to be a no-holds-barred fighter. So I filled out an application and sent it in.”

He sent in his resume, which was impressive with all of his amateur wrestling championships. There were forces in the UFC at the time who weren’t keen about bring in big amateur wrestlers, but Severn, at his age, was thought to be past-his-prime. He arranged a meeting with then-UFC matchmaker Art Davie, who was based in Southern California.

“I was in Los Angeles, on a pro wrestling show, and wrestled Hawk (of the Road Warriors tag team, one of the biggest stars in pro wrestling of the time). Art Davie came out, interviewed me, watched me in a pro wrestling match, interviewed me again, and the first thing he said was, `Do you realize what we do is real.’”

Severn found out about his first competition, in Tulsa, a few days beforehand. His training consisted of over the course of a few days, five 90 minute workouts in total, at the Lima, Ohio, pro wrestling school run by one of his buddies from that world, Al Snow. Snow and some of his proteges played a game called `Let’s try to hit Dan.’

They were in a pro wrestling ring. Snow, who had a marital arts background, along with several of his pro wrestling students worked out with Severn. They had one pair of boxing gloves in the gym, so two of the guys would each get a glove. The pro wrestlers came at him from all angles, trying to punch and kick him. Severn’s only training was to learn to avoid getting hit before tying up and taking the guys down with his wrestling skill.

“I trained some amateur techniques and some illegal moves in amateur wrestling, but I was just a wrestler,” he said about the first show. “It took me to the finals, but it cost me the championship. What I was doing wasn’t working on Royce Gracie. I kept thinking, `I’m going to have to hit this guy.’ I struggled more with my conscience than with my opponent. But it taught me a lesson when the match ended.”

Eventually, before the Ultimate Ultimate show at the end of 1995, he spent five weeks in the most intense training camp of his life, getting down to 242 pounds enabling him to out wrestle and outlast everyone in the competition.

Severn avenged an earlier submission loss to Shamrock, winning the UFC singles championship on May 17, 1996, at the famed Cobo Arena in Detroit, in what in many ways was the most successful and biggest UFC event to date. They did 240,000 pay-per-view buys and sold out the arena with 11,000 fans.

Both men had a game plan of to wait for the other to make a move, and then counter. So they stood there. And stood there. Unless you saw it, you couldn’t even imagine a fight like this. They circled. And circled. Fans were furious, throwing things, chanting for the Red Wings, and booing loudly.

Finally Severn tried to shoot in, Shamrock countered, and was on top in a mount position for about 90 seconds. But he did no real damage while on top. Later, there was a second scramble, this time Severn was on top, in a guard, but threw down punches for about 30 seconds, busting Shamrock up, before Shamrock escaped and got back to his feet. There was no action the rest of the fight. Judges somehow had to try and pick a winner, and Severn got a split decision.

But he lost the title in his first defense, against the younger and stronger amateur wrestler, Mark Coleman, on February 7, 1997.

Severn’s relations with UFC fell apart a few months later.

Kickboxer Maurice Smith had shocked the MMA world beating Coleman for the title, based more on superior conditioning than anything else. He was scheduled to make his first defense against Severn. Severn was the favorite, with the feeling he could take Smith down, and unlike Coleman, wouldn’t get tired and Smith wouldn’t be able to get up. And if he could, he’d be taken right back down. As it turned out, it was the exact strategy Randy Couture used on Smith to win his first UFC heavyweight title.

After agreeing to the title fight, in the days before exclusive contracts, Severn took a booking for the debut show of a fledgling Japanese organization, called Pride, which booked the Tokyo Dome for the biggest event of its kind in modern history of what would become MMA. Severn was booked against UFC star Kimo Leopoldo, as the No. 2 match on a show headlined by Rickson Gracie vs. Nobuhiko Takada, which drew more than 30,000 fans.

Severn’s goal was to make the big payday and avoid getting hurt, and he half succeeded. UFC wasn’t happy, but Severn, who had never been seriously hurt in an MMA fight, assured the company there was nothing to worry about. During the 30 minute fight with Leopoldo, he took so many low kicks that he was unable to face Smith. It wasn’t until three years later that UFC would book him again, as a late injury replacement against Pedro Rizzo, whose low kicks finished Severn quickly.

Severn continued to fight and do pro wrestling all over the world. He had a short run in the WWF, now WWE, and even wrestled current acting star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson once on a pay-per-view show. He garnered more fame as a pro wrestler in Japan, where he once headlined by baseball stadium show that drew 28,000 fans.

After his success in the early UFCs, Severn became a very popular figure in the amateur wrestling world, as, when Brock Lesnar was still in high school in North Dakota, he became the hero to kids growing up in the sport. He was the guy who first showed the world that wrestlers were among the toughest, if not the toughest fighters. Older pro wrestlers, particularly those who started out as amateur wrestlers or had backgrounds with submissions, hooking as it was called in that trade, but had nowhere to apply their skills to make money but pro wrestling, also revered him. He was the guy who proved them right after lifetimes of arguing with people about how wrestling isn’t a real fighting skill.

“A guy like Lou Thesz (one of pro wrestling’s biggest stars in history), someone like him, he’d have done really well in this,” said Severn. “There are a lot of guys in the circuit, Mike Rotunda, Kurt Angle, very successful amateur wrestlers. The guy who played at Oklahoma, Dr. Death (Steve Williams, who beat Severn in college and was a legend in Japan), he’s a tough guy all the way. Gary Albright, he was a collegiate wrestler from Nebraska. He was legit nasty kind of guy I think would have done very well at a different point in time. I think they all would have been successful at this in their younger and more competitive days.”

Unlike many who were there from the start, Severn said he’s not surprised at the level of popularity the sport has reached in its current very different form.

“Literally, when I first saw it, I could see how big it could get,” he said. “I was blown away that you could do this type of competition in the first place. After I got some old VHS tapes, I may have had it on and a friend would drop by, see it in the background, ask, `What are you watching,’ and I’d say, `This crazy thing called Ultimate Fighting, no holds barred.’ Usually they were just dropping by to say, `Hi,’ for a second. Two hours late, they’re still sitting on my couch. I was watching them more than I was watching the television. This happened repeatedly, the sport was so captivating. But it was a much different product than it is now. Now it’s been around long enough and people accept it as a sport. When it first began, it was more spectacle than sport. Today, you can see a lot of people don’t even know about this era of NHB. They just know the term MMA, and think it came from January 2005 when The Ultimate Fighter show debuted on Spike TV.”

For the past half-dozen years, he’s tried to go out with nostalgia fights based on the early UFC days, against Coleman, Shamrock and Gracie, but they never materialized.

“I did actually meet and speak with Ken and Mark face-to-face because I wasn’t going to let it fall through. You learn as you go through life that you can handle things better yourself than going through managers and attorneys. I would have stopped a couple of years ago if we could have pulled those matches off, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

He also notes that what’s important for the sport is having contrasting personalities, noting one of his favorite fighters is Georges St-Pierre, and he loves what he represents, but you can’t have a sport with nothing but GSP’s.

“I like the way Georges St-Pierre presents himself, the way his does his interviews, how he presents himself from a pure athletic standpoint, I love all the things he does and represents,” said Severn. “But from a promoters’ perspective and a fans perspective, I don’t want everyone to be Georges St-Pierre or it might be boring to watch. You need Rashad Evans trash talking. You need Brock Lesnar frothing at the mouth. You need different characters. A lot of these guys are realizing this more-and-more.

“Rashad, when he came on the scene, was as quiet as a church mouse. He wrestled at Michigan State and he came down to my place way back when. He did some matches with my promotion, Danger Zone. I helped him get his first pro fights and helped him get into The Ultimate Fighter show, and then he honed his skills more.”

He also helped start out Don Frye, who followed him as one of the sport’s early stars.

“Don Frye was one of my wrestlers at Arizona State. Randy Couture was also wrestling when I was coaching. Don came to me after he had seen UFC, asking if I could help him get into it. I’ve helped a few people. I may have helped him get his foot in the door, but he’s fully to credit for his success. Don ended up having much more success in his run in Japan in Pride and pro wrestling.”

Severn hopes to maintain an affiliation with the sport in a way that most of his contemporaries weren’t able to. He’s had limited interaction with UFC. He never worked for the current ownership group, and but made a few appearances, once for a Hall of Fame induction, and once when they went to honor the most popular fighters of the past.

“They’ve contacted me on a few occasions,” he said. “They’ve let me know that if I’d be in attendance at shows, tickets will be waiting for me, and I’ve taken them up on it on a few occasions. Lorenzo (Fertitta) and Dana (White) went out of their way to shake my hand. Now that I’m past my era of competition and will still be involved in the sport, in a different type of capacity, I’ve always been a goodwill ambassador.

“I’ve got no axes to grind with anyone,

“I’ve lived a charmed life,” he said. “I don’t look at this as sad. It’s tough for any athlete to be involved with something without having feelings about it. I’ve been very fortunate with my health. The way I’ve conducted myself, I’ve won over a lot of people. There were times after winning major events, e-mails and phone calls would come. That great positive support is something I’ll away cherish. Even in the last ten years, the amount of positive e-mails have inspired me.”

Kraj 2.0 wrote:I guess you could say he's Severn all ties with the UFC now.

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:In 1987, I was at a clinic with Severn teaching wrestling. He was so far beyond my ability as a mediocre high school senior, it wasn't fathomable. The year before I wrestled a Olympic silver medalist in Greco roman, and that dude was so skilled it was silly, but Severn was so fucking strong and dominating, even while demoing it was insane.

Also, a few years later I met Darcy Severn, who was his niece or cousin or something who was working as a stripper in Flint. She was my first step down a dark and winding road. I was lucky to get out alive. I was at her folks place briefly, helping do a heap of manual labor, and Dan was there and he remembered me from the clinic.