I got a copy of UFC 4 (Revenge of the Warriors!) as a stocking stuffer this past Christmas, and after watching the superb UFC 100 this past week, I thought it would be a neat contrast to go back and watch something from closer to the beginning. I used to watch these with my roommate back in the day as a weekly ritual, and I don’t really remember much about the early ones outside of “Kenpo Karate always loses” and a lot of Royce Gracie.
- Immediately the atmosphere is way different, with a smaller venue in Tulsa and a more redneck and bloodthirsty crowd than you’d see now. The hosts are Bruce Beck and Joe Brown (a former football player) and they REALLY make you long for Mike Goldberg. The soundbites from each fighter are also a far cry from the slicker production values presented today on Spike TV, to say the least. “Hi, I’m Steve Jennum, and I’m here to defend my title.” There’s no Tito Ortiz here, lemme tell you.
Open Weight Tournament Quarterfinals
- Royce Gracie v. Ron Van Clief. Van Clief is a 51 YEAR OLD martial arts instructor who dresses like Apollo Creed. Gracie just schools the shit out of him, taking him down and riding him at will, then forcing him to give up his back with some expert shots to the head and then finishing with the choke at 3:27. Textbook. I really appreciate the incredibly smooth technical style of Gracie much more now that I actually watch MMA on a regular basis and understand him. Back when it used to be a freakshow to watch while we ate pizza and got drunk, I found him kind of boring.
- Joe Son v. Keith Hackney. Uh oh, Hackney is KENPO KARATE~! Son is the manager of Kimo (who missed his calling by not going into pro wrestling) and practices “Joesondo” (no, really) and looks like Oddjob minus 100 pounds. This is gonna be a trainwreck. And sure enough, although Son manages to take Hackney down, Keith fires back by PUNCHING JOE SON IN THE FUCKING NUTS A ZILLION TIMES and then choking him out until he taps. Wow, no rules indeed.
- Steve Jennum v. Melton Bowen. Bowen is a boxer, Jennum is the tool who stepped into the final match of UFC 3 as an alternate and won it, basically because Gracie was too injured to win it himself. The crowd boos him pretty heavily because really that was some serious bullshit. Back then, boxer v. ninjitsu was an intriguing matchup, but now we know that wrestlers and martial artists would dominate easily. Bowen of course wants to stand up and Jennum wants the takedown, and Bowen has NOTHING to defend with. He’s totally out of his league here, and Jennum throws strikes unopposed, passing whatever guard Bowen might be trying with ease. Amazingly, Bowen manages to escape, but Jennum throws him down again at will and Bowen is gassed. Stop the fucking fight, Big John. I should note that Jennum isn’t wearing gloves, and that’s gotta hurt both of them. Bowen’s got no defense left and Jennum toys with him a bit and then finishes with an armbar at 4:47. Jennum worked a style very close to the more modern MMA one, actually, and really made a good accounting for himself here as a worthy fighter. Unfortunately, he injured himself here and had to pull out of the tournament. Too bad, I was intrigued to see more from him.
- Anthony “Mad Dog” Macias v. Daniel Severn. Ha, Daniel. Nobody knew who the hell Severn was at this point, as he was a while away from being NWA World champion. Macias is Muay Thai boxing, and again you’d think all Severn would have to do is take him down. And indeed Dan shoots in and just manhandles him on the mat, then suplexes the shit out of Macias, hitting two back suplexes in succession. And you need some serious power to do that to someone who isn’t cooperating, so wow. Severn finishes with the rear naked choke at 1:45. Raw power! Bruce Beck calls the suplexes “backflips” until Jeff Blatnick is nice enough to correct him.
Open Weight tournament Semi-Finals
- Royce Gracie v. Keith Hackney. Hackney, looking like the bad guy from Karate Kid, tries some silly looking standup while waving his arms like a Kung Fu Grip GI Joe, and Gracie actually tries to trade kicks with him for some bizarre reason. Hackney gets backed up on the fence, however, and Gracie wraps him up in the gi and throws knees. Royce then brilliantly goes to the mat, making Hackney think he has control, but he wraps him up in the triangle and Hackney doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into. He gets a couple of comebacks, but Gracie just doesn’t let go and calmly pounds away from the guard and then finishes at 5:34. Gracie is a monster, holy shit. The final armbar was SICK.
- Dan Severn v. Marcus Bossett. Bossett’s another karate guy, so look for Severn to squash him dead in short order. Bossett won the alternate fight earlier in the evening. And holy shit, I forgot that Severn’s corner man was AL SNOW. What’s he gonna teach him, how to lose in the opening match and get mocked by Mick Foley for 10 years straight? I kid, I kid. Bossett tries the fancy kicks, and Severn casually catches the leg and takes him down, getting full mount control and choking him out to advance to the finals within something like 30 seconds.
- UFC 5 Qualifier: Jason Fairn v. Guy Mezger. Well we obviously know who went on to be the bigger star here. Or maybe you don’t, I dunno, but the answer is Mezger. Both guys have Steven Seagal ponytails, so there’s actually a rule in place by mutual agreement not to pull hair. That’s like something out of the Rick Martel-Shawn Michaels match at Summerslam 92. Fairn gets a nice shot to put Mezger down, but he can’t sink the choke in, allowing Mezger to take him down. Guy gets full mount and throws punches, and Big John stops it at 2:13. Mezger needs to lose the too-revealing spandex tights, I’d say. This is an example of the brutal early nature of the beast, because Mezger had taped fists instead of gloves and did some serious damage to Fairn’s face before it was stopped.
Open Weight tournament finals
- Royce Gracie v. Dan Severn. Severn dives in with the takedown right away and Gracie immediately goes into the guard. It’s like chocolate meeting peanut butter for the first time. Severn tries for the choke because he has zero striking skills at this point. And that’s not gonna work on Gracie. Like seriously, if Severn had any kind of punching offense he would have HAD Royce here, but instead we get a guy with no finish going to the ground with no pound to follow up. Today they’d just get stood up by the ref, but with no rules at the time Severn is allowed to retain control with nothing going on while Gracie patiently works from the bottom and uses the fence for leverage. Gracie’s guard is amazing, as he gives Severn NOTHING to work with and no opening. And this one is LONG, as Gracie briefly tries a triangle at 10:00, but Severn powers him down again and retains control. Severn keeps trying the straight choke on the mat by sheer power, but Gracie is just amazingly calm and does an unbelievable maneuver into a triangle for the win at 15:49. That was an amazing performance from Gracie, but it showed without a doubt that the wrestlers were going to be the future of the sport, because if Severn had a killer instinct he would have taken that one easily.
What a great early UFC! The back of the box didn’t read all that exciting because it just listed the first round matches, but there were some killer fights in here by the standards of the time. Tremendously entertaining stuff.
Joe Son is Oddjob, which is why he looks like him.
Well, no, he was Random Task in Austin Powers.
Ah, the good ol’ days when UFC was real.
Oh, gimme a break. What do you want from them?
I don’t want anything from them as I’m a reasonably well-adjusted adult.
Reasonably.
My mistake. I read it wrong. It said he was a parody of it.
Was this written by Scott or Princess?
That was all Scotty. Usually I’ll either identify myself early or make some raunchy sick female joke that he wouldn’t make.
The amazing thing is that all the training Severn had was basically Al showing him how to sink the RNC the night before, and he was just so naturally big and strong and skilled at wrestling that it took Gracie 15 minutes.
It’s actually too bad that he was more fun to watch when he didn’t know what he was doing than the dull fighter he developed into at snoozefests like Ultimate Ultimate or the infamous rematch with Shamrock.
Still, very much true that you could see where things were going – namely that the second a wrestler could work some ground striking into his game, the purely BJJ guys like Gracie would be in trouble. That would start to happen with Coleman, obviously.
I actually remember ordering this PPV. How I got my parents to let me watch such a thing at 12 years old is baffling. Funny enough, I never got to see the ending of the Severn-Gracie fight because it went on too long and the feed cut out in the middle of it. I was PISSED.
I too find it curious how I was allowed to watch these at around the same age, looking back on it now. If you’re growing up a hockey fan though, of course, you would already have seen blood and violence of an arguably comparable nature.
For those of us that don’t follow UFC, when did this take place? I figure it’s sometime in the late-1990s but I’m curious as to when exactly the PPV occurred. I know I could Google it or look it up on Wikipedia but I prefer to try to start/continue conversations, if I can.
Wikipedia’d because I was bored. December 16, 1994.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_4
Oh so it was actually the mid-90s then? So this would have been up against The New WWE Generation, Hogan’s first year in WCW and…the start of Raven/Dreamer in ECW? I suppose I shouldn’t say up against since ECW didn’t have PPV yet and I don’t know what sort of buyrates UFC was doing compared to WWE and WCW but I like to try to put things into a wrestling perspective as it helps me picture them better. I hope I’m not the only one who does that but if I am, so be it…
Weird timing, Scott. Word just hit that Kimo died today at age 41.
That’s what I heard to, until…
http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news;_ylt=Ag56WpCPyUgCYZdsm9XhpSc9Eo14?slug=ki-kimo072109&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
Looks like the “MMA Media” prematurely reacted.
Charlie in doesn’t know what he’s talking about shocker.
Oh fuck off your cocksucker. It was on the front page on Yahoo and everything.
I remember being excited when Severn came to WWF in 1998 because by that point he had been NWA champion for 3 or 4 years and, even though I hadn’t seen him wrestle yet, I was expecting some quality. Instead he was slow, plodding, completely uncharismatic, and his selling was unconvincing. I just remember thinking “How has this guy held the NWA title for so long? He’s terrible.”
Maybe I was missing something. Does anyone know of any decent Dan Severn pro wrestling matches?
Mick Foley mentions in his first book that Severn wasn’t much of a wrester (when Foley asked Owen Hart what he thought of Severn as a worker, Owen said, “He’s a really nice guy.), But on the night of the famous Death match tournament (Foley/Funk in the exploding ring), Severn supposedly had a good match with a Japanese guy… don’t remember off the top of my head who though.
I remember being equally stoked about Severn and being pretty disappointed as well. I think the only WWF pay-per-view match of note he ever had was against the Rock in the Semi-finals of the King of the Ring, 1998.
The Japanese guy was Tarzan Goto, and that was a weird match. Hardcore rules with dueling chairs and all that.
I think they could have done more to play to his strong points instead of just throwing him out there. And Jim Cornette wasn’t the right mouthpiece for him. I remember him doing commentary on Raw once and thinking “why the hell would they do that?” Obviously he’s not a good talker, but I think they missed the boat entirely.
I worked at a video store in 98 and got to watch all the UFCs that were out on video to that point. The ‘ninjitsu” guy was a riot. The only thing funnier was Tank Abbott’s first opponent who listed his discipline as “Bone Crushing”.
I’m pretty stoked you are retro-reviewing these. The only UFCs I’ve seen are, IIRC, 1-6. I remember loving the shit out of Severn when he won UFC 3. All your commentary is spot on to my memory too.
I remember wishing they would just feed more clueless dudes to Severn to suplex all day long and having that same, “but this guy is kinda boring” reaction you mention to Gracie.
Is it this UFC where the guy starts the match with some goofy forward flip and just kinda lands on his back and his opponent just calmly waits for him to stand up?
I always remember Hackney as the guy that broke his hand punching some fat fuck in the head over and over.
Also, anyone ever know what became of Remco Pardoel? I think he was in UFC 2, I remember liking his look and style but never really saw him again. IE: for the next few UFCs that I watched.