Ken Shamrock looks back at his second fight against Dan Severn.
Back in May of 1996, Ken Shamrock and Dan Severn clashed in their second fight at UFC 9. Severn defeated Shamrock in the main event to capture the Superfight Championship.
Shamrock guest appeared on Busted Open and looked back on the fight. He said personally, it is one of his worst performances and one of his worst decisions to go through with it. He feels it is the worst championship fight in UFC history.
“I had built up and I was a World Champion and things were going very well for me and then I had this big fight with (Dan) Severn, the second one, and so much had transpired. I had some cracked ribs, I had this knee problem where I couldn’t really get up and down very well, and trying to train for the fight and I was thinking about not fighting even though it was one of the bigger fights that was coming up. Trying to push it off, and then on top of it, I think it was three days prior to the fight happening, they came in and said that you couldn’t punch unless you wore gloves, and a lot of things that went on behind the scenes… I knew that I should have stepped away. I just knew it. One, I wasn’t completely healthy. It wasn’t like I couldn’t still fight because I could but I just knew I wasn’t 100 percent healthy, and then we had all these legal battles going on around that prevented me from doing what I wanted to do. If I couldn’t grapple… because Severn has no hands, then I could go ahead and try to keep it standing and try to knock him out, and do those things but then that was taken away leading up to the fight three days prior to that, and I think to myself, I had so much pressure. I had the owner coming to my room, I had my dad coming to my room, I had all these people coming, saying, ‘Man, you cannot not fight. They’re sold out, and they’re here to see you…’ You know how much rides on the success of the company, of you going out there and doing your job, and me feeling the way I felt was like, I should not be going in there. I do not feel like I want to go in there with all the things that were going on around me. It just felt like everything was coming against me doing it, and because of the conversations that I had with the owner and the promotion and my dad and others, I went ahead and did it and I look back on that as one of my worst decisions and one of my worst performances. Not just me personally, but in the company’s history, the worst championship fight ever was the Ken Shamrock/Dan Severn 2,” Shamrock laughed. “Out of everything that I’ve done in my life, that’s the one I wish I would have stuck to my guns.”
Shamrock was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2003. Severn was inducted in 2005.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit Busted Open with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.
