Dan Freaking Severn?

In his always fun Pulse Answers Column, the second most entertaining Scottsman in the world, Iain Burnside provides a list of the longest combined world title reigns, in honor of John Cena's latest run, which now clocks in at over a year.

On his list of the 31 longest tenured champs in the history of the business are some interesting entrants. The top five is more or less who you'd expect, even if Bob Backlund is kind of a surprise at fifth, ahead of Harley Race. I had no idea Dory Funk Jr. had a longer run than his brother. I also thought Terry Funk had more than one title reign, even ommitting the ECW title.

Other than not knowing who Orville Brown, Naoya Ogawa, and Dick Hutton are, the biggest shocker here came from Dan Severn's place in the top 10. I mostly remember Severn as the guy who wasn't as successful as Ken Shamrock or as amusingly awful as Tank Abbot in the early UFC to pro wrestling crossover attempts. Funny how no one's really doing that anymore, and instead guys like Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle are instead trying to go the other way.

Owen Hart's whole bit in Mick Foley's first book, about how saying Severn was a nice guy was the only good thing you could say about his WWF stint during the Attitude Era, sums up that run. I never even saw him wrestle at that point, but his style clashed enough with their garbagey house style at the time that it doesn't take a genius to see that not working. I knew he was NWA Champion for awhile, before Jarrett rented the belt out when he started TNA, I just didn't know it was for that long. That's kind of amazing, seeing him mixed in with some of the biggest names in the history of the business And Jeff Jarrett who, as Burnside points out, really benefited from running his own company and having the excuse that he was one of the few guys with main event experience or heat on the roster for the first four years of the promtion's existence. We'll see if he makes it back to being "the King of the Mountain" again, but he was smart enough to realize how sick to death the crowd is of him and has mostly stayed away since jobbing the belt to Sting, showing up only to hit Abyss with a guitar in a cage and use Eric Young's cult following to become miraculously sympathetic again; with Angle, Sting, Joe, and Christian all established as main eventers and guys like Abyss, AJ, and Chris Harris all poking around the edges, it will be interesting to see if he has the balls to put himself on top again, or if he's going to stay in the background like he has lately.

As an aside, I knew a guy who worked in a comic/sports card shop around here. He's big on MMA, which I am barely a casual fan of. One day, we were talking about it, and he brought up that he trained with Dan Severn when he lived in the midwest. Somehow, this lead to his talking about Severn showing off all his title belts. I remember saying I'd be more impressed with his NWA Titles than all of his legitimate MMA awards, which he got a good laugh out of. Then we went back to talking about Garth Ennis comics. Good times.