profile Tim Kennedy

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Green Beret and MMA fighter Tim Kennedy knows

the meaning of combatBy RoB FitzgeRald | Photos By MiChael daRteR

Two planes flew into two buildings in lower Manhattan, and the resul-tant miasma of ash and confusion caught the attention of a rudderless young man 3,000 miles away in San Luis Obispo, California. His father, a veteran police narcotics investiga-tor who knew the world’s risks from seeing just about everything first-hand, watched the young man’s thoughts begin to churn.

What’s it like, you ask, to watch your son walk into a recruiting office and join the Army in the midst of a multiple-front war on terror, when enlistment in an infantry unit virtu-ally guarantees a first-class ticket to a bullet-dodging contest?

Mike Kennedy knows. He spent 32 years solving SLO’s problems from the perspective of a man of faith — faith in his work, faith in a system he had spent his prime years supporting, and faith in raising his three home-schooled children to do right, edu-cate themselves, and create lives of industry, curiosity and responsibility.

His middle child, Timothy Fred Kennedy, seemed not to have read Mike’s memos on productive citizen-ship until Sept. 11, 2001, a day that set in motion a chain of events that would eventually define a young man’s life, change a family forever, and transform a self-professed “selfish little prick” into both an elite soldier and one of the best mixed martial arts fighters on the planet.

What, then, is it like?Says Mike Kennedy: “As a parent,

you never want your kid in harm’s way, but if somebody has to do it, Tim is who you want protecting your country.”

Tim Kennedy deployed overseas with protection in mind. In fact, he

Tim KennedyAge: 30Hometown: San Luis Obispo, Californiacurrent residence: Austin, TexasHeigHt: 6'0"weigHt: 185 pounds fight weight; 215–220 off-seasonmmA record: 11–2, 6 by KO, 4 by submission, 1 by decisionmedAls: Bronze Star, Joint Service Commendation MedalrAnk: Staff Sergeant (E-6), marksmanship instructor, Texas National Guardsponsors: Ranger Up military apparel, Gerber Knives, Cash 4 Gold, Green Beret Foundation, Soldiers’ Angels, Sprawl fightwear

➔ long combat deployments made staying in fighting shape a challenge, but Kennedy persevered

➔ When it comes to getting in optimal condition, Kennedy is as comfortable train-ing with pallets and ammo cans as he is with a barbell

“ I was selfIsh, narcIssIstIc and ethnocentrIc...the specIal forces changed all that” — Tim Kennedy

had protective instincts his father never needed to teach. In San Luis Obispo, Tim would step in for kids who couldn’t defend themselves. In Afghanistan, it was the oppression of children that struck a chord: Girls who had acid thrown in their faces simply because they wanted to go to school couldn’t stand up and fight. Tim Kennedy could.

The Taliban are nomads, con-stantly on the move throughout Afghanistan, their existence depen-dent on the seasons. American fire support bases — encampments designed to provide a measure of protection for infantry units operat-ing far afield — pay close attention because when the Taliban relocate, they attack, picking apart the nearest coalition firebase with ambushes and

improvised explosive devices. “There’ll be a ton of Taliban all

around you, all the time,” Kennedy explains. “Every time a vehicle leaves a firebase, it’s in a gunfight. Every single time.”

By 2008, nearly five years after enlisting, Kennedy was firmly ensconced in the upper stratosphere of the Army’s rank-and-file royalty. A Ranger-qualified sniper, he had passed through the notoriously diffi-cult Special Forces selection process to become a bona fide Green Beret with a set of skills uniquely suited to silencing Taliban weaponry. Cultivate F

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profile Tim Kennedy

the ability to “reach out and touch somebody” from 2,500 meters, then do it with lifesaving consistency and you’ll end up with a Joint Service Commendation Medal. Along with his Bronze Star, that’s the military commendation on his “breast of fury” in which Kennedy takes the most pride.

“They’d fly me and my sniper buddy in, and we’d go from firebase to firebase picking off whoever was out there to let them know they had better not be within a certain range,” Kennedy says. “That’s why I became a sniper.”

Kennedy wasn’t always a hero, but sometimes heroes take time to arrange their priorities. The sto-rybook template doesn’t often include homeschooled kids with no sports experience outside of some club volleyball. The genesis of a hardened warrior isn’t usu ally an idyllic suburban home life, including a father with a solid job and a stay-at-home mother who cared deeply for the welfare of their daughter and two sons. It may include a gnawing intuition — with ideas yet unformed but an undeni-able restlessness — that there’s more to life than what you’d experience on California’s central coast.

“I was never a delinquent, but I was a pretty bad kid until about 23, when I enlisted,” Kennedy admits. “I mean, at one point I had two babies by two different women within a few weeks. The structure of martial arts, that kind of ‘bow to your sensei’ stuff, was something I really needed at the time.”

He began his training at a now-defunct Japanese jiu-jitsu school in San Luis Obispo, but his fight-game alma mater is The Pit, the famed Hawaiian kempo academy that launched the careers of MMA superstars Chuck Liddell and Jake Shields. After 31 amateur fights with just one defeat, Kennedy made his pro debut in 2001, losing because of a cut just 12 days before

➔ Green Berets and mma fighters have one training commonality: the need for functional strength

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the 9/11 attacks that would alter the course of his life.

“After 9/11, I realized I had led a pointless existence,” he remarks. “I was selfish, narcissistic and eth-nocentric. All I cared about was whether I was the best fighter, or if I was going to the right parties or had on a good pair of pants. The Special Forces changed all that.”

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The Army’s 18 X-Ray Program is a simple proposition for young men with testosterone to burn. If you think you have what it takes to qual-ify for the Special Forces, 18 X-Ray dispenses with the regular Army formality of making rank. Instead, you come straight off the street, pass through Basic Combat Training, Advanced Individual Training and

Airborne School, then drop directly into the razor-sharp teeth of the Special Forces selection program. If you’re capable of finishing, as Kennedy did in 2004, you’re in. And in a post-9/11 Army, “in” means near-instant deployment.

“We were in a few hundred gun-fights in the first 3–4 months of our first rotation through Iraq,” he recalls. “We came back and it was like, ‘Hey, this is a highly specialized team you’re on, and you’re not really ready for this yet.’”

After his four-month rotation, Kennedy returned to the States for 60-plus days of Ranger School, a con-dition for maintaining his Special Forces qualifications. He then returned to the 7th Special Forces Group and quickly ascended the ranks to become a sniper, instructor and three-time champion in the light heavyweight division of the Army’s highly competitive service-wide MMA-style Combatives Tournament. Throw the toughest guys in the Army in a ring and let them fight it out, and the soldier with his hand raised three years running was the homeschooled kid from SLO.

The fight game beckoned through-out his military service and Kennedy recorded four professional wins — his first 11 fights were taken on less than five weeks’ notice — by either stop-page or submission between deploy-ments. But the Green Berets would define who and what he was, and what he had come to expect from himself and his brothers in arms.

“These guys are just badasses,” he says. “We’re 10 rooms deep in a house and a round goes off, and every single Green Beret in the building is running toward the gunfire, which is some-thing I’ve never seen anywhere else. Being part of a group like that, you’re humbled every day. I have to push myself harder to be the best I can be so I can earn my right to be there.”

Kennedy has seen multiple tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, plus six deployments elsewhere in support of the war on terror. He

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has been places he can’t tell you about, doing things he’s not permit-ted to recount. Take, for example, a three-day gunfight in Afghanistan. Outmanned numerically if not quali-tatively, Kennedy and 30 of his fel-low Green Berets emerged without anyone being hit. “We had just been blown up and they had fortified positions with machine guns, just laying into us, and we were like, ‘This is gonna suck.’ Three days later, we had killed a few hundred of them and we’re still there. How does that happen? By being Green Berets. By being perfect.”

On Aug. 5, 2009, Kennedy left the Army to pursue a full-time MMA career with Strikeforce, opting to join the Texas National Guard’s 19th Special Forces Group as a combat

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fIght foodTim Kennedy competes in Strikeforce’s ultracompetitive 185-pound class — which is loaded with the likes of Jason “Mayhem” Miller, dan henderson and champion Jake Shields — but his typical off-season weight is 215 pounds. The six-meal daily plan below was formulated by his nutritionist p.R. Cole and is designed to accommodate Kennedy’s training regimen, which usually includes at least three intense workouts per day. priding himself on rising at 5:30 a.m. and starting his first workout by 5:50, he opts for the efficiency of a preworkout shake vs. eating breakfast.

➔ Kennedy says training with a Promask on makes it twice as hard to breathe

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marksmanship instructor. His first two fights, against highly regarded 185- pounders Nick Thompson and Zak Cummings, resulted in decisive wins. Kennedy says being a soldier has made him a better fighter and vice versa.

“When you’re sitting on the side of a helicopter with your feet hanging out and an SR-25 on your lap, and you see a dude pop out of the top of a cupola with an RPG, that’s when you get nervous,” he says. “In a fight, there’s a dude wearing a white shirt whose job is to make sure I don’t get hurt. Unless the guy across from me has a bomb strapped to his chest or AK-47s in his corner, what’s the worst that can happen? I get cut?”

By all accounts, Kennedy has the requisite tools to take what he and his coaches believe is his rightful place in the upper echelon of cham-pionship-caliber MMA: superior athleticism, rapidly improving standup and ground games, and an off-the-charts cardio capacity that has become his trademark. Much of that foundation comes from some rather unorthodox training methods he developed while deployed. If your Humvee breaks down, don’t call Tim Kennedy. He’ll jump on its hood, then scavenge it for parts that he’ll promptly squat, throw and smash until his hands bleed.

“I’m against doing anything in a vacuum, and training like that taught me a great deal about functional strength,” he says. “I’d come back

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from a trip after doing functional stuff for four months, and I’d be stronger than anyone I rolled with and I could pick up weights I had never been able to lift before.”

Now that he’s officially employed as a professional fighter, Kennedy hones his game at Competitive Training Center in Austin, Texas, with strength coaches Justin Lakin and Coy Schneider. His regimen — a steady diet of MMA work along with more conventional gym inter-pretations of his now-legendary deployment workouts — is designed to take full advantage of the time he has left. “I’ve got 3–4 years left of my athletic prime and I don’t want to miss a minute of it,” he says.

“I’ve never even seen him out of breath,” says Jason Webster, Ken-nedy’s striking coach in Austin and a 20-year veteran of the fight game. “Tim is absolutely in a class by him-self in terms of being in a constant state of readiness. I’d be shocked if he’s not a world champion within a year. This guy is a machine.”

Eight years removed from his enlistment and subsequent transfor-mation, Kennedy maintains a tre-mendous amount of stability and focus in his life. Happily married for four years to Ginger — “She’s a lot smarter than he is, which helps,” Mike Kennedy notes — he says peo-ple are often shocked to see who and what he has become.

“You can see the night-and-day difference in my life,” he admits. “People who knew me before don’t even recog nize me now. Professional soldier? Professional fighter? Happily married, faithful Christian? Are we talking about the same guy?”

Kennedy’s long-term goal for his fight career includes mounting a much greater stage from which to spread his message of faith, hard work, integrity and service to his country. He craves his personal pul-pit — the platform of MMA cameras and microphones to which he’ll have full access should he win a title —

and wants his life’s body of work to motivate others to follow his path, both within the military and without.

“You can be a Green Beret if you want,” he says. “You can be a top-10 fighter in the world. You just have to train, focus and get off your ass. Watch my fights and you’ll see I’m smiling before, during and after. I don’t care how many belts I win. I’m still going to make a contribu -tion to my country, and that’s what makes me smile. I want millions of people to hear that message. I’m a Christian, I’m a soldier and I’m a badass fighter.” m&f

➔ if you have something mov-able or stackable, Kennedy will find a way to train with it

“ You can be a top-10 fIghter In the world. You just have to traIn, focus and get off Your ass.” — Tim Kennedy

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