Green Beret and MMA fighter Tim Kennedy knows the meaning of

profile TIm Kennedy
Green Beret and MMA
fighter Tim Kennedy knows
the meaning of combat
By Rob Fitzgerald | Photos by MICHAEL DARTER
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profile TIm Kennedy
tim kennedy
“ I was selfish, narcissistic and
ethnocentric...the Special
Forces changed all that” — Tim Kennedy
➔ Long combat
deployments made
staying in fighting
shape a challenge, but
Kennedy persevered
Tim Kennedy deployed overseas
with protection in mind. In fact, he
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➔ When it comes
to getting in
optimal condition,
Kennedy is as
comfortable training with pallets
and ammo cans as
he is with a barbell
from to p: courtesy tim kenne dy (4); Esth er Li n/STRIKEFORCE (3)
locat ions: Camp Mabry, Austi n, TeXas ; CTC, Austi n, TeXas
Two planes flew into two buildings
in lower Manhattan, and the resultant 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 investigator who knew the world’s risks from
seeing just about everything firsthand, 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 homeschooled children to do right, educate 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 citizenship 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.”
Age: 30
Hometown: San Luis Obispo,
California
current Residence: Austin,
Texas
Height: 6'0"
Weight: 185 pounds fight weight;
215–220 off-season
MMA record: 11–2, 6 by KO,
4 by submission, 1 by decision
Medals: Bronze Star, Joint
Service Commendation Medal
Rank: Staff Sergeant (E-6),
marksmanship instructor,
Texas National Guard
Sponsors: Ranger Up military
apparel, Gerber Knives, Cash 4
Gold, Green Beret Foundation,
Soldiers’ Angels, Sprawl fightwear
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 dependent on the seasons. American fire
support bases — encampments
designed to provide a measure of
protection for infantry units operating 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 difficult Special Forces selection process
to become a bona fide Green Beret
with a set of skills uniquely suited to
silencing Taliban weaponry. Cultivate
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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 storybook template doesn’t often
include homeschooled kids with
no sports experience outside of
some club volleyball. The genesis
of a hardened warrior isn’t usu­ally
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 undeniable 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 nowdefunct 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
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➔ Green Berets
and MMA fighters
have one training
commonality: the
need for functional
strength
profile TIm Kennedy
bonus content on the web
To see behind-the-scenes video footage with Tim Kennedy,
visit muscleandfitness.com and click on Bonus Content
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 nearinstant deployment.
“We were in a few hundred gunfights 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 condition 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 throughout his military service and Kennedy
recorded four professional wins — his
first 11 fights were taken on less than
five weeks’ notice — by either stoppage or submission between deployments. 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 something 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
➔ Kennedy says
training with a
Promask on
makes it twice as
hard to breathe
has been places he can’t tell you
about, doing things he’s not permitted to recount. Take, for example,
a three-day gunfight in Afghanistan.
Outmanned numerically if not qualitatively, Kennedy and 30 of his fellow 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 Food
Tim 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.
Preworkout
Lunch
Postworkout
Max Muscle Full Blown
Extreme (arginine,
caffeine, tyrosine),
Max Muscle Xtinguisher
(carnosine), whey protein
Grilled sandwich: 2 slices
whole-wheat organic bread;
spinach; avocado; sliced
chicken breast; turkey
ham; fat-free cheese; lowsodium, sugar-free mustard
Max Muscle XTR (BCAAs),
glutamine
Postworkout
1 egg + 3 egg whites,
spinach, black beans, turkey
breast, jalapeño, fat-free
cheese
Preworkout
Weight-gainer protein,
almonds, organic peanut
butter, ice, Lactaid
Dinner
Salmon, asparagus, mixed
green salad
profile TIm Kennedy
marksmanship instructor. His first two
fights, against highly regarded 185pounders 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 championship-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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profile TIm Kennedy
➔ If you have
something movable or stackable,
Kennedy will
find a way to
train with it
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 interpretations 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 himself 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 transformation, Kennedy maintains a tremendous 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 people are often shocked to see who and
what he has become.
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“ You can be a top-10 fighter
in the world. You just
have to train, focus and
get off your ass.” — Tim Kennedy
“You can see the night-and-day
difference in my life,” he admits.
“People who knew me before don’t
even recog­nize 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 pulpit — 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 contribu­tion 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