You mess with the bull and you get the horns… or something to that effect.
Tonight on Hard To Kill on Discovery, our Green Beret-turned MMA champion Tim Kennedy is exploring the world of professional bullfighters in America where a less classical style of bullfighting is practiced.
Will he get through the night without being gored?
Kennedy explains his mission for tonight: Step into a ring with a bull and try to keep up with the cowboys and bullfighters.
He says: “Until you step into a ring with a 1500-pound angry bull, there’s no way you can understand just how tough a bullfighter is.”
Read our exclusive interview with Tim Kennedy!
American bullfighters’ jobs are to face down a 1500-pound bull that was bred to fight. Saying that every day you go to work is dangerous is the understatement of the year.
But Tim is game and under the guidance of 5-Time World Champion bullfighter, Rob Smets, Tim undergoes a crash course in bullfighting techniques.
Kennedy is a fit and trained athlete whose capabilities are vast. This Army Ranger, Green Beret, and Special Forces sniper enthusiastically puts his all into a weekly challenge across the globe as we join him sitting in the catbird seat with him as he learns on the fly.
The premiere opened with Kennedy whose experience with the “Top Gun” nation’s elite pilots tested the limits of his own mind and body. Now the heartland’s challenge of American bullfighting is on deck.
The latest in a series of compelling reality docuseries hosts like Mike Rowe, Kennedy is an entertaining and affable guide as Discovery’s newest host hero who shines a light on a difficult day’s work for some.
This is in a bid to get him prepared for one of the biggest rodeo events in the country.
In American-rodeo-style, bullfighters and bulls face off inside of a small caged arena, which greatly restricts the fighter’s ability to put space between themselves and the irate bulls.
They are given scores for touching, evading and in a lucky break, actually flipping over bulls.
When we interviewed Tim and asked what he would not do again, bullfighting was on the list. Tim replied: “Commercial fishing and bullfighting would be pretty high on that list. The first day that we went out on a boat, every single person holding every piece of camera equipment was throwing up on each other and everything around them within 10 feet.
“That’s before we even left the harbor and we were about to go out for 12 hours. It was, as the captain said, the best day of weather. He was like, ‘Man, you men got super lucky. Look at this sea. It’s perfectly flat,’ as the dude next to me’s hurling vomit all over into the wind and into everybody’s faces.”
“It’s not one thing that sets them off. It wasn’t just the motion of the ocean. It was the crew hands having chewing tobacco, pouring yourself a cup of coffee and sitting there for two weeks, smelling the food from the galley while the diesel is coming out of the exhaust while the fish are cooking on the deck. It’s all of it, all at once, with no sleep. It’s so hard, so amazing.”
“We went to some freezing water near the Arctic and we went to some really warm water down in Florida and we went to some really rough seas in the northeast. I think we kind of checked every block to demonstrate the vast difference of commercial fishing.”
In a job where there is no room for mistakes and cowboy’s lives are on the line, Tim’s training is truly put to the test. Make sure to tune in tonight and see how he stacks up with the veteran bullfighters at the Cowtown Coliseum.
Hard to Kill airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on Discovery