Kennedy proves ‘Hard to Kill’ on Discovery series
A Green Beret, Special Forces sniper and MMA fighter, Tim Kennedy is a guy who doesn’t scare easily — or at all. But some of the jobs he had to undertake on the new Discovery Channel series “Hard to Kill” definitely had him feeling like he was in over his head.
“Honestly, it was a daily gut check, a humiliating, humbling dive into ‘Am I going to die or not?’ ” he said. “No matter how tough you are, cold always gets to you and fire always gets to you. And even if you are the toughest dude on the planet, a 2,000-pound bull is going to scare the crap out of you.”
In the hourlong series, which premieres Tuesday at 10 p.m., Kennedy tackles some of the riskiest jobs imaginable — from test pilot and bullfighter to commercial fisherman, to triggering avalanches with explosives at high altitudes. In the process, he’s been trapped in a burning plane, buried alive in snow, crash-landed in the Arctic Ocean, gone into hypoxia from lack of oxygen and struggled to maintain equilibrium amid the G-forces of a military jet. And felt the repercussions days and weeks afterward.
In Tuesday’s opener, Kennedy is in California’s Mojave Desert, where he undertakes the rigors of test piloting. In one exercise, his plane’s Gforces become so strong that blood is drawn away from his brain and toward his feet, which can lead to loss of consciousness. To combat this, Kennedy must perform a series of clenching techniques to keep blood at the brain so he can stay awake and in control of his aircraft.
“The weirdest part is,” he said, “you see like the black tunnel closing in on consciousness, and you squeeze everything really, really, really hard and it starts to open a little bit, maybe a little bit more and then they go faster and it closes down again. And it is a conscious, frightening sensation of — it’s like getting knocked out in slow motion. It’s really weird.”
Kennedy feels a kinship with these folks who risk all in the line of duty, having done his share of dangerous jobs, and he wants them to get some recognition.
“Maybe when (people) go slide down that slope with their kids on a sleigh ...,” he said, “they recognize that there are some people risking their lives on the top of the mountain to make sure they don’t get buried in an avalanche. Maybe just once they think about it. That’s what I want them to come away with, an opportunity to see into a world they’ve never seen before and to hopefully have a new respect for a small group of society that they never even knew about.”