Tim Kennedy, the UFC middleweight who’s currently on hiatus, is nothing if not outspoken. Perhaps most famously, he recently claimed on The MMA Hour that he made more in sponsorship money in one Strikeforce fight than all of the fighters on the recent UFC Nashville card got in stipends from Reebok combined. Now, he’s talking about Reebok again, having been asked about them on The Three Amigos Podcast.
Stemming from a discussion of Reebok’s Ireland shirt gaffe, he said this about the apparel company:
Oh man, I’ve no idea what they’re doing. There’s been a lot of new lines that have been released in all different sports. I own 5 different apparel lines, and we have never premiered or debuted a new line that could’ve gone worse. And the more that they do, the worse the perception of their products are.
[…]
It’s just every time they do something, it’s horrible. It’s ironic that we’re nearing Halloween, because maybe this is like a big horrible joke that’s just them coming out with new Halloween costumes, but nope, this is them coming out with their real line of clothes.
With regards to a return from his self-impsed hiatus from MMA, he said:
There’s a whole bunch of fights that would give me motivation to come back. I’m still training 2-3 times a day, so it’s not like I’m done, but for me to come back in, especially with the Reebok deal, it’s a big big problem financially,” Kennedy said earlier today in an interview with the Three Amigos Podcast. “I lose $100,000-$200,000 a fight because of that, so the incentive has to be significant. We’re prizefighters. We fight for money, and they just took a big chunk of the reason why I fight out, which means that the incentive has to be somewhere else, which is me doing something significant; fighting somebody amazing like Anderson Silva, Vitor Belfort, or Nick Diaz, otherwise what’s the point?
