Tim Credeur was introduced to violence first through schoolyard bullies and then by the friction that comes from being the only white kid on an all-black high school football team in the deep South. Fights found Credeur; the only choice he had to make was whether he would fight back.
“My Dad was a boxer,” Credeur said. “When I started getting picked on and getting into bad situations, he showed me how to punch.” After that first taste of structured combat, Credeur branched out and started kickboxing, a decision that would prove to be life changing.
“I remember seeing my kickboxing instructor knock a guy out in a fight in the first or second round and it was the coolest thing I ever saw in my life,” Credeur remembered. “I never saw a police man or fireman or doctor that inspired me to do anything. It was only fighters.” From then on, Credeur knew what he was born to do. But it wouldn’t be until a fateful day in November of 1993 that his desires would gain a laser-like focus.
“The story has been told a thousand times, by a thousand different people,” Credeur said. “I saw UFC 1 on pay-per-view and I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe they were allowing that type of thing to happen and it was just so cool to me. From that day, I was overtaken.”
Short on cash and full of desire, Tim Credeur devised an interesting way to fund his training. “When I was 17 I joined the Navy because I knew that California was the only place where there were any type of grappling schools. I found the Carlson Gracie Team and Rodrigo Medeiros out there and I started training immediately…I joined the military 100% as a way to find fighting.”
Since then, Credeur has earned his Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, traveled to Brazil, Thailand and Japan to hone his fight skills and has gone undefeated in three fights in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. On September 16, he will face his biggest test yet in former middleweight contender Nate Quarry, his opponent at UFC Fight Night in Oklahoma City, OK. But Tim Credeur isn’t worried about anyone else’s name or accomplishments in the fight game, and for that, he thanks his father.
“My Dad once told me, ‘If there is another person on the planet doing it, then you can do it too. Some other guy that was born to some other lady is doing it, so why can’t you?’ If you keep fighting for what you want, great things happen.”
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