Big trucks roar as massive wheels spin on man-made hills and valleys. It’s a makeshift reality playing out in large arenas under brilliant lights, amounting to a sometimes blurry background composed of a hypnotic cacophony.
Cheers of victory and cries of failure, sounds of 1,500 horsepower pouring from gigantic engines tucked inside 12,000 pounds of steel and fiberglass.
Monster Jam is a spectacle on dirt, and Bryce Kenny, who visited campus Friday, March 28, is a star in the sport now driving the mean canine Monster Mutt. The truck looks like it sounds, the current iteration including a tail, floppy ears and painted-on teeth.
Kenny earned a soccer scholarship to Campbell, where he played and earned first team Academic All-Conference honors before getting hurt after his sophomore season.
A former professional drag racer, Kenny was the first driver to go 100 mph in a monster truck, a Guinness World Record clip at 100.31 mph set June 24, 2020 in The Mohawk Warrior. Kenny also earned the 2019 Save of the Year, the 2021 Outreach Award and the 2024 Lucas Oil Extreme Air of the Year.
Kenny isn’t one to slow down, to even barely tap the proverbial brakes. In 2007, Kenny hosted Morgan Kane, of Grave Digger fame, while Kane was on campus for a recruiting trip. They kept in touch. Kenny left the world of drag racing during the recession of 2010-11. Some 10 years ago, Kane introduced him to Monster Jam.
Kenny has since taken his passion for monster trucks and motorsports and transformed it into a metaphor for life.
Kenny’s book, “Geared for Life: Making the Shift Into Your Full Potential,” is about overcoming challenges, about learning to benefit from losing and to ultimately learn from, in his case, sometimes dangerous mistakes.
To succeed, to achieve and to win.
Kenny spoke to faculty and staff of the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences to kick off the group’s professional development day Feb. 28 in the theater of the Oscar N. Harris Student Union. His motivational message is simple and straightforward.
Dr. Jeff Mercer, CPHS dean, in introducing the motorsports star, said Kenny is helping organizations transform pressure into performance through his revolutionary, G.E.A.R. framework.
G.E.A.R. is an acronym, which Kenny details in his book, for grow, engage, accelerate and risk.
“I have become obsessed with understanding what makes people stuck in life, and then helping them get unstuck,” Kenny said.
Kenny explained each concept, relating them to his own challenges and victories. He illustrated each idea in gritty detail — from the driver’s seat and behind the wheel, through a windshield peering out into a noisy world of lights and dirt, of flips and sky-high jumps.
“I love trying to figure out how to get people back into a mode of finding that unexpected traction in unexpected places,” Kenny said. “I believe that G.E.A.R. framework is going to give you that opportunity so that, for the rest of your life … you can go back to this road map and be able to find that traction in what you’re trying to accomplish.”
Gaining that traction and growing, ideas that come from understanding that what we don’t is actually what costs us the most, he said.
“It’s not what we know that costs us, it’s what we do not know.”
Kenny directed people to the theater’s large screen, to an event last year in Houston, to, in monster track parlance, a skills challenge. To a video of The Mohawk Warrior. In the video the truck is vertical in the midst of — again with the parlance — a “nose wheelie.” But, instead of the truck flipping back onto its wheels it rolled forward, onto its roof and upside down. It remained until a crane could flip it right-side up.
“That’s so embarrassing,” Kenny said, now able to laugh about it.
“I was in the process of setting it back down when it ran out of gas. Is that not ridiculous? That’s all it was. I just ran out of gas.
“And you talk about helpless. … I’ve gone through life in so many chapters, and…I just simply was empty. I just didn’t have enough fuel. The traction point that I want to challenge you with today is that you cannot survive with an empty tank.”
Learn what fuels that tank, he told the CPHS crowd.
“The key is I have to know what fills me back up if I’m going to expect to run at the level (at which) I’m built to run. So, your tune up for ‘grow’ is simply, What fills your tank?
In our society, we are very good at thinking about mental health, but, execution-wise, I think we’re really bad at mental health because we’re so passionate about emptying our mind. But the problem is not filling it back with anything.”
Kenny turns back to the big screen. Another arena, this time in Minneapolis, in front of his primary sponsor.
Another lesson learned.
Kenny planned a backflip, a maneuver in which the driver guides the trip into a curved wall, allowing momentum to push the truck up the incline, into the year and, hopefully, back onto its wheels.
In this case, that didn’t happen.
“That’s not a backflip,” he said. “That’s a back flop.”
Up and over and onto the roof. Stranded again. The “E” in G.E.A.R., he said, stands for engage.
Kenny talked with veteran drivers about executing the flip. Pick a focal point and give it 100 percent throttle, they told him. When dirt returns to your field view, get off the gas and hit the brake.
“But you know what? I didn’t know how abrasive and abrupt hitting a wall was gonna be. I didn’t expect it,” Kenny said.
“When I turned that corner and I was facing that backflip obstacle, I picked out my focal point. But I used my feet to kind of steady the truck, and I was using both the brake and the throttle. As I approached … and I hit that box, I went to hit the throttle,” said. “It threw my left foot forward just enough to tap the brake, and it killed all of my momentum, and I just simply did a back flop.”
Kenny said he has seen drivers break their necks on failed backflips, when they hit the throttle just half-way. Give it 100 percent and, typically, better things will work out than not, he said.
He equated keeping a foot on the brake and the other on the gas as a safety net, a Plan B, or a type of comfort zone.
“We think that our Plan B is actually safer if we just kind of have that back door kind of just cracked open just a little bit, just in case this plan doesn’t work out. I’ve learned that half commitments are actually more dangerous than full ones.”
Don’t allow your mental energy to leak into Plan B, he said. Place all of your energy toward the current goal or task.
“That’s the separation that we have got to have. That’s what real engagement is all about. You cannot maximize your traction if you are as committed, or somewhat committee, to that safety net.”
Pessimism, he said, will slow us down as fast as anything.
It’s part of a lesson learned from billionaire investor Bill Walsh. It’s the reason Kenny adopted a logo in the shape of a gear with the number 24 inside, surrounded by a circle ending in an arrow pointing upward.
Fail faster, Kenny said.
Walsh implements a 24-hour rule. If someone brings an idea to a meeting, and participants agree it’s a good one, the person or team who proposed the idea have 24 hours to act on it. Or, the idea gets an immediate death.
Walsh said two things happen” according to Kenny. One, action and activity pick up. Second, people start coming to meetings with better ideas. Ideas that are more solid, more fleshed out.
Kenny talked about a rough patch during his career, a so-called “dip.” He tried — over and over again — to make those high jumps. Reaching toward that world record. Kenny got some height, but he and the truck continually failed to land upright.
“I got to the point in my career I was ready to quit.”
Accelerate through the dip, Kenny said as he put the “A” into G.E.A.R.
Kenny turned toward the screen, to a jump in The Mohawk Warrior, this one in Atlanta. The truck sailed high into the air before bouncing onto the ground but eventually landing on four gigantic tires. It’s one of the reasons Kenny is known by some as “the big air guy.”
Maybe, Kenny told CPHS, you’re doing the right things. But, maybe, you’re not doing enough of them.
“Maybe you’re in a dip right now,” he said. “Don’t back off the throttle. If you start failing faster you will eventually find a way that is not going to cost the truck to jump up on its roof. …”
Learn what’s slowing your decisions, then navigate around those speed pumps.
Take risks, the word representing the “R” completing G.E.A.R.
Again Kenny turns to the big screen, to the hardest crash of his career. Also in Atlanta, the day after Kenny’s huge jump. The Mohawk Warrior rolling and striking the lip of the concrete track at Atlanta Motor Speedway, nearly catapulting the truck into the catch fence.
Why take the risk. For glory? Money? Trophies? No, no and no.
One more video. This one in Orlando, Florida, with footage from two sides of the stadium. Another backflip, this one as close to perfect as probably was possible.
“I don’t do what I do and subject myself to that so some kid hopped up on cotton candy can have a good time,” he said. “I do it because whenever I step on that throttle and I strap in so tight into this truck that I can barely breathe…is because I imagine that kid or that family sitting up there, and I (ask) myself, ‘What if this is the only time and opportunity in that kid’s life to be inspired?’
“And I take that very personally, and that’s the reason why I go out there and do it. I understand what’s at stake.”
Learn, Kenny said, to date the trophy but to marry the stakes. The best performers, he said, are those with something to lose.
Kenny’s talk toward his feelings about returning to Campbell, a place he loves. A place that changed his life.
“The ripple effects of what you are doing is the equivalent of taking this big, giant boulder and throwing it into the middle of a huge body of water,” he told the educators.
“I’m begging you, imagine that rock hitting in the middle of that water, and those ripple effects starting because those lives…those people that are walking across your campus and that are sitting in your classroom this week and next week and this entire semester…those are all ripple effects.
“I love this college. There are so many things I have learned, that somebody threw enough big enough rocks … that set me on one of those ripple effects.
“You have the same opportunity in the exact same way, to finally have that impact that you’ve always wanted to make. It can start as soon as you walk out of this auditorium, as long as you have the courage to just simply find your next gear.”
As Kenny has done. As he continues to do when, quite literally, he climbs into a 12,000-pound monster truck.
To challenge others. To inspire them. Cotton candy or not.
“I know for one moment I have an opportunity to potentially alter that kid’s life, because he sees something cool, and he says, ‘Maybe I could do cool things too.’”
Whatever that turns out to be.