Chuck Norris: a legend with the last laugh
Remembering the martial artist, action star and an internet mythology all his own.
When you have spent years as a living legend, death is hardly the end of the story.
Especially if you are Chuck Norris. Even the age of 86 felt improbable; he had somehow seemed permanent. There was Walker, Texas Ranger, of course, and the 1972 martial-arts film The Way of the Dragon, in which he faced Bruce Lee. An entire era of action cinema sits inside those names.
A cobra once bit Chuck Norris. After five days of agony, the cobra died.
Born Carlos Ray Norris in Oklahoma on 10 March 1940, he was the eldest of three brothers. His childhood was difficult, marked by poverty, his parents’ divorce and his father’s drinking. The quiet, withdrawn boy joined the US Air Force and began studying martial arts while stationed in South Korea. He went on to train across several disciplines and establish his own system, Chun Kuk Do.
Karate championships in the 1960s helped pave the way into film. A major breakthrough came with Bruce Lee’s invitation to play his opponent in The Way of the Dragon. An oft-repeated story has Norris asking who wins. Lee’s answer: the star of the film, naturally. When Norris asks whether he wants to beat the world champion, Lee reportedly replies that he intends to kill him. On screen, at least.
Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.
Steve McQueen encouraged him to take acting seriously, and the karate champion became an international action star. From 1993 to 2001, he dispensed his particular form of justice as Cordell Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger.
Before that came the 1980s films Missing in Action, The Delta Force and Code of Silence, establishing the screen persona he would carry into television: controlled, resolute and equipped with an unshakeable sense of right and wrong.
Chuck Norris once threw a grenade and killed fifty people. Then it exploded.
Across more than twenty films, he played taciturn loners, soldiers, law officers and veterans. His characters caught criminals, freed prisoners of war, rescued hostages and fought terrorists. He dodged bullets, landed kicks squarely on jaws and dealt with several villains at once. He became an icon of the B-movie action tradition.
Among his later appearances was The Expendables 2, alongside Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Jean-Claude Van Damme: action heroes from a whole era, together on one screen. Naturally, Norris’s mythology left little doubt about who was the toughest.
Thunder is just Chuck Norris cracking his knuckles.
Away from the camera, Norris promoted martial arts and founded schools. Then came a second kind of fame: “Chuck Norris facts”, the jokes and memes that turned his strength into a gleefully impossible force. The phenomenon spread online from the mid-2000s, creating a comic character larger than the already larger-than-life screen one.
Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups. He pushes the Earth down.
Death may have come for Chuck Norris, but it is probably apologising for the inconvenience. Down here, very little changes. A living legend becomes a legend. And if aliens do exist, perhaps they will finally feel brave enough to visit.
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