Chuck Norris
Everyone knows the jokes:
“Chuck Norris doesn’t do pushups. He pushes the earth down.”
“When Chuck Norris was born, he drove his mom home from the hospital.”
“Chuck Norris threw a grenade and killed fifty people…and then it exploded.”
You can laugh, but do so at your own peril. Carlos Ray Norris is a legit savage. You can’t lump him in with Van Dam, Jackie Chan, Snipes, Stallone, Seagal, or any of the other “martial arts action heroes”. To this day, Norris is the only one of them to be a legitimate world champion martial artist. From 1964-1969, he dominated the martial arts scene as the Middleweight Karate Champion of the World and was named the Black Belt Magazine Fighter of the Year of ’69 to top it all off.
In 1990, Norris became the first westerner in the recorded history of Taekwondo to be given the rank of 8th Degree Black Belt Grand Master before being inducted into the Martial Arts History Museum’s Hall of Fame in 1999. If he had been born a half-century later, I don’t doubt we’d all be watching him competing for UFC gold right about now.
While most people know him as the butt kicking star of Walker, Texas Ranger – Norris’ can thank his time as a military policeman in the Air Force for being what ultimately put him in the position to fall in love with martial arts while stationed in South Korea.
Norris eventually went on to join the Terrell County Sheriffs Office in Texas as a Reserve Deputy in the mid- 90’s. Check out this archived 1997 story of the time he helped the boys take down a drug ring during a narcotics sting op.
