dailynewsnblog
A person who shall remain nameless texted me this morning. Her students, all women in their early twenties, were perplexed about something. They saw this news that Chuck Norris had died. It came through in push notifications from actual news sources first thing Friday morning, so clearly this was a person who mattered. They knew the name. You know, kind of. But for most of them, that’s about where it stopped.
“He was in ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’” one explained.
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“What’s that?” replied another.
“Doesn’t he have a bunch of facts and jokes?” one asked. And yeah, that description sounded vaguely familiar to some, though understandably nonsensical to others.
But how can you explain a phenomenon like Chuck Norris? How do you describe his career arc from genuine martial artist to action movie star to cultural avatar of comically exaggerated masculinity? How do you tell them that just the name — Chuck Norris, a combination of sounds and syllables that evoke the feeling of a karate chop to the throat — carried an almost mythical heft of connotative power?
A memory: I’m 11 years old and all I want in the world is to go see “The Hitman.” This desire is based entirely on a previous trip to the movie theater where, in the lobby, I spotted a giant cardboard cutout of Norris holding a sawed-off shotgun. That was all I needed to know. Chuck Norris is either a hitman or someone pursuing a hitman? And he has a sawed-off shotgun? And, at least in my memory, a long black coat that looks cool as hell? Take my (parents’) money. I’m in.
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So my dad took me. I do not remember it being a particularly good film. It definitely doesn’t rank among his most significant works. I remember there’s a part where Norris punches through a screen door to cold-clock some big, scary dude. Obviously that was rad. (But also foolish on the big guy’s part. Imagine thinking a screen door is going to protect you from Chuck freaking Norris. It’s like hiding from a bomb behind a paper plate.)
I remember my dad saying there’s no way you could keep firing that shotgun with one hand the way Norris did without the recoil going crazy. Even at the time I recognized this as true but immaterial.
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I remember a scene in which he gives a young boy tips on fighting — how to stand, where to hold his hands, etc. — that at the time felt like an instructional for all 11-year-old boys everywhere. That right there was worth the two hours. Clearly, the advice must have been meaningful and correct. It came from Chuck Norris, for crying out loud.
As a kid growing up in America in the 1980s and early ‘90s, Norris seemed to have no genesis as a celebrity. He simply was. He had always been, as far as we were concerned, and would always be. His name and likeness were on our toys before we had any idea what “The Delta Force” or “Missing In Action” movies were all about. We could be forgiven for thinking that one of the coolest weapons of all time — I refer now, of course, to nunchucks — was somehow named after him. That seemed perfectly logical.
Somewhere in our teens, the concept of karate lost its once all-encompassing hold on our imaginations. Norris was still on TV — he was a cowboy now, with the hat and the jeans and everything — still spin-kicking people on TV, and that was a good thing. We liked knowing he was out there somewhere.
It wasn’t just because of the relentless ass-kicking, either. His characters always had a certain stoic wisdom to them. Above the omnipresent ginger beard was the steely glare of a man who would never even think of bullying someone, but was obviously not to be trifled with. Just looking at him, you got the sense that he delivered brain trauma with a quiet integrity. His characters might as well have all been named Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris (right) in his breakthrough role opposite Bruce Lee in “The Way of the Dragon.”
(Sunset Boulevard via Getty Images)
Then came the invention of the internet. It wasn’t right away, but pretty soon. Once we realized that this huge technological leap forward could be used for sharing the most trivial of amusements — and in a way that allowed us to build upon the jokes ourselves, like early humans adding our own flourishes to existing cave paintings — Norris became the perfect subject. He was one of the first memes. He worked especially well for those early lo-fi days of the internet because you didn’t even need his image. All you needed was a shared cultural concept of the man. He was the epitome of bad-ass and we had all long since accepted that. So of course these jokes made a certain kind of sense.
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There is no chin underneath Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.
Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He simply stares at them until he gets the information he wants.
You could do this all day. Sometimes it feels like we did, just reading these emails like chain letters and then forwarding them on to our friends. This collective understanding of the man was such that, when he made a cameo in the 2004 film “Dodgeball,” his presence alone was the entire joke. The idea that he would be a judge who passed a deciding vote in the protagonist’s favor — like Apollo himself had come down from Mount Olympus to shepherd our hero to victory — made perfect sense.
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I don’t know if this is still a type of fame you can achieve now. I do know it is a difficult one to describe to people who didn’t witness it themselves.
Some years back I was doing jiu-jitsu at a real old-school type of martial arts dojo called Sakura, owned and operated by a man named Jim Harrison. (Not the poet and writer, but similarly ancient and overflowing with a brutal kind of wisdom, even then.) The walls there were decorated with mementos of his time in what he referred to as the “blood-and-guts days” of early karate and kickboxing tournaments. And in many of the photos, there he was posing with Chuck Norris. It was a point of tremendous pride for him, just the fact that he not only knew Chuck Norris, but that they were actually friends.
“You know who that is?” he asked me once, pointing a gnarled finger at a black-and-white photograph.
Of course I did, I told him. It was Chuck Norris. I mean, obviously. Who else could it be?
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These kids now, he said, they didn’t know. If they recognized him at all they thought he was just Walker, Texas Ranger. Some guy in a cowboy hat and jeans seemingly always on TV in the background at their grandparents’ house.
And how were you supposed to explain it to them, this man’s whole deal, the crushing grip he once had on the culture, the specific singularity of his fame? How were you even supposed to be sure that you understood it yourself?
