I’m going to miss Chuck Norris.
A few years back, I shared the story of how his entire career — the movies, the TV show, the memes, all of it — grew out of a karate studio he opened in California in the early 1960s.
It wasn’t a plan to become famous — just a way to make a living while he waited to hear back from police departments he’d applied to.
In the end, the business failed. It took Norris years to dig out of the financial hole, largely by teaching private lessons and entering tournaments for prize money.
As he said about that period: “If I hadn’t lost my schools, I’d still be there teaching karate. But because I lost those schools I was forced to seek another avenue.”
That avenue led to Steve McQueen, who pushed him toward acting. This in turn led to Bruce Lee, who cast him in a movie, which in turn led to Walker, Texas Ranger. That led to the idea of Norris becoming one of the earliest viral internet memes in history — a man who became more famous the second time around than he ever was the first.
Norris died yesterday in Hawaii. I mean, If you have to die, Hawaii isn’t a bad last place to be. He was 86.
Chuck Norris is also remembered for the famous combat in Bruce s ‘Game of Death’ where Lee and he engage in a defining. absorbing final fight, Lee ending the conqueror in the film posthumously staged following Lee’s untimely death in 1973.
