A cobra bit Chuck Norris in the leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.
My life has been enriched by knowing Chuck Norris, and I don’t mean his films. Although I confess I did have, as a gift from a theatre manager, the perfectly tacky movie poster for the only show I saw, Missing In Action, the one where after Viet Nam is over, he rescues P.O.W.s. (Rumours of such prisoners persisted for years; I remember a tethered great balloon that read Missing But Not Forgotten)
He would forgive me the fact that because I wasn’t near any television in those years, I missed his TV show, Walker, Texas Ranger.
They say the young people these days don’t know his movies, or even what Norris looked like —tall, dirty blond, sometimes with a beard— No, but they knew the many, many memes about him being tough. I used to laugh every time I passed a T-shirt kiosk: one of the shirts read The Dark is Afraid of Chuck Norris. Where the memes came from, Chuck never knew, but he wasn’t going to be a spoil sport and discourage them.
My enduring image of Chuck is of him at his yard parties, operating the bar-b-que so that the friends of his kids would know him as “Mr. Norris” not as an intimidating movie hero.
My fuzzy image is of the lonely young man, Airman First Class, stationed in South Korea, walking off base to be standing behind Koreans in a field, and struggling to keep up, as they practised something called Karate. Eventually, because of he kept appearing, they welcomed him into their club. Life was rough in poor postwar Korea, but if you were part of the karate club, nobody bothered you.
Flash-forward to his life in the States: There were karate clubs across the U.S. and he ran his own club. A good one. One Saturday he drove a van of his young students to a tournament. Coming home later was a happy thing: every body had won their match… except the teacher. I think that was the time an insecure young opponent had asked Chuck to go easy on him. Never again!
A humble consideration for others was characteristic of Chuck. Recently I saw a Youtube of an old BBC show where the host asked Norris, “What’s it like to be a successful terrible actor?” And Chuck simply said he’d been acting for nine years and thought he was getting better.
Karate was not a sport, it was a martial art. When my roommate helped put on the first international tournament in Canada, he told me, “A sportsman (such as a boxer) practices to go to tournaments, a martial artist goes to tournaments to improve his karate.” Or as I put it, if the guy on the next bar stool has a black belt, I wouldn’t be afraid of getting him angry. Not like being beside a boxer. But let’s not get all mystical about the benefits of a martial art: My roommate, sans black belt, did time in the Remand Centre, where he analyzed watching a stupid karate practitioner, sans black belt, being easily defeated by an irritated criminal.
Norris—he had been an air policeman in the service—was too good to ever be in trouble, even though he came from a hard childhood in Oklahoma. He once amazed a prosecutor, while in court as an expert witness, by running over to “karate kick” (not really) the attorney before he could click the trigger on his pistol: Thus demonstrating, to the chagrin of the prosecutor, that the defendant was correct in being afraid of a trained fighter. Norris once amazed a talk show host who asked, “What if you were confronted by a mugger…” He replied he would give up his wallet. Humble.
Chuck wrote his memoirs, to freely share The Secret of My Inner Strength. Hs publisher was skeptical, asking if there was any market for such a book…
—Note: In the writing trade, having people know you in advance of publication is called, “having a platform.” Hence many writers have newsletters and blogs—
…Chuck replied that he was a world karate champion, and so if karate people bought his book…
It was through his first edition that I got to know him. A family man, with five children, who gave lessons to the televised-on-prime-time “Osmond Family.” (My own family had six kids)
Chuck Norris was excellent, humble and good. An inspiration to me, it was nice to know he was in the world.
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Sean Crawford
On the great plains,
March
2026
Chuck Norris has died, age 88
Essay note: One day I will write about why I am not the same man as my inspiration.
Blog note: To me, the only way to write about a man’s life is in a single sitting. No cold long revising. I wrote this last night over bubbly white (no red left) during a Tuesday Open Mic for music at Higher Ground.
