I met him twice, both times he was just a regular nice man. Rest in peace, legend.
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man no way… idk how to feel about this one. feels like the end of an era tbh. i still remember those crazy chuck norris facts everyone used to spam in middle school. kinda weird to think he’s gone. rip legend.
I appreciate we can refer to them as such
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Chuck once ate an entire cake before someone told him there was a stripper inside.
Chuck Norris once had sex with all the nuns in an abbey tucked away in the Tuscan hills of Italy. 9 months later, the nuns gave birth to the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated team in the history of the NFL.
Here’s Chuck Norris telling a Chuck Norris joke.
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As this well written obit says, Chuck Norris made onions cry.
(Excerpt).
As he was dipping a muscled toe into Hollywood in the 1970s, Chuck Norris went for elocution lessons. They didn’t show. If his voice could be heard above exploding buildings, vehicle pile-ups and rapid gunfire, it tended to say “Show time!”, “Let’s rock and roll!” or, as he ran at a crouch towards mayhem, “I’ll send you a postcard.”
He had acting lessons, too. Those he was pretty clear-sighted about. He was no Laurence Olivier or Dustin Hoffman. He didn’t have the presence of Sylvester Stallone or the craggy, virtuous heft of John Wayne, his boyhood hero. Against many of the baddies he met he looked wiry, at five foot ten and 165 lb, and his hair was scruffy. Somebody said once that he had the emotional range of an avocado. His films, true, were very one-dimensional. Even his cbs tv series, “Walker: Texas Ranger”, about a nature-loving lone-wolf lawman with a tragic Native-American past, drew little more out of him than a grim stare and a growl of a song, advising the “unsuspecting stranger” to be sure he knew wrong from right.
But this was not what his screen career was about. The reason a billion people a week (his estimate) watched “Walker” worldwide at its peak was to see baddies get thoroughly beaten up and the good guy win. His straight American back was always to the wall, often literally. Typically he was alone, or else the double-daring leader of a team carrying out a rescue mission, as in the “Delta Force” films. Besieged by a dozen thugs, clinging to a high ledge, spreadeagled on the hood of a speeding car, there seemed no hope for him. But then, “Party time!”, he would turn into a whirl of jabs, feints and feet, kick-boxing his way out. A roundhouse kick full in the face usually settled things. “I didn’t fight,” he said once. “I gave a motivational seminar.”
A massive piece of weaponry could also be helpful. But in the end it came down to him, one sweating but cool human being, and the skills he had honed for years since that day in the 1950s, on service in the air force, when he had wandered into a judo hall in South Korea. He went in because he was lost; when he came out, he was hooked. Solid training in all kinds of martial arts, but especially Korean tang soo do, won him the world middleweight karate championship in 1967; he held it for the next five years. He was the first Westerner to earn an eighth-degree black belt in taekwando, as well as black belts in jiu-jitsu and judo.
Once back stateside he set up martial-arts academies, made training videos and developed his own “chun kuk do” system, a mixture of all he knew. This went on alongside Hollywood, where Bruce Lee, then Hollywood’s kick-boxing sensation, got him bit parts to start him off. Lee was a good friend, but he was not allowed to best him onscreen. At the end of their epic, cat-leaping bout in “The Way of the Dragon” (1972), the greatest fight they ever had, he was laid out dead. That certainly didn’t happen in any other film. There the outcome, as he wiped his brow, would be a piled heap of groggy men who had dared to take him on. In “Delta Force 2”, after one such maul-fest, an army officer asked him if he felt better now. “Sure I do,” he replied. “They don’t.”
(Gift link).
(Normal article).
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2026/03/26/chuck-norris-made-onions-cry
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Ann Wroe writes the best obits! For anyone who wants to listen to her read that obituary, and you should, because she narrates as well as she writes, it was in Friday’s episode of The Intelligence podcast, titled “Hasta la victoria, quizás: Cuba’s Broken Economy.” It’s a free podcast and on all the usual podcast apps.
Chuck Norris was once told that Nothing could kill him, so he hunted down Nothing and killed it.
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