There is a particular kind of man who decides, upon meeting Chuck Norris, that the correct response is physical confrontation.
This type of man is not unintelligent, necessarily. He is not always large, though he is sometimes large. He is not always drunk, though the incident rate among the sober is, statistically, lower. What he is, without exception, is a man who has organized his understanding of the world around a specific hierarchy — a hierarchy in which physical dominance is the primary currency, in which the largest force wins, in which the correct response to something that makes you feel small is to make it smaller.
This is a coherent worldview. It has worked, for this type of man, in most of his previous encounters.
It has never worked on Chuck Norris.
Not once. Not partially. Not in a way that could be generously interpreted as a near miss or an honorable attempt. The gap between what these men expected and what occurred is not a gap that can be measured in degrees of failure. It is a categorical distinction — the difference between a man throwing a punch at another man, and a man throwing a punch at a concept.
The concept does not bruise.
The first recorded instance occurred in the spring of 1962.
Chuck Norris was twenty-two years old. He had recently completed his service with the United States Air Force and returned to California, where he was teaching martial arts out of a small studio in Torrance. The studio was modest — a rented space above a dry cleaner, with a wooden floor that needed refinishing and a window that let in more cold than light. Chuck Norris had chosen it because the rent was reasonable and the floor was structurally sound, and because he had identified, in the three weeks since opening, seventeen specific improvements he intended to make to it, beginning with the window.
He had not yet gotten to the window.
The man who came in on a Thursday afternoon was named Roy Briggs. Roy Briggs was six feet two inches tall, weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, and had won four consecutive regional wrestling championships in a circuit that did not ask too many questions about technique. He had thick forearms and a low center of gravity and the particular confidence of someone who has spent years learning that his body can solve most problems.
He had come, he said, to test the instructor.
This was not an unusual request in the martial arts world of early 1960s California. Schools were new, reputations were unestablished, and there was a type of man — overlapping considerably with the type described above — who felt that the correct way to evaluate a martial arts teacher was to attempt to physically defeat him. It was, in its way, a form of quality control.
Chuck Norris looked at Roy Briggs.
Roy Briggs looked at Chuck Norris.
There was a pause of approximately four seconds, during which Chuck Norris completed a full structural assessment of Roy Briggs — his weight distribution, his balance point, the way he held his shoulders, the particular set of his jaw that indicated he had already decided how this was going to go — and reached several conclusions, all of which proved correct.
Then Chuck Norris said: "Alright."
What happened next requires careful description, because it is frequently misrepresented.
Roy Briggs did not, as some accounts have suggested, fly through a wall. The wall was intact afterward. Roy Briggs himself was intact afterward, in the sense that all his original components remained present and in their original locations.
What happened was this:
Roy Briggs threw a punch.
It was, by any objective standard, a good punch. Roy Briggs had thrown thousands of punches in his life and this one carried the full weight of his experience, his strength, and his considerable forward momentum. It was the kind of punch that ends conversations. It was the kind of punch that changes the shape of faces. It was, in the taxonomy of punches, a serious, professional, well-intentioned piece of violence.
It did not arrive.
This is the precise word. The punch did not arrive. It was thrown — Roy Briggs's arm extended, his weight shifted, his fist traveled the distance between his shoulder and the space where Chuck Norris's face was located — and then something happened that Roy Briggs's nervous system registered but his brain took several seconds to process.
Chuck Norris was no longer in that space.
He was not behind Roy Briggs, which is where people usually end up in these situations. He was not to the side, or above, or in any position that implied he had moved away from the punch. He was simply somewhere slightly different than where the punch had expected him to be, in the way that a river is somewhere slightly different than where you threw a stone into it — the stone entered the water, the water accommodated the stone, and by the time you looked the surface was smooth again and the stone was somewhere downstream and the river had no particular feelings about the transaction.
Roy Briggs's fist completed its arc and found nothing.
The nothing was very calm about it.
Roy Briggs threw seven more punches.
This is the detail that separates Roy Briggs from lesser men. A lesser man throws one punch, finds nothing, and stops. Roy Briggs threw seven, because Roy Briggs was a man of considerable determination and because some part of him believed, with the deep unreasonable faith of someone who has never been categorically wrong before, that the eighth of anything is usually where the results start.
There was no eighth punch.
After the seventh, Roy Briggs stood in the center of the studio floor breathing hard, his hands at his sides, looking at Chuck Norris with the expression of a man whose primary operating system has just returned an error it does not have a category for.
Chuck Norris was standing approximately where he had been standing when Roy Briggs entered.
He had not, at any point, thrown a punch of his own. He had not struck, swept, thrown, or in any way applied force to Roy Briggs. He had simply been somewhere other than where Roy Briggs's fists were, consistently, without apparent effort, in the way that water is somewhere other than the spaces between your fingers when you open your hand underwater.
He was not breathing hard.
He was, if anything, slightly more relaxed than when Roy Briggs had arrived, in the manner of someone who has spent a few minutes doing something that required mild attention and found it, on balance, less interesting than anticipated.
There was a long silence.
Then Chuck Norris said: "Your left shoulder drops before you commit to the right hand."
Roy Briggs looked at him.
"It's been dropping your whole career," Chuck Norris said. "You've won anyway because you're strong and fast and the people you fought weren't watching for it. But anyone who's watching for it will take you apart."
Another silence.
"You want to fix it or not?" Chuck Norris said.
Roy Briggs stood in the center of the studio floor for a moment longer. His breathing slowed. Something in his face went through several changes — the specific sequence of a man who arrived with one intention and is now recalibrating toward a different one, not gracefully, but honestly.
He said: "Yeah."
"Good," Chuck Norris said. "Take off your shoes. The floor's clean."
Roy Briggs trained at the studio for three years.
He became, in that time, a better fighter than he had ever been — not because Chuck Norris gave him new techniques, but because Chuck Norris corrected the seventeen specific inefficiencies in his movement that Roy Briggs had been compensating for since he was sixteen. Each correction revealed another. By the end of the first year, Roy Briggs moved differently than he had ever moved — more economically, more honestly, without the accumulated compensations and workarounds of someone who had always been strong enough to overcome his own errors.
He won two more championships.
He also, somewhere in the second year of training, stopped being the type of man described at the beginning of this chapter. This happened gradually, without announcement, the way most important changes happen. He did not become a different person. He became a more accurate version of the person he had always been underneath the parts that were performing.
He credited Chuck Norris for this.
Chuck Norris, when asked about it later, said he hadn't done anything. Roy Briggs had done the work.
This is technically true. Roy Briggs had done the work. But Roy Briggs had done the work because Chuck Norris had not, on a Thursday afternoon in 1962, done what every other martial arts instructor in that situation would have done — which is to say, demonstrated his superiority in the most emphatic terms available and sent Roy Briggs home carrying a lesson written in bruises.
Chuck Norris had looked at Roy Briggs and seen, underneath the punch, the shoulder drop.
He had seen the thing that needed fixing.
This is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing about Chuck Norris — more dangerous than the fact that he cannot be hit, more dangerous than his arrangements with gravity and time and death. The most dangerous thing about Chuck Norris is that he looks at people and sees what they actually are, underneath what they are performing.
Very few people are prepared for that.
Roy Briggs had not been prepared for it.
He became, despite this — or perhaps because of it — one of the better men in the room for the rest of his life.
There is a footnote to this story.
In 1987, Roy Briggs — by then fifty-three years old, retired from competition, running his own small gym in Riverside — was teaching a class when a young man came in looking to test the instructor.
Roy Briggs looked at him.
The young man looked at Roy Briggs.
Roy Briggs said: "Your right shoulder drops before you commit to the left hand."
The young man blinked.
"You want to fix it or not?"
The young man stayed for two years.
He became considerably better than he had arrived.
He also, somewhere in the first year, stopped being the type of man described at the beginning of this chapter.
Some things travel forward in time without needing Chuck Norris to carry them.
They simply go.