Zachary Groff 📖

“Real men live for Christ” RIP Chuck Norris

Your first meme was probably a Chuck Norris fact. Mine was. He died yesterday in Hawaii at 86, ten days after posting a video of himself throwing punches on his birthday. His caption: “I don’t age. I level up.” This is a little tribute. The real Chuck Norris was wilder than any meme about him. He lost his first three karate tournaments, then went 65-5 over the next decade. Six-time undefeated world middleweight karate champion. Black belts in five different disciplines. First person ever inducted into the Black Belt Hall of Fame, and the only martial artist to be named to it three separate times. His student Steve McQueen told him to try acting. That led to a fight scene opposite Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon (1972), which became the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong that year. Then Walker, Texas Ranger ran 9 seasons on CBS, 194 episodes, broadcast in over 100 countries. But his biggest cultural moment started with a college freshman’s joke. In 2005, a Brown University student named Ian Spector built a random fact generator on the Something Awful forums. It was originally about Vin Diesel. When the novelty faded, Spector ran a poll with 12 celebrity options. Chuck Norris wasn’t on the list. He won anyway, by write-in landslide. By early 2006, the Chuck Norris Fact Generator was pulling 20 million pageviews a month. This was before Twitter existed, before Facebook was public, before YouTube had a single viral hit. A college kid’s joke website about a semi-retired action star became one of the most visited humor pages on the internet. It spawned six books (some hit the New York Times bestseller list), two video games, and a scene in The Expendables 2 where Sylvester Stallone’s character recites a Chuck Norris fact to Chuck Norris’s face. When asked about his favorite fact, Norris said it was: “They tried to carve Chuck Norris’ face into Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn’t hard enough for his beard.” The meme ran for 21 years. Most memes last weeks. Chuck Norris Facts introduced more people to Chuck Norris than his movies ever did. For everyone born after 1995, he was never an aging action star or a karate champion. He was the guy who counted to infinity. Twice. The guy whose tears cure cancer, too bad he never cried. The last thing the internet saw from Chuck Norris was him throwing punches on his 86th birthday. Which is, honestly, the most Chuck Norris fact of all.

NOW - Netanyahu: "Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good."

Chuck Norris held a 183-10-2 record and was a 6x world champion in full contact bare knuckle karate. On top of that, he beat heavyweight kickboxing world champion Joe Lewis 3 consecutive times and also had a brutal sparring match with undefeated kickboxing world champion, Bill Superfoot Wallace, that lasted an hour and a half. According to Wallace, they practically stalemated and "beat the crap out of each other". Chuck was trained in kickboxing/boxing by Benny The Jet Urquidez and was also trained in BJJ by the Gracies and Machados for 20 years. Even being able to submit Carlos Machado himself on occasion. Chuck had a 315 Ibs bench press at 180 lbs bodyweight and was said to have a grip back in the day that nobody could escape from because he was so strong. Even Jean Claude Van Damme said he'd never fight Chuck Norris, despite being a kickboxing world champion himself. Chuck held a 10th degree black belt in Chun Kuk Do, a 9th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, an 8th degree black belt in Taekwondo, a 5th degree black belt in Karate, a 3rd degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a black belt in Judo. Rest in peace, Chuck!

Oliver Pierce was installed Sunday night at Grace Presbyterian in Spartanburg as a MTW Missionary in Brussels, Belgium working with RUF Global. Wonderful to see this wonderful young minister working in these vital new PCA endeavor.