Chuck Norris, 1940–2026

March 20, 2026

Does Chuck Norris need an introduction? Even if one doesn’t practice martial arts or has never seen his movies, chances are you already know him for the memes that dominated the Internet in the 2000s and early teens.

On Friday, his family announced he passed away the day prior at the age of 86. While they did not disclose the cause of death, he had been hospitalized for a medical emergency earlier in the week. The Norrises also stressed that “he was surrounded by his family and was at peace.”

Norris was an icon of 1980s action cinema and for starring in series like Walker, Texas Ranger. Besides continuing to act, he remained an icon of American pop culture in the following decades thanks to his contributions to American martial arts, his books and outspoken political views, and more prominently the “Chuck Norris facts” that proclaim him to be a roundhouse-kicking superhuman and the epitome of masculinity.

Given his image, it seemed natural that he would dabble in off-road racing too. During the ’80s, Nissan enlisted a team of celebrities to try out races like the Frontier 500. Norris split driving duties of a Nissan truck with his son Eric, a stuntman and racer who won the 2002 NASCAR Winston West championship, while his younger brother Aaron raced with motocross great Broc Glover by his side. Other driver pairings in the Rock ‘N’ Racing Team were Toto guitarist Steve Lukather alongside Chicago trombonist James Pankow, The Tubes frontman Fee Waybill with his agent and team co-owner Larry Fitzgerald, and actors Robert Hays and Kent McCord.

The 1985 Frontier 500 was documented for the TV program Celebrity Grudge Match. After rolling the previous year, Chuck—opting to drive more “aggressively conservative” to stay on all four wheels—and Eric finished second among the celebrities and four minutes behind Aaron and Glover.

“It was good. A lot of markers were gone, though,” Chuck quipped at the finish. “We got lost three times. We drove about ten miles out of the way down here because there’s no markers down here.”

In 2011, Mike “Mad Dog” Henle, a longtime journalist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, recalled nerfing Norris at one of the Frontier 500s. Paul Page, the longtime Indianapolis 500 play-by-play announcer and Henle’s navigator, urged him to push the slower truck out of the way after tailing it for miles. Unaware of who the driver in front was, Henle obliged, and only realized who he hit afterward.

“I couldn’t tell who was in the truck that we had been attempting to move during that period of time and, frankly, I appreciated the fact that Page had enough confidence in me to think I could get the truck in front of us out of our way,” Henle wrote. “I remember that we all started to get out of our trucks when I looked at the side of the truck I had been beating on for much of the day. I didn’t know who had been driving and when the name ‘Chuck Norris’ appeared on the side of the truck, I immediately realized that I had been trying to bully a guy who was renowned for not only being a movie and television star but an expert at martial arts, too.

“Norris was known as the ultimate tough guy, someone you wouldn’t want to start a fight with especially when driving an off-road truck. You might say that Page and I participated in a form of road rage long before there was such a thing. I took one look at Norris and thought I’d be drop-kicked back to Vegas as I glanced at Page as if to say, ‘Gee, thanks for the encouragement, but we might have tried picking on someone else, you know.’

“Norris was so cool about everything that we actually had pictures taken after the media event. A devout Christian, he was gracious and eager to participate in the post-race media gathering where there were seemingly no hard feelings over the rough housing.

“It seems that we actually beat Norris and if we did win, I’d have to give Page credit for the effort. He wasn’t interested in going slow and he also didn’t like finishing first runner up.

“For sure, a lesson learned although I’m not sure I would have followed Page’s orders had I known who was driving the truck in front of us.”