Chuck Norris He is world-renowned for his action movies—and his 1972 fight with Bruce Lee—and his brilliance in martial arts. Now 83, Norris is a black belt in five systems. Furthermore, he also has multiple karate titles. However, although he has practiced and experienced multiple sports of great physical demand, there is an old style of boxing that seemed extremely brutal to him and that it could even put his life in danger.
While speaking with Dick Cavett on his show, Chuck Norris revealed his take on and experience of an ancient sport. What sport were they talking about? And what did Norris say about that discipline?
On “The Dick Cavett Show”, Cavett talked about Thai boxing. At that time, he had first witnessed this sport live in a camp and had been stunned to the point of fear. So Cavett asked Norris what he thought.
And Norris replied: “It’s a brutal sport, Thai boxing, the average length of a professional athlete in Thai boxing is five years, and I mean they start young, so usually their career ends at 20 years old. When you start using your knees and elbows and all that, it’s really devastating.”
Furthermore, in the interview Chuck Norris also talked about the difficulties he had to face during his Karate World Championship finals, as karate was not as popular or as big as boxing in the 90s or earlier.
A career full of a thousand and one anecdotes. Did you know that Chuck Norris made a strange request to his opponent in a martial arts tournament in 1968 just before the first scene of him in the movies? “Punch me in the body, but try not to hit me in the face,” he told Lewis Ray “Skipper” Mullins. And what did you ask to eliminate the “harsh language” to participate in the saga of Los Expendables?
Joaquín Gasca is an expert in competition, technology and motor sports. Some time ago he hung up his stud boots to focus on paddle tennis and running… old things, he complains. But he’s also up for whatever blitz he has to do with pushing his body to the limit, whether it’s behind the wheel of an Aston Martin or skateboarding to the office.
He is very much from Atlético de Madrid, so when footballers like Marcos Llorente or Álvaro Morata have starred on the cover of Men’s Health, he was there to write them. He just ran his first marathon for Runner’s World, and as he passes in this universe, he’s already looking for the next one to go under 3 hours. If you have to test any type of paddle tennis racket, vehicle or watch, it’s no problem. Even slippers. Whatever is needed in sports equipment.
Joaquín graduated in journalism from USP-CEU in 2013, but since 2009, when he joined the University newspaper, he began to work as a 360 “journalist” in digital and print. The next steps in his almost 15-year career were taken by doing culture and sports in Shanghai magazine, until he entered Hearst a week before the start of the pandemic in 2020. He is also a professor of social networks and new technologies at Universitas Senioribvs CEU and is part of the Hearst Innovation HUB to investigate new trends.
