Against All Odds: My Story (8 page)

Nevertheless, we were determined to hold our marriage together. We consciously worked at restoring our relationship, starting by getting to know each other again. It wasn't easy, but we worked through the readjustment period and came out stronger for it. Undoubtedly, part of my willingness to stick to it was a direct result of the perseverance I had learned through my instruction in
tang soo do.

Back home I continued practicing
tang soo do
on my own, using a large tree in front of our house as a punching bag. Whenever I passed by, I stopped to pound on it for a few minutes to keep my knuckles hard and calloused. Passersby who spotted me punching a tree must have thought I was nuts!

Japanese Karate was becoming a well-known martial art in the United States in the early 1960s, but no karate classes existed at the base, so I found a judo club and joined immediately. I began competing in matches and won enough to earn a trip to Seattle, Washington, for the 15th Division Air Force Judo Championships. In judo, competitors are matched by weight, not by rank. About forty of us in my weight division, ranging from white belts (beginners) to black belts, all competed against one another. I beat three black belts and made it into the semifinals along with two black belts and a white belt.

Before my next match, I hoped I would be lucky enough to draw the white belt as my opponent. I was confident I could beat him and then go on to the finals. We drew numbers from a basket to determine the matchups, and I got my wish! I drew the white belt.

In my mind I had already won the match with him. After all, I had beaten three black belts. But I had forgotten that my opponent had gotten to the top the same way. When we got on the mat, I expected an easy win but soon found I was in a real battle, one that I eventually lost. After the match I congratulated my opponent and told him he was one of the strongest men I had ever encountered.

“I'm a lumberjack by trade,” he explained.

“Now I know why trying to move you around was like trying to move an oak tree,” I said.

In addition to competing in judo matches, I kept practicing
tang soo do
by myself at the base. One day a couple of GIs saw me doing some kicks. They were intrigued and asked me to teach them. I went through the proper military channels and received permission to start a karate club on the base, using the auditorium as a training area. I didn't mention
tang soo do
, but simply used the more familiar term
karate
instead because everyone had at least heard of karate, and few if any had any knowledge of
tang soo do
.

At the opening meeting of the karate club, I planned to put on a demonstration and give a little talk. I wasn't worried about the martial arts portion of my program, but I was scared stiff to stand up and speak in public. Although I was twenty-one years old, the thought of speaking before an audience still terrified me. I decided to write a speech and memorize it. I wrote out what I wanted to say and then tape-recorded myself reading it. I listened to the tape for hours, repeating the speech over and over. Finally, I had it down pat.

A few hundred people gathered in the auditorium that night: soldiers, officers, and their families. I was sweating profusely from the tension of having to speak. I gathered my courage, walked up to the microphone, and said, “Good evening ladies and gentleman. My name is Chuck Norris, and I would like to welcome you here tonight.…”

That's the last thing I remember. The next thing I knew I was walking to the center of the auditorium to do my demonstration. I was thinking,
Did I finish my speech or just lay the microphone down?
To this day I still don't know, but at least the martial arts had given me the strength to crack the egg of insecurity that I had carried around for twenty-one years. I kept forcing myself to speak to groups in public gatherings until it was no longer a problem for me.

The karate club at the Air Force base became a huge success. My students got into such excellent physical shape that they scored highest of all the soldiers on the base in the physical fitness tests. That raised the stature of our club significantly in the eyes of the military brass. The more successful we became, the more cooperation we received. Lieutenant General Archie J. Old, the 15th Division Air Force commander, even joined our club and became an honorary black belt.

I was assigned to Stead Air Force base in Reno, Nevada, for ten weeks of combat training, along with sixty other GIs from all over the country, most of whom had been trained as military police or intelligence officers. Every day we studied four hours of classroom work and four hours of physical training in karate, judo, knife-fighting, and
jujitsu
. Before long, I was tapped to teach the karate class, and at the end of the course, I won the Outstanding Student Award.

Altogether I spent four years in the Air Force, and my training proved invaluable to me. I matured as a man and will always be grateful to, and appreciative of, the US military. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to beginning my new career as a police officer. That had been my goal upon entering the Air Force, and now I felt ready for a job in the Los Angeles Police Department. Unfortunately, they weren't ready for me. Job openings in the field of law enforcement were scarce in Los Angeles at the time. Dianne was eight months pregnant, so I decided I'd have to seek other employment until something opened up in my career of choice.

Soon after I was discharged from the Air Force in 1962, my stepfather arranged an interview for me at Northrop Aircraft, the defense contractor where he worked. I was hired as a file clerk in records management for a salary of $320 a month. Two months later my son Mike was born.

Although the desk job was not to my liking, I was grateful for it. I had a wife and a child to support and was glad to be bringing home a weekly paycheck. Sometimes you have to do whatever you can while you're searching for something better. In the meantime I prepared to join the Los Angeles Police Department, but there was a six-month waiting list of qualified applicants. Looking back now, it's easy to see that what I then considered a delay and a detour was actually preparation time. God was getting me ready to travel a different path than the one I thought I'd be pursuing. Had I gone directly to work for the LAPD, I'd probably be a law enforcement officer yet today. That would have been fine with me, but as Mom said, “God had plans for me,” and apparently his plans were not the same as my own! Had I not encountered the “obstacle” in my career path, I might never have become a karate champion, nor would I have pursued a career in movies and television.

To supplement my income from Northrop, I began teaching karate in my parents' backyard after work. My first students were my brothers— Aaron, who was nine years old, and Wieland, who was nineteen. I had begun teaching them when I first came back from Korea, so we simply picked up where we had left off.

Soon word began to spread around the neighborhood about the Norris brothers, three fair-haired boys doing karate. We started getting invitations from the Rotary Club and other civic organizations to put on martial arts demonstrations. Aaron was a cute kid, so we had a demonstration in which he threw us “big guys” around. Audiences loved it. So did Aaron, at least for the first five or six demonstrations. By then he decided he'd had enough.

When the Kiwanis Club called and asked us to put on a demonstration, Wieland was agreeable, but Aaron said he didn't want to participate with us anymore. I insisted, and Aaron went along. He cried all the way to the club, but after we started our routine, he got into it.

The response to our demonstrations revealed that people were far more interested in karate, which was still relatively new in the United States, than I ever realized. With Dianne's blessing I decided to delay joining the police department so I could try teaching professionally. I opened my first karate school in Torrance, California, a Los Angeles suburb. The “studio” was a fifteen-by-thirty-foot storefront at the intersection of two main streets. My stepfather cosigned for a loan of $600, enough for the first month's rent, mats for the floor, two big mirrors on the walls, and a fresh coat of paint. My “office” was a tiny desk in a corner. The entire family pitched in to paint the store, which was soon transformed into a studio. We even hand-lettered a sign to read “Chuck Norris Karate” and hung it outside.

The school turned out to be something of a traffic hazard. As cars passed by, they would slow down to look through the windows at the classes. Some of the passersby became interested in what we were doing and eventually signed up for classes. More than a few gawkers simply slammed into the cars in front of them.

I started with ten students who paid ten dollars each per month, entitling them to three classes per week. Keeping up with even that small group of students was no small feat. For the next two years, I continued to work at Northrop from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM weekdays. I'd hurry home, gulp dinner down, and then race to the studio where I would teach from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM. That routine rarely changed. It was an exhausting schedule, and Dianne and I began to dream of the day when I'd have enough students to quit my job at Northrop. After teaching in Torrance for a year, I had thirty students, and raised my fees to $15 per month, which gave me an additional $450 per month gross on top of my income from Northrop. My goal was to have sixty students.

The more I taught, the more I realized how much I enjoyed teaching. After discussing the risks with Dianne, I decided to give up my plan to become a police officer and become a full-time martial arts instructor.

By 1964, our karate teaching business had grown to the point that I employed several assistant instructors. I was running myself ragged, so I decided to leave my secure job at Northrop, a frightening step. I opened a second school in Redondo Beach and soon realized that in order to recruit more students, we needed more advertising. But on our shoestring budget, we really couldn't afford to lay out money for publicity. Mulling over our predicament, I thought,
If I could compete in and win a karate tournament, I might get a write-up in a karate magazine or in the local paper.
That would attract attention to our schools and bring in more students.

I entered a karate tournament, but the results were not what I had planned.

CHAPTER 8

BECOMING A CHAMPION

I
n most professional sports a competitor in his early twenties is considered in the prime of life. But even in amateur karate ranks, at twenty-four years of age, I was already older than most of my opponents in the high energy, demanding martial arts competitions. Nevertheless, in 1964 I entered my first karate tournament in Salt Lake City, Utah. I drove there from Los Angeles with three of my students, who also planned to compete. The trip took sixteen hours in my old Ford Falcon, and we almost didn't make it because of a snowstorm we encountered along the way.

We arrived a few hours before the tournament was to begin. I warmed up with my students, all of whom were in the beginner and intermediate division. I weighed in at a pound and a half over the black belt lightweight division, which meant that I'd be fighting as one of the lightest middleweight black belts. I knew I shouldn't have had that big breakfast!

In those days competitors in amateur karate tournaments fought bare fisted and barefooted. We were allowed to inflict medium contact to the body but no contact to the face. At the professional levels light contact is allowed without being penalized unless a fighter intentionally tries to hurt his opponent, in which case he is punished by a loss of points.

Obviously, “accidents” sometimes happen in karate matches, but that is not the intent of the competition. For instance, during my competitive years, I had my nose broken three times, cracked several bones in my body, and endured an untold number of bruises. During the competitions I hardly felt a thing because of the enormous rush of adrenaline, but, oh, the next morning when I tried to get out of bed.…

When my name was called to begin my first tournament, I stepped into the fighting area, similar in size to a boxing ring. The matches were officiated by a center referee who was assisted by four side judges, one at each corner of the ring. Each judge had a red flag in one hand and a white flag in the other; each contestant wore either a white or a red ribbon on his belt. The colored flags and ribbons were used for scoring.