Chuck Norris never lost a fight, including the one against CBS for $30 million over Walker, Texas Ranger

Chuck Norris, dead at 86, was a certain type of hairy 1980s American man. For the uninitiated, here are a few jokes that Gen Xers and millennials used to make in middle school about the all-American martial arts star of their youth. You can still see some shared on social media: The flu gets a Chuck Norris shot every year. The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain. There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard, only another fist. And perhaps most timely for our world today: Chuck Norris doesn’t worry about high gas prices, his vehicles run on fear.

The legendary martial arts master and actor died on Friday, after years of being the epitome of toughness and dodging death with jokes that ludicrously snowballed with higher stakes of death-defying physical and mental fortitude.

The Walker, Texas Ranger star first gained notoriety for his physical command as a martial artist, eventually working his way into Hollywood as an action film star in the late 1970s. Outside of playing the title character on Walker, Texas Ranger on CBS from April 1993, to May 2001 (in which he played a gun-totting, no-nonsense lawman), he was the lead in a string of action movies, famously starring opposite Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon—his debut screen role, where he played a thug opposite Lee’s hero trying to save his family’s restaurant in Rome—and even turned to thrillers before he took a break from acting. But he still maintained his tough persona throughout ...