Pearl River Chuck Norris passed away recently at 86. He was a former kick-boxer, sometime movie actor, and occasional television star. In martial-arts, he was good enough to be in some of the legendary Bruce Lee flicks in the 70s and managed to show up in 32 films before he was done. In television, he carried the “Walker: Texas Ranger” series for years. He made a good living, even if he wasn’t one of those actors who would be on anyone’s list of nominees for the annual rewards. He was popular enough to have a front-page obit in the New York Times and a last page obituary in The Economist, all of which, as the country song line goes, “was something to be proud of.”
I can’t honestly admit to having been able to make it through more than one or two Walker shows, but it was impossible in my generation not to have seen him in a Bruce Lee movie. Nonetheless, I have a fondness for Norris, because I have my own Chuck Norris story.
Years ago, Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, a labor and community organizer, who had worked extensively on the West Coast for SEIU, HERE, and various AFL-CIO central bodies and was then based in Portland, Oregon, put together an interesting organizational coalition called Enlace. The point was to link membership-based organizations and unions in the United States and Mexico. ACORN and Local 100 were part of the coalition for a number of years, and I went to the founding meeting in San Juan de Allende and subsequent meetings in several other US and Mexican cities including Saltillo and Torreon.
Torreon is a working-class industrial city in Mexico, a maquila center not that far from the US border. In the conference there were a number of plenaries and workshops. The ILWU, the longshore and warehouse workers union, had several representatives attending this meeting. In the afternoon, as the meeting droned on, one of them came over to me and said they were going to sneak out, catch a taxi, and go to a bullfight at the municipal ring elsewhere in the city. Ok, I was in, Why not?
There were four or five of us. It cost almost nothing to get in, but the bullfight was already in progress, so when we entered, we were going to have to make our way up into the stands. Needless to say, this was a local crowd and in no way part of gringolandia.
We started making our way up the steps through the crowd to where we saw some open seats. Weirdly, about a dozen steps in, the crowd seemed to be shouting and pointing at us. It is an exaggeration or a kindness to say my Spanish is rudimentary. This was uncomfortable. Were we being heckled, because I was a foreigner? Were we in a pickle or what? I couldn’t tell exactly what people were shouting, but I could tell it was directed at me. As we continued to climb towards our seats, my companeros were smiling and laughing more, so I figured maybe we were good. All of the crowd was looking our way and none of them were paying attention to the matador and the bulls, all of which was bizarre. When we finally sat down on the benches one of them reached over to me and said, “The crowd is shouting “Chuck” over and over again. They think you are Chuck Norris. Give them a wave!” This was surprising and hilarious. Several spectators nearby offered to buy me and my partners a cerveza. It was a hoot and also a quickly resolved case of mistaken identity. We watched the rest of the bullfights and joked along with the crowd as we left.
Putting two and two together later, I could tell how it happened then, and a couple of other times to me over the years. I was fit enough, but no one could have mistaken as belonging in a different kind of ring on closer inspection, but it was still perhaps an honest mistake. Both of us had red hair and weighted about 165. Norris was reportedly 5’10, so I was a bit taller, but not by all that much. He was from Oklahoma and presented from the West, I was born in Wyoming and raised in the west and south. We were fighters, but in different wars. My oft broken nose would have distinguished me, but at the distance of a bullfight stadium, maybe some, looking for some thrills, were happy to believe Chuck Norris might have showed up one Saturday afternoon to join them.
My hair is no longer red and Chuck isn’t around with us anymore, but thanks to Torreon, I read his obituaries with interest and respect.