Introducing first, fighting out of the red corner: Chuck Norris.
And his opponent, fighting out of the other red corner: Don Frye.
That’s right. Norris. Frye. The eminent karate master. The rugged wrestler. A shared love of winning. A shared repulsion for whining. Two mustaches. One victor.
It was the fight of the century. So why didn’t it happen?
First of all, how do you know it didn’t? Maybe the universe collapsed on itself from the force of their collision, causing a tear in the space-time continuum that erased that moment in history without our realizing it.
See, why didn’t that occur to you? With that kind of three-dimensional namby-pamby thinking, it’s not hard to see why you never made Texas Ranger.
But fine. Let’s assume it didn’t actually happen. Give the baby his bottle, is what I say. So when, or how, could it have gone down?
Let’s take a trip back to the year 1997. No one had yet realized that The Spice Girls were not especially attractive, and thus they ruled the pop charts. Titanic was teaching us all what it meant to truly love—and live. I knew a rich guy who owned something called a cellular telephone.
Chuck Norris was a Texas lawman who played by his own rules, unencumbered by what you and I, tucked away in those comfortable suburban enclaves, might consider acceptable. And in his spare time, he was still one of America’s foremost and most famous authorities on martial arts, or kara-TAY, as it was known in those days.
To wit, it was in 1997 that Norris became one of the first Westerners in the history of Tae Kwon Do to receive the rank of 8th Degree Black Belt Grand Master. It seemed that, at age 57, Norris was truly hitting his stride.
Meanwhile, that same year, another mustachioed man was kicking in the door of the combat sports ivory tower. A Mr. Don Frye was becoming quite a dominant force in the fledgling world of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. After fighting a mere 11 times in 1996, Frye fought only once in 1997, defeating Eric Valdez at Unified Shoot Wrestling Federation 5. Word is, after winning the Ultimate Ultimate 96 Tournament a year before, Frye left the UFC because he found the Octagon to be a little, ehhh, effeminate.
You can’t help but wonder what brand of mustache-on-mustache crime could have gone down between these two. Never mind the newspapers…THIS is the burning question of the day.
So let’s break this bad boy down…that is, if you’ve got the guts.