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TAMPA - It's a birthday lunch. Chuck Norris, chicken salad and me.
Chuck's eating chicken salad on white bread. An odd choice for the world middleweight karate champ who retired in 1974 after six undefeated years.
Chuck didn't know it was my birthday when he arranged lunch. He was testing a Scarab powerboat in Sarasota and had a day to kill before flying back to California.
Back in 1983, I spent an afternoon with him at his Palos Verdes ranch. We hung around his first-floor gym. We went to a pizza joint with his two grown sons, Mike and Eric. We checked out the oil paintings of John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable that Norris had hung above the stone fireplace in his den.
Norris even took me to his inner sanctum: his and wife Dianne's master bedroom, hidden behind a reinforced door protected with a five-digit electronic lock. Assuming a band of mercenaries bypassed the exterior alarm and disabled the bedroom security system, they would have to race down a narrow 30-foot corridor to confront Norris, a black belt in Tang Soo Do and Tae Kwan Do.
Today, we talk about his ranch. Fond memories. Particularly for Norris, who recently sold his stead and moved to Orange County so Dianne could be closer to her music production office. (Orange County is more Chuck's style: Conservative. Pro-Reagan, pro-Bush. Anti-drugs. Pro-defensive violence in movies, as opposed to unprovoked aggression.)
When we met five years ago, Norris was talking about expanding his image beyond the one-dimensional stage. America's chop-socky king wanted to become a romantic hero. He thought Lone Wolf McQuade was the vehicle to do it.
Alas, his...