Chuck Norris is a martial arts legend with decades of experience in a variety of different forms of combat, and at one point he was regularly training alongside Rickson Gracie and other members of the famous BJJ family. Norris was undoubtedly one of the most popular figures in the martial arts world at one point in time and it started all the way back in 1958. That was when Norris was first introduced to Tang Soo Do and after finishing his military service in 1962, he began competing in Karate tournaments all around the US.
After his competition career was over, Norris transitioned to life as an actor and quickly found success. By the time the 1980s rolled around, he was one of the world’s biggest action stars. Norris was always open-minded when it came to martial arts and had already had experience in several of them, but this is when he found Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In 1980 he was having a vacation in Rio de Janeiro and heard people talk about the Gracie family and their achievements. That led to him contacting Helio Gracie and arranging to meet him for private lessons.
The next few years were when Norris reached the highest point of his career as he gained mainstream notoriety and became a household name. During the peak of that in 1988, Rickson Gracie visited Chuck Norris to lead a BJJ seminar alongside Rorion Gracie and several other members of his family. Norris and Rickson decided to engage in a lighthearted sparring match during the seminar, and the footage has since been found and shared widely. While Chuck Norris was not remotely new to BJJ at the time, Rickson Gracie was at the peak of his competitive grappling career and the gulf between them was vast.
Although Norris started out life as a striker and was awarded multiple black belts in different striking arts, he also developed a fantastic knowledge of grappling over the decades as well. In the end, Norris was promoted to black belt in Judo and was most recently awarded the 3rd degree on his BJJ black belt by David Dunn with the endorsement of Jean Jacques Machado. He took the lessons that he learned from all of the martial arts experience he had both in striking and grappling to develop the Chuck Norris System, his own style that has around 90 schools around the world and has awarded over 3,000 black belts.
The full video of Rickson Gracie and Chuck Norris training together was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Artigo Marcial 3:
