TLDR: Before Chuck Norris became a Hollywood action star, he ran a chain of karate studios across Southern California where he trained some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Steve McQueen, Bob Barker, Priscilla Presley, Michael Landon, and the Osmond siblings.
It was McQueen who pushed Norris toward acting when the studios went bankrupt in the mid-1970s.
Norris died on March 19, 2026, at age 86.
In the mid-1960s, if you wanted to study karate with the best instructor in Los Angeles, you drove to Sherman Oaks and walked into a storefront studio run by a relatively unknown former Air Force serviceman named Carlos Ray Norris.
He had a world-champion competition record, a gift for teaching, and a roster of students that reads, in retrospect, like a guest list for the Academy Awards.
Nobody called him Chuck yet. That came later.
How a Shy Kid From Oklahoma Built an Empire
Chuck Norris was born on March 10, 1940, in Ryan, Oklahoma, into a household shaped by economic hardship and the desertion of an alcoholic father.
By his own description in a 1988 Los Angeles Times interview, he was a shy, slightly built, non-athletic youth who lacked self-esteem. He enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1958 as an Air Policeman, hoping to build a career in law enforcement.
His deployment to Osan Air Base in South Korea changed everything. Looking to avoid barracks drinking and card games, he began studying judo, broke his shoulder in a training fall, and then observed Korean practitioners working through Tang Soo Do near the base.
He started training five hours a day under Master Jae Chul Shin. Within six months, something had shifted in him psychologically. By the time he was discharged in August 1962, he had earned a black belt in Tang Soo Do and a brown belt in judo.
Back in California on a waitlist for the Torrance Police Department, he opened his first storefront martial arts studio in 1962 on Hawthorne Boulevard in Torrance to make ends meet. The single location expanded rapidly into a chain of more than 30 studios across Southern California.
The Sherman Oaks location became the primary hub for Hollywood’s elite.
He also continued competing on the national and international karate circuit, capturing the World Professional Middleweight Karate Championship in November 1968 and defending it undefeated for six consecutive years until his retirement from competition in 1974.
Steve McQueen: The Student Who Changed His Teacher’s Life
Steve McQueen was among the first major celebrities to walk into Norris’s Los Angeles studio, and the two developed a deep, lifelong friendship that extended far beyond the mat.
McQueen trained diligently for years in a hard-contact style derived from Tang Soo Do, bringing to the studio the same obsessive focus he applied to racing cars and motorcycles.
When Norris’s studio chain ran into severe financial difficulty in the mid-1970s, threatening him with complete bankruptcy, McQueen recognized something in his instructor that Norris himself had not yet seen.
He told him directly: “You either have a certain presence that comes across on the screen, or you don’t. I think you may have it.”
Norris laughed it off. McQueen kept pressing.
As the schools began to close one by one, McQueen eventually persuaded Norris to enroll in formal acting classes at MGM in 1974. In his autobiography Against All Odds, Norris reflected on the causal chain: “When a door shuts in your life, that doesn’t mean that a bigger door isn’t going to open. If I hadn’t lost my schools, I’d still be there teaching karate. But because I lost those schools I was forced to seek another avenue. And acting is a bigger door than karate.”
McQueen’s son Chad also trained under Norris, establishing a multi-generational family enrollment at the studios.
Bob Barker: Four Cracked Ribs and a Black Belt
Bob Barker, the legendary host of The Price Is Right, was not a casual practitioner. He trained with Norris and his brother Aaron for at least eight years and earned a fully verified black belt. He sparred hard and took hits seriously, which eventually caught up with him in memorable fashion.
During an intense sparring session at the studio, Norris landed a powerful kick to Barker’s ribs. Believing it was a minor strain, Barker pushed through the pain and continued his normal routine.
A couple of days later, Aaron Norris sparred with Barker and landed a follow-up kick on the opposite side of his torso. Medical examination subsequently revealed four cracked ribs, two on each side. Barker later recalled his mother’s response: “I think maybe you’re going to have to stop playing with those Norris boys.”
The injury did nothing to diminish his respect for the Norris brothers. Barker eventually leveraged his training to perform his own fight choreography in the 1996 comedy Happy Gilmore and demonstrated his skills on WWE Monday Night Raw in 2009.
He was still training into his seventies before finally deciding, in his own words, that “the time had come to exercise more lightly.”
Priscilla Presley: Ballet Grace on the Mat
Priscilla Presley began training privately under Norris at the Sherman Oaks studio during her marriage to Elvis Presley, seeking to share her husband’s passion for martial arts.
Norris quickly recognized she was a natural student. Her intensive childhood training in classical ballet gave her a distinct physical advantage over most beginners, particularly in flexibility, balance, and the execution of high kicks.
He documented a detail about her training habits that has become one of the more charming footnotes of the era: she occasionally asked to work out in high heels because that was simply what she wore every day.
Norris praised her dedication, noting she had “many of the qualities I value in a person” and calling her “a great reflection in yesteryear of what we see today, women training and competing with equal diligence and fortitude to men.”
One rumor worth correcting: the famous rib-cracking incident at the studio involved Bob Barker exclusively. Presley completed her training safely and she and Norris remained close friends for decades.
When he died in March 2026, she posted a public tribute on Instagram: “I’m so sad to hear that my karate instructor and friend Chuck Norris has passed away. He will be forever missed.”
The Rest of the Roster
McQueen’s social and professional circle acted as a natural pipeline into the studios. Michael Landon, the star of Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie, studied private karate lessons under Norris during the peak of his television career.
Dan Blocker, Landon’s Bonanza co-star, trained alongside his children at the Southern California studios and established close personal ties with the Norris family during the late 1960s.
James Garner, the star of Maverick and The Rockford Files, trained privately under Norris as his reputation among Hollywood’s elite grew.
Donny and Marie Osmond trained under Norris in the 1970s during the peak of their variety show success, with much of their instruction delivered by Pat E. Johnson, a senior Tang Soo Do 9th-degree black belt who worked within Norris’s school system.
Johnson later served as the head referee in the original Karate Kid film and choreographed the martial arts sequences in many major 1980s movies.
One name that occasionally appears in pop culture retellings of this era is James Coburn. It is not accurate. Coburn was a private student of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do system, not a student of Norris’s studios. He and Norris were associates, not instructor and student.
What Teaching Hollywood Taught Norris
The years spent teaching actors did something to Norris’s own relationship with martial arts. Working with students whose backgrounds were in performance rather than combat forced him to look at fighting through a visual lens.
He began to understand how movement read on screen, how a high kick communicated something that a low efficient block never could.
This shift crystallized during his close training exchanges with Bruce Lee in the late 1960s. The two practiced together and traded technical ideas.
Norris famously convinced Lee that high kicks were highly effective on camera, a technique Lee subsequently adopted with great success in his films. The student teaching the teacher, through the medium of a camera lens neither of them had yet fully stepped in front of.
When the studios finally closed and Norris followed McQueen’s advice into acting, he brought all of it with him.
The screen character he eventually built, most notably Cordell Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger, was modeled on classic Western heroes who did not seek conflict but possessed the absolute capability to handle it. That moral clarity came directly from the years he spent teaching it to other people.
The financial failure of his studio empire in the mid-1970s felt, at the time, like the end of everything he had built since Korea. In retrospect, it was the beginning of something larger.
Steve McQueen saw it before Norris did, which may be the most interesting thing about the whole story: the student recognized the teacher’s next door before the teacher did.
Which celebrities did Chuck Norris train in karate?
Chuck Norris trained several major Hollywood celebrities at his studios in Sherman Oaks and Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. Confirmed students include Steve McQueen, Bob Barker, Priscilla Presley, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker, James Garner, Donny and Marie Osmond, and Steve McQueen’s son Chad. James Coburn is sometimes mentioned but was actually a student of Bruce Lee, not Norris.
Did Chuck Norris break Priscilla Presley’s ribs?
No. This is a common misconception. The rib-cracking incident at Norris’s studio involved Bob Barker exclusively. Barker sustained four cracked ribs during two separate sparring sessions with Chuck and his brother Aaron Norris. Priscilla Presley completed her training safely and remained close friends with Norris until his death in March 2026.
Who convinced Chuck Norris to become an actor?
Steve McQueen, one of Norris’s karate students, was the primary person who pushed him toward acting. When Norris’s studio chain was facing bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, McQueen told him, ‘You either have a certain presence that comes across on the screen, or you don’t. I think you may have it.’ McQueen eventually persuaded Norris to enroll in formal acting classes at MGM in 1974.
Where was Chuck Norris’s karate studio?
Chuck Norris opened his first martial arts studio in 1962 on Hawthorne Boulevard in Torrance, California. This expanded into a chain of more than 30 studios across Southern California. The Sherman Oaks location became the primary hub for Hollywood’s elite clientele. The studios were closed or sold in the mid-1970s when the business ran into severe financial difficulties.
Did Chuck Norris train Bruce Lee?
No, but the two exchanged martial arts techniques during close training sessions in the late 1960s. Norris famously convinced Lee that high kicks were visually effective on screen, a technique Lee subsequently adopted in his films. They were contemporaries who learned from each other rather than a traditional instructor-student relationship.
What martial art did Chuck Norris teach?
Chuck Norris primarily taught Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art he had studied under Master Jae Chul Shin at Osan Air Base in South Korea during his Air Force service in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He later developed his own system called Chun Kuk Do, which he taught through the United Fighting Arts Federation (UFAF). His early Sherman Oaks commercial studios should not be confused with the later UFAF international organization.
