In 1994, two men pulled knives on Chuck Norris on a Dallas street. He was filming Walker, Texas Ranger at the time and thought they wanted autographs. They didn't. By the time the Dallas Police Department arrived, they found two muggers with broken arms and Norris leaning against a wall.

It reads like a Chuck Norris Fact. But it wasn't. And that was always the thing about Norris, who died Thursday in Hawaii at 86. The man kept catching up with the myth.

The internet knew something

Chuck Norris Facts started in 2005 when a high school kid named Ian Spector built a joke generator. "Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice." "Chuck Norris doesn't sleep. He waits." The jokes spread everywhere. They became one of the internet's original memes.

But they worked because they weren't built on nothing. They were built on a man who really was a six-time undefeated world karate champion, who served in the Air Force during Korea, and who broke two muggers' arms in a Dallas alley. The exaggeration had a foundation. The mythology pointed at something true.

Two days after Norris died, Variety published an opinion piece by William Earl asking whether his legacy amounts to "dangerous propaganda." Earl called Walker, Texas Ranger "cop-aganda." He wrote that Norris's characters illustrate "the pernicious attraction of taking the law into one's own hands" and that it's now "easier to see Norris' characters as justification for a fringe conspiracy movement." He connected fictional Texas Rangers to ICE agents and the Iran bombing.

That piece tells you more about the people writing the obituary than the man in it.

The actual man

Carlos Ray Norris was born poor in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1940. He joined the Air Force at 18, served as an Air Policeman, and shipped to Osan Air Base in South Korea, where he started training in Tang Soo Do at a dojo near the base. That's where he got his nickname. He came back stateside and finished his service at March Air Force Base in California.

He came home and won the World Professional Middleweight Karate Championship six years running, 1968 through 1974, without a single loss. No Westerner had earned an 8th-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do before him. He fought Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon. The toughness wasn't a casting decision. Hollywood found a tough guy and gave him a camera.

And the camera worked: Missing in Action, The Delta Force, Code of Silence, Lone Wolf McQuade. Then Walker, Texas Ranger ran for eight seasons on CBS, roughly 200 episodes, and made Norris a household name for a generation of Americans who had never seen a karate tournament. The show was simple. A Texas Ranger catches bad guys and roundhouse kicks them in the face. Millions of Americans watched every week for eight years.

What he built

Norris founded KICKSTART Kids in 1990 with the support of President George H.W. Bush and launched it in Texas public schools two years later. The program puts black belt instructors in Texas public schools to teach discipline, respect, and self-defense to at-risk children. Not a weekend seminar. A daily class, built into the school day. It now operates in 58 schools. More than 120,000 kids have gone through the program. The Texas Education Agency recognizes it for PE credit.

He did USO tours to Iraq. In 2006, he shook hands with roughly 37,000 troops. In 2007, the Marine Corps made him an honorary Marine, one of roughly 100 people to receive the distinction in the Corps' 250-year history. He served as a spokesman for the VA's hospitalized veterans.

The man Variety called "dangerous propaganda" spent his off-screen decades teaching discipline to at-risk children and visiting wounded Marines.

The brother

His brother, Wieland Norris, served with the 101st Airborne Division. He was killed at Firebase Ripcord in the summer of 1970, during the last major ground battle of the Vietnam War. Seventy-five Americans died there. The battle got almost no press back home. The country had moved on. The soldiers hadn't.

Chuck was refereeing a karate tournament in California when he got the call. He wrote later that his last words to Wieland were: "I'm going to miss you. Be careful." He dedicated the Missing in Action films to his brother. Variety sees militaristic escapism. Chuck Norris was making a memorial to his kid brother who gave his life for his country in Vietnam.

Fair enough

Norris's politics were not everyone's cup of tea. He endorsed Mike Huckabee. He wrote a column for WorldNetDaily, a site that sometimes read like the conspiracy theories his characters fought. He campaigned openly as a conservative in an industry that punishes it. You can disagree with every position he held.

But Variety didn't write a piece about his politics. Earl argued that Norris's art was dangerous. That fictional Texas Rangers catching fictional bad guys on a CBS show in the 1990s were "justification for a fringe conspiracy movement." That's not cultural criticism. That's contempt for a man who can't answer back because he died two days ago.

The Marines knew

The day Norris died, the United States Marine Corps posted its tribute: "Chuck Norris didn't join the Marine Corps... the Marine Corps applied to him."

It reads like a Chuck Norris Fact. But it was the official statement of the United States Marines.

Chuck Norris was a veteran, a world champion, and a man who buried a brother in Vietnam and turned his grief into films that honored the people who serve. He built a program that taught 120,000 kids how to stand up straight. He shook 37,000 hands in Iraq. And when two men pulled knives on him in Dallas, he broke their arms.

Variety looked at that life and saw propaganda. The Marines looked at it and saluted. As Americans, we say goodbye to the man behind the myths, legends, and jokes. He exceeded them all.