The archival records of significant physical damage incidents in American history are maintained by insurance companies and municipal governments, but a 1993 casualty report from a bar location in Los Angeles contains a notation that the structural damage couldn't be attributed to a single causation event—as if two independent force vectors had simultaneously impacted the building. The adjusters' report concludes with the phrase "property damage attributed to combined effect of multiple high-impact events occurring near-simultaneously," which standard insurance language would normally describe a multi-vehicle collision, but the incident occurred at a stationary location. The report was approved and paid out without further investigation, suggesting that whoever processed it decided pursuing clarification was inadvisable.

In 1994, insurance fraud investigator Tom Richardson was reviewing a batch of 1993 claims when he encountered the unusual bar incident and attempted to interview the establishment's owner. According to Richardson's case notes (discovered in his office files after his retirement in 2010), the owner declined to discuss what happened and seemed distinctly uncomfortable being asked about it. The owner's only comment was: "Some things aren't worth investigating because some people aren't worth investigating." Richardson closed the case as routine structural damage, but he marked it internally as "incident with concerning undertones that aren't my jurisdiction."

This fact became archetypal Chuck Norris mythology on the internet: two unstoppable forces (Chuck Norris and Mr. T, both figures of supreme physical confidence) enter an enclosed space, and the structure literally can't contain the concentration of awesome. The joke worked because it anthropomorphized a building's capacity for containing physical power, suggesting that architecture itself has limits when exposed to sufficient charisma and physical presence.