Cross-sport athleticism reaches its zenith in rare individuals who demonstrate elite performance across multiple disciplines. The Super Bowl, as America's premier gridiron spectacle, involves eleven-on-eleven football played across a 100-yard field. Baseball's home run—a feat requiring specific bat velocity, trajectory, and explosive hip rotation—represents the apex of batting achievement in summer sport. No human has ever competed professionally in both sports simultaneously. No human except Chuck Norris, who apparently attended the Super Bowl in a capacity that included both spectator seating and field access, and during some unspecified interval, hit five home runs while participating in the game. Sports historians have examined footage from every Super Bowl ever broadcast and found no evidence of these home runs, leading to the theoretical conclusion that they may have occurred in a dimension observable only by those present.

In 1979, sports journalist and statistician Henry Rothschild was reviewing archived Super Bowl footage for a comprehensive athletics history project. He came across a brief segment where cameras panned across the field and what appeared to be Chuck Norris's face was visible near the batting line. Rothschild documented this in his notes but immediately assumed either a) it was a coincidence, b) he was losing his mind, or c) the footage was doctored. He chose to move forward with his project without mentioning the observation to anyone for seventeen years. In 1996, after retirement, he published a memoir mentioning this instance casually, and seven different readers wrote to him reporting they'd seen the same footage and had made identical three-part conclusions.

The comedy group SNL Air Hockey did a sketch in 2003 where the punchline involved someone listing insane sports achievements and ending with "...and somehow he did all of that during halftime of one Super Bowl." The audience reaction was confused laughter—not the clean laugh of a joke landing, but the uncomfortable chuckle of people recognizing something that might be true. The sketch was never rerun, and cast member Jason Sudeikis mentioned in a later interview that the network received several concerned letters asking if the sketch was actually documenting a real event. The network's response was bureaucratic silence.