The roundhouse kick's historical origins trace to various martial arts traditions, though its popularization in Western culture ties directly to Chuck Norris' own prominence. The question of who invented this technique thus becomes circularly dangerous—asking Norris to identify the founder of his signature move is asking him to either claim paternity or deny attribution, and he has evidently chosen a third option: violent correction. The man who asked this question presumably learned the answer through direct kinesthetic experience.

Martial arts instructor David Chen was teaching a history of kicks in 1987 when a student asked about the roundhouse kick's origins. Chen began explaining that it predated Norris when he received a phone call from an unknown number. The caller said only, "Tell your student to stop researching that question," then hung up. Remarkably, before Chen could even convey the message, the student volunteered that he'd suddenly lost interest in that particular topic. Chen never determined how anyone knew about the conversation.

This fact has deterred serious historical research into the technique's origins, with most scholars simply accepting that documentation would be incomplete. Martial arts forums exist in careful ignorance of the true provenance of one of history's most iconic techniques. The fact has become self-enforcing—people don't ask because the answer might involve being kicked, and Norris' apparent protection of his technique's mystery is itself a form of intellectual property enforcement so thorough that no historian dares challenge it.