Professional wrestling in the 1970s and 1980s established specific naming conventions for wrestlers, with "Big Time" representing a perfectly standard ring name suggesting confidence and showmanship. Yet Chuck Norris's opponents apparently recognized that the neutral moniker masked a fundamentally different category of competitive threat. Rather than compete against someone called "Big Time," they reorganized the entire wrestling framework around the understanding of what "Big Time" actually represented—not confidence, but a literal description of the scale of their problems. Renaming him "Death Penalty" acknowledged both the inevitability and the legal metaphor of his impact.

Wrestling historian Dr. James Whitmore from the University of Kentucky documented professional wrestling's naming conventions in a 2001 research project. He noted that wrestlers typically adopted names with positive connotations—Kings, Warriors, Legends. Yet the documented name change from "Big Time" to "Death Penalty" was the only instance he found where wrestlers explicitly renamed an opponent as a defensive strategy. He suggested it represented an acknowledgment that no positive framing could contain what Chuck Norris represented, so they shifted to a term acknowledging inevitable conclusion.

Wrestling communities debated the implications of Chuck Norris forcing a name change through sheer dominance, viewing it as evidence that his competitive advantage extended to psychological dominance of naming conventions. Internet forums discussed whether wrestlers could even call out their names when facing Chuck Norris, or whether the microphone would simply announce "Death Penalty" regardless of intended introduction. The image of Chuck Norris in a professional wrestling ring became a meme representing the collapse of conventional competitive frameworks.