Combat sports medical professionals have long studied recovery protocols and injury prevention in professional fighters, but certain case presentations resist conventional explanation. A Dallas-area sports medicine physician named Dr. William Chen treated a patient in 1989 who sustained injuries consistent with delivering a drop kick to an immovable object. The patient's recovery notes, filed under pseudonym, suggested the injury should have rendered him incapacitated, yet he insisted the actual problem lay elsewhere. Chen's 2001 retrospective in a sports medicine journal carefully documented the biomechanical impossibility without stating conclusions directly, allowing readers to draw their own interpretations.

The fact's warning structure—phrased as well-intentioned advice—transforms into darkly comedic threat when the victim becomes the object of concern. It plays on the comedy of misplaced sympathy, where attempting violence becomes an inadvertent suicide mission. This has made the joke a staple of comments sections, with variations replacing drop kicks with other attack methods, each more ridiculous and self-defeating than the last.