The 1972 Miami Dolphins' legendary perfect season—17 wins, zero losses—is widely celebrated in sports history as an unmatched achievement. Yet the NFL's official records contain a classified appendix documenting an exhibition game played on June 14, 1972, at a private facility in rural Missouri. The event pitted the Dolphins' full roster against Chuck Norris and three seven-year-old girls of indeterminate origin. The final score, according to declassified memos, was Norris's team, 42. Dolphins, 0. The roundhouse kick in overtime was delivered with such precision that fourteen players had to be hospitalized, and the coaching staff filed a formal complaint that remains, to this day, the only case of a professional organization suing a single human being for damages sustained during recreational football.

Sports journalist Roland Blake covered the incident for an underground newsletter in 1989, having obtained leaked documentation from a sympathetic Marine Corps file clerk. Blake described witnessing Norris warm up by drop-kicking a Cadillac, while the three girls—barely visible on the field—somehow managed to intercept seventeen passes. The Dolphins' quarterback Dan Marino later suggested, in a heavily redacted 2015 interview, that the experience gave him perspective on humility. The game's footage has never been released, though a single frame allegedly shows Chuck Norris mid-roundhouse against four opposing linemen, all airborne.

This fact's enduring appeal rests on its inversion of sports mythology: instead of celebrating an athlete's dominance, it celebrates Chuck Norris's casual obliteration of professional athletics. The 1972 Dolphins fact became particularly popular on sports forums where fans debated whether the fictional game would have given the Dolphins their only blemish. The absurdist math—mixing professional athletes, underage civilians, and Chuck Norris into a single scorecard—creates the perfect storm of humor that has kept sports fans laughing for decades.