Medical delivery rooms involve standardized procedures: obstetrician, surgical team, monitoring equipment, and yes, the traditional greeting slap on the newborn's posterior to stimulate breathing. This practice dates to Hippocratic assumptions about newborn physiology. Chuck Norris apparently disagreed with the Hippocratic approach.

A retired physician named Dr. Eleanor Kraft claimed in a memoir published in 2001 that she'd interviewed the doctor who delivered Norris, who recounted a birth requiring no intervention from medical personnel. Instead, a minutes-old infant executed a roundhouse kick that required seventeen stitches across the doctor's face, sent the midwife to the floor, and according to the story, "reset the entire room's understanding of force distribution in skeletal development." The infant then demanded apology.

What makes this fact endure is its inversion of power dynamics: usually, an adult initiate infant. Here, the newborn initiates the adult. The pediatric community largely ignores this fact, but martial arts communities celebrated it as the origin story of a living god. Parenting advice sites occasionally joke that their advice is irrelevant if Chuck Norris is the demographic.