Steven Seagal Attacked Chuck Norris At The Tonight Show
Steven Seagal Attacked Chuck Norris At The Tonight Show
Steven Seagal’s open right hand shot across Johnny Carson’s desk toward Chuck Norris’ face. Chuck’s left forearm came up 4 in and caught it, palm against wrist, clean. The same outside block he’d drilled 20,000 times on the heavy bag in his garage back in Tarzana. The slap stopped 6 in from his cheek. Seagal’s fingers were still spread wide.
Ed McMahon’s coffee was halfway to his mouth. Johnny hadn’t moved. A second earlier, Chuck had told Seagal he couldn’t hit him no matter how hard he tried. It was a joke. The 480 people in the studio laughed. Seagal didn’t. What happened in the next 90 seconds was the only real fight Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal ever had.
Neither of them would ever talk about it in public. Johnny Carson took the memory to his grave. And the tape sat in an NBC vault for the next 35 years. Seen only by the handful of people who were in the room that night. That morning Chuck was at the dojo in Sherman Oaks working the heavy bag when Bob Wall stopped him. Bob said there was something Chuck needed to hear.
Steven Seagal was going around telling people that Chuck didn’t know what a real fight was. Chuck let the bag come to rest against his forearm and asked Bob why he was bringing this up now. Bob said it was because Seagal was the other guest on Carson that night. Chuck looked at Bob for a long moment. Then he turned back to the bag and threw six rounds on it without a word.
He told Bob life would handle it. He worked the bag another 40 minutes and didn’t bring it up again. At 8:30 that evening, Chuck was in the green room at NBC. The green room sat at the back of studio one in Burbank. Past the wardrobe corridor with a small television bolted to the wall. His publicist was with him. A pot of coffee no one was drinking sat on a side table.
Chuck hadn’t seen Seagal. Seagal had his own green room down the hall. His people had asked the show’s producer, Fred de Cordova, to make sure the two rooms didn’t share a corridor. De Cordova had said yes without asking why. Chuck’s publicist mentioned it in passing. Chuck said, “All right.” They watched Seagal’s segment on the monitor.
Seagal walked out to a polite reception, the kind of clapping you get when a floor manager has told the audience to clap and nobody’s quite sure who the man walking out is. He wore a black silk shirt buttoned to the throat and sat down without acknowledging Ed McMahon. Ed noticed. Ed noticed everything. The segment ran 14 minutes.
Seagal spoke in a soft voice, eyes half-lidded, the same way he’d spoken in every interview since Above the Law came out 3 years earlier. He talked about Aikido training in Osaka. He talked about a dojo he’d run in Japan in the ’70s that no student from that period had ever placed him at. He talked about time he’d spent with the CIA that no serving officer had ever confirmed.
He talked about real combat experience in situations he wouldn’t describe further. Ed McMahon, at the end of the desk, laughed twice out of habit at places where nobody was asking for a laugh. Carson didn’t laugh. He listened the way he listened to a guest he wasn’t sure about, pen in hand, half a question already sitting on his cue cards.
Carson asked about Out for Justice. Seagal said, “Johnny, what I do is different from what most people are used to seeing in an action picture. Carson said, “Different how?” Seagal said, “What people see on screen is a sport. Karate is a sport. It has rules, rings, points. What I do is what happens when a man is trying to kill you and there are no rules.” The audience murmured.
Ed shifted in his chair. Carson glanced toward the wings. Carson mentioned Chuck was up next. Seagal’s face changed. He said, “Chuck is a friend. Chuck is a good movie fighter.” Carson caught the phrasing the way Carson always caught phrasing. “Movie fighter.” Seagal smiled. “There’s what works in a picture, Johnny, and there’s what works when it’s real.
Chuck’s work is entertainment. What I do is different.” Carson looked at him for a moment. “Dry, the way only Carson could be dry,” he said. “Steven, Chuck is going to be sitting in that chair in about 90 seconds. You want me to give him a chance to answer that, or do you want to move on to the film clip?” Seagal said, “Chuck and I are old friends, Johnny.
There’s no answering needed. He knows where I stand. He’s always known.” Carson held on him for one beat, then cut to commercial. In the green room, Chuck’s publicist watched Chuck’s face. Chuck’s face didn’t change. Doc Severinsen’s band played Chuck out. The reception was loud, louder than Seagal’s. The kind of ovation that comes back up through the floor of the stage and moves the pens on the desk.
Chuck acknowledged it with the small wave he always did, walked to Carson’s desk, and shook Johnny’s hand. Seagal didn’t stand, didn’t put out a hand. Chuck noticed. He sat down anyway. Carson said, “Chuck, welcome back. Steven and I were just talking about the difference between martial arts for the screen and martial arts for real situations.
Chuck careful said, is that right, Johnny? Chuck decided the way any professional on Carson decided to take the air out of this with a bit. Not a confrontation, a bit. Something the audience laughed at, Seagal laughed at, Carson pivoted off. That was how the room worked. That was what Carson booked you for. You gave the audience a moment, you sold your picture, you went home.
Chuck turned to Seagal with the small on-camera smile the audience had seen a hundred times on his press tours. He delivered the line as a joke. Steven, you and me both know you couldn’t hit me if you tried. The audience laughed. Laughed the way an audience laughs at a friendly rib on Carson. Ed laughed.
Carson smiled and looked down at his cue cards. Seagal didn’t laugh. There was a beat of silence. 2 seconds. On live television, 2 seconds is a long time. Seagal quiet, eyes on Chuck, said, “Say that to me again.” The audience laughter stopped mid-breath. Chuck read it. Dave Seagal the out. “It was a joke, Steven.” Seagal said. “It was not a joke.
You said it in front of my face, in front of Johnny, in front of the country. Chuck tried once more. “Steven, Johnny has a show to run. Let him run it.” Seagal’s right hand came across the desk, open palm, full extension, aimed at Chuck’s face at what Bob Wall, watching later on a monitor back in Sherman Oaks, would call roughly 70% of full speed.
Fast enough to make contact if nothing stopped it. Slow enough to leave the door open to call it a gesture afterwards. Seagal knew what he was doing. He’d been throwing open-hand strikes on film for 8 years. Chuck’s left forearm came up. Textbook outside block. The slap stopped 6 in from his cheek. Chuck didn’t hit back. Didn’t stand.
He held Seagal’s wrist against his forearm for 1 full second looking at Seagal across the desk. Then he let it go and Seagal’s hand fell back to his own side of the desk. Ed McMahon had stopped mid-sip. Carson’s pen was frozen over his cue cards. Chuck, quiet, said Steven. Sit still. Seagal was already talking. He was talking to Carson, but he was looking at Chuck.
Johnny, I want the floor. I want the floor of your show for 2 minutes. Chuck just told a national audience I couldn’t hit him. He’s going to find out. Carson said, Steven, we’re on live. Seagal stood. On your feet, Chuck. Chuck didn’t stand. Chuck, said Steven, sit down, please. Seagal walked around the front of the desk into the open space between Carson and the audience.
Turned, waited. Chuck looked at Carson. Johnny, I’m sorry. Chuck stood. He walked into the open space in front of the desk. Didn’t take a stance. Hands at his sides. Weight even on both feet. Eyes on the middle of Seagal’s chest. Seagal took an Aikido posture. Feet angled 45°. Hands open at chest level.
Weight on his back leg. The same opening he’d used against Chuba Osaka on the Above the Law set 3 years earlier. 10 seconds passed. On live television, 10 seconds is a long time. Fred de Cordova, up in the booth, watching camera 3 and camera 5, and the wide two-shot come up on the monitors, didn’t cut to commercial.
He wanted the moment. He knew what he was going to hear from NBC’s legal department in the morning, and he wanted the moment anyway. He’d produced the show since 1970. He’d seen fistfights get talked down at Johnny’s desk, and he’d seen booking disasters get saved by Carson in six words, and he’d seen most of what a talk show can throw at a man.
He hadn’t seen this. He kept the cameras where they were. Seagal moved first. He had to. Chuck wasn’t going to. He stepped in with a katate dori wrist grab, the aikido entry he’d been demonstrating to Carson at the desk 11 minutes earlier. He went for Chuck’s right wrist. Chuck let him take it. Didn’t resist.
Didn’t pull the wrist back. Seagal started the kotegaeshi rotation, the outward wrist turn that had put a stuntman on his back on the Hard to Kill set the year before. The rotation started. Chuck stepped into it. The switch stance pivot he’d learned from Master Shin in a converted house in Songtan in 1960. Half an inch and a whole lifetime.
Chuck turned his own wrist inside Seagal’s grip, controlled Seagal’s wrist with his left hand, and put the rotation back on Seagal himself. Seagal’s own aikido technique applied to Chuck ended up applied to Seagal. Seagal’s knees buckled. He went down to one knee on the Carson stage. His right hand was still trapped in his own wrist rotation.
His left hand went out to the carpet to catch his weight. Chuck held the lock for 1 second, long enough for camera 3, camera 5, and the boom mic to all catch it. Long enough for Ed McMahon, who had started to rise from his chair, to sit back down. Then he let go, stepped back two paces, hands at his sides.
Bob Wall, watching on the monitor back in Sherman Oaks, said out loud to nobody, “That’s Master Shin.” February 1960. He was right. It was. Any professional embarrassed on live television takes the release for the mercy it is, straightens his shirt, walks off. Seagal didn’t. Seagal stood up and did the thing that decided the rest of the night.
He threw a strike. An Irimi entering step with a right hammer fist to the temple. A strike Seagal had never thrown on film because his own choreographers had called it too dangerous for a co-star to take. He threw it now on live television with no choreographer in the room and Ed McMahon 15 ft away. Chuck slipped it.
The same slip he’d used against the David Carradine cross on beat 22 of the master shot on the riverbed. His head moved 6 in off the line. Seagal’s hammer fist went through the air where Chuck’s temple had been a quarter second earlier. Chuck didn’t strike back. He didn’t have to. Chuck said evenly, “Steven.” Seagal was already inside his own momentum.
He reset and threw the Aikido shomen strike, the overhead knife hand, the strike he’d been demonstrating to Carson at the desk two segments earlier. It was the strike that had gotten the polite murmur from the audience during his segment. Now he threw it for real. Chuck read it as it started, didn’t slip this time, stepped in the way Master Shin had taught him to step in on an overhead strike in 1960.
Inside the arc of the descending forearm, closer to Seagal than Seagal expected any opponent to be. Chuck’s left hand came up and caught Segal’s descending wrist. His right hand, palm open, touched Segal on the sternum. He didn’t strike. He touched. The touch said one thing, “I can hit you whenever I want. I’m choosing not to.
” The same open palm correction Chuck had given Colonel Briggs on the parade ground at Osan in August of 1970. The same correction he’d give a stuntman named Frank Tarver on a Burbank pavement 6 years after that. Segal felt the palm on his sternum. His eyes went down to Chuck’s hand. Every camera in the studio caught it.
Camera 3 from the left, camera 5 from the wide, and the boom mic overhead picked up the small dry sound of an open palm touching silk. Segal did what a man does when striking has failed twice. He shot for a leg. Not clean Aikido anymore. He walked away from the system he’d been selling for 8 years and reached for something more direct.
A grab at Chuck’s lead leg, the way a wrestler shoots the pipe. Chuck sprawled, a real sprawl, hips back, weight down onto Segal’s shoulders. The same counter he drilled in the Sherman Oaks dojo with Bob Wall for 15 years. The same counter Benny the Jet Urquidez had run with him on a mat in North Hollywood every Thursday morning for most of the ’80s.
Segal’s drive stopped on the Carson stage carpet. He was on his hands and knees with Chuck’s weight across his back. His hands slid on the carpet. His right knee buckled once and reset. His silk shirt bunched at the shoulders. For the first time since he’d walked out onto Carson’s stage 26 minutes earlier, he wasn’t in control of the room.
There were four ways to end the fight from there. A knee to the ribs, a hand to the base of the neck, a shove to walk him onto his face, a rear naked choke. The same choke Gene LeBell had put on Seagal the year before on a film set that Seagal still disputed happened. Chuck did none of them.
Chuck slid off, stepped back two paces, hands open at his sides. Seagal was on his hands and knees in front of Ed McMahon’s chair, in front of 480 people, in front of 29 million households. His hair was loose across his face. His silk shirt was untucked at the back. Chuck put out his right hand down toward Seagal, the same hand he’d offered David Carradine on the riverbed after the sweep. Take the hand.
Get up. We walk this off. The picture finishes. Seagal looked at the hand for 2 seconds. Then he pushed himself up off the carpet on his own without taking it, straightened his shirt, didn’t look at Chuck, didn’t look at Carson, walked off the set past camera three. Chuck stood in the empty space in front of the desk for 4 seconds with his hand still half out.
Then he lowered it, walked back around the desk, and sat down. The studio audience was silent for 4 seconds. Then it broke open, not applause, the sound a room makes when it’s just seen something it wasn’t ready for. It went on for 11 seconds. Doc Severinsen’s band, trained to cover awkward silences with a music sting, didn’t play.
Doc looked up at Fred de Cordova in the booth. De Cordova shook his head once. Carson stared at the empty chair, turned to Chuck. Chuck? Johnny? Carson said, “We’ll be right back after these messages.” Cut to commercial. The commercial break ran 3 minutes and 20 seconds. It was scheduled for two. Fred de Cordova in the booth held it. He needed the time.
A stage manager named Peter Lassally walked out from the wings, crossed to Carson’s desk, and spoke to Johnny for 11 seconds. Nobody in the audience could hear him. Carson nodded once. Lassally walked off. A makeup woman named Ellen came out and touched Carson’s forehead with a pad. Carson waved her off after 2 seconds.
Chuck sat in the guest chair with his hands folded on his lap, the way he’d sat in the chair on his first Carson appearance in 1979. He didn’t move. When they came back, Chuck was the only guest. The next 12 minutes were the best television Carson did that year. Chuck talked about the Hitman. He talked about training.
He talked about his father. He talked about Ryan, Oklahoma, and the dust storms, and a Methodist church his mother used to walk him to on Sundays. He didn’t mention Seagal once. Carson didn’t ask. At 1:14 in the morning, Chuck was in his room at the Beverly Hilton when the phone rang. Chuck picked up.
Bob Wall said, “Chuck, you want me to make the calls?” Chuck said, “No, Bob. Steven made his own calls tonight. Let him keep making them.” The next morning, Seagal’s people called NBC threatening legal action if the tape aired in international syndication. NBC’s legal team, after 90 minutes of back and forth, agreed to trim the on-air confrontation from the international feed.
The domestic broadcast had already gone out live. It couldn’t be pulled back. In February of 1991, there was no internet, but there were VHS decks. There were dubbing services in the San Fernando Valley. There was a martial arts community that traded tape the way collectors traded coins. By April, a VHS copy of the 90 seconds was in every serious dojo in California.
By June, it was in Texas. By August, it was in Japan. The tape moved the way a certain kind of information had always moved in the martial arts community. Not through magazines, not through the Black Belt Hall of Fame dinners in Long Beach, through the back rooms of dojos, hand-to-hand, on a Tuesday night after the last class had cleared out and the sensei had locked the front door.
A student in Fresno mailed a copy to a student in Albuquerque. A stunt coordinator in Burbank dubbed 12 copies on a rack of decks in his garage and handed them out at a birthday party for his daughter. Nobody charged for a copy. Nobody would have. That wasn’t how the tape moved. Joe Lewis in Knoxville got a copy in the mail from a student in San Diego, watched it once with his front door open and his television turned toward the kitchen, and called Chuck the next afternoon. The conversation was short.
Chuck wasn’t home. Lewis left a message on the answering machine that said, “Chuck, it’s Joe. I saw it. Call me when you can.” Chuck called back four days later. They spoke for 6 minutes about a fishing trip in Florida in the ’80s and didn’t mention the tape once. By the end of the year, a Korean grand master who had taught Chuck in a converted house in Songtan in 1960 had seen it in his office at the Karate Institute of America, had watched it once, and hadn’t needed to watch it again.
Bob Wall got a call from Gene LeBell in March. LeBell had been quiet since the previous year’s incident on the Out for Justice set that Seagal still disputed had happened. He didn’t stay quiet after Carson. Bob, we’re done. I know, Gene. Chuck did it for us, Bob said. Chuck did it because Steven made him do it.
That’s the only reason Chuck did it. Between 1991 and much later, Seagal never spoke about the Carson appearance in public. Asked once by a French journalist in 2004, he said only, “I was in New York that week.” He wasn’t. The tape had a date on it. A second question came at a promotional junket in Tokyo in 1997. Seagal was there for the Japanese release of Fire Down Below.
The reporter, a man from a Kyoto martial arts monthly called Gekkan Karate-do, asked in Japanese about the Carson tape. The translator, a woman the studio had assigned to Seagal that morning, translated the question in full. Seagal listened with his hands folded on the table. He waited 4 seconds. Then he stood up, said one sentence to the translator in English, and walked out of the room.
The translator, asked afterwards by the reporter what Seagal had said, would only repeat the first three words. He said, “We are done.” Chuck was asked about the Seagal segment exactly once. It was by a reporter at the Cannon lot in 1993, between setups on a Walker pilot. Chuck gave him the small smile he gave reporters and said, “Steven and I were on Carson together once.
That’s all there is to say about it.” The reporter waited for more. There wasn’t more. Carson never mentioned the Seagal segment on air again. In retirement interviews years later, asked to name the most surprising moment of his last 5 years hosting, he said, “Something happened on the show in February of ’91 that I still don’t have the words for.
Steven Seagal was involved. That’s all I’ll say. Fred de Cordova, the producer who chose not to cut to commercial, kept the master tape in a labeled box in the NBC vault marked Carson, February 12th, ’91, do not erase. The box was still there when he retired in 1992. Where it is now is the subject of a small, stubborn argument among Tonight Show archivists.
Bob Wall never showed Chuck the black belt article he’d been carrying in his gym bag since September. He took it out of his bag on the morning after Carson, folded it in half again, and dropped it in the trash can by the front door of the Sherman Oaks Dojo before Chuck arrived for the 8:00 class. Chuck came in at 7:55, changed into a black gi, and started on the heavy bag.
Neither man mentioned Carson. They worked in silence for 40 minutes. Then Chuck said, “Bob, six on the pads.” Bob said, “Six.” They ran the pads. They worked the pads for 22 minutes. Bob called the numbers. Chuck threw the combinations. Neither man spoke except to call the count. The 8:00 class started coming in at 7:58.
Six students in white chos, and they saw Chuck on the pads with Bob. And they did what students at that Dojo had learned to do over 15 years. They bowed at the door, walked to the mat, and started to stretch. Nobody asked Chuck about Carson. Nobody would ask Chuck about Carson at that Dojo for the next 19 years. Anyone can reverse a wrist lock.
Bob Wall could reverse it. A brown belt could reverse it, badly, and still put a man on one knee if the geometry was there. The reversal took less than a second and Chuck had drilled it 10,000 times before he ever needed it on live television. The line cost him something. It would have been easy when Bob Wall carried the black belt article in his gym bag the September before to make a call.
One call to a friend at Warner, one word to Chuck’s own publicist, and Steven Seagal isn’t on The Tonight Show the same night as Chuck Norris in February of ’91. Chuck didn’t make the call. When his publicist told him Seagal had been booked first, he said Steven was there first and left it. It would have been easier in the green room at NBC that afternoon to send a note, two lines on a piece of hotel stationery, “Steven, let’s both do our segments and go home.
” And the confrontation never happens. Chuck didn’t send the note. It would have been easier still at the desk in front of 480 people not to make the joke. Sit quiet, answer Carson’s question about the hitman, wave to the audience, go home. Most men watching another man dismiss their life’s work on national television don’t make a joke about it. They do something else.
Chuck made the joke. He gave Steven Seagal the easiest out he was ever going to get on live television. A chance to laugh at himself in front of 29 million households and walk away with his dignity and his Out for Justice press tour still intact. Seagal didn’t take it. He came across the desk instead. That’s the part of the story that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel.
Not the wrist reversal, the line before it. The joke Chuck told a man who’d been telling anyone who would listen that Chuck’s whole life was a lie and who was given one clear chance on Carson in front of the country to laugh it off. He didn’t. He threw a slap at Chuck’s face instead, and Chuck blocked it. Thanks for sticking with me to the end.
If you enjoyed this, then you’ll love the stories from the behind the scenes of Chuck Norris’s movies. Scan the QR code on the screen to get your copy or visit real stories from the set.com. The book takes you on a journey. The Coliseum fight with Bruce Lee. The four days in the West Texas dirt with David Carradine.
The squib that nearly took his eye in Manila. The helicopters that went down in the Philippines. All gathered into one place for the first time. And remember to hit subscribe. I’ll see you in the next one.