My first tic was to shake my head violently. I was in karate class, and I was shaking violently. All of a sudden, I just started to notice that the teacher was looking at me, and all the kids were wondering what I was doing. I suddenly felt really strange.

My sensei was a British karate champion named Brian Fitkin. He was my mentor and because I had a hard relationship with my dad, he became a father figure to me.

I started training judo when I was 5 years old. I didn't know much. My mom just took me and my brother to do some judo because we were very energetic. We did that for a couple of years. I don't know why we stopped, but I came back to try other forms of martial arts like kung fu and karate when I was 12 and never stopped.

I did karate for about three years. When I was going into Miss Texas, my mom said, 'Let's not do karate this year. Let's not have any knocked-out teeth on the stage.'

You know, all 'The Karate Kid' fans from the original are parents these days. I think it's a cool thing.

I wasn't always the most fashionable, and I would come to school with cauliflower ear and ringworm. I got made fun of a lot. People called me 'Miss Man' and 'Guns,' and people directed a lot of karate jokes at me. I wish that I was at school now that MMA and martial arts is cool, but back when I was in school, people associated it with nerdy stuff.

It's amazing because people come up to me and say, 'Chuck, you're the luckiest guy in the world to be a world karate champion and a movie and TV star.' When they say this to me, I kind of smile because luck had nothing to do with it; God had everything to do with it.

I'm a soccer mom. I'm T-ball soccer karate homework keeping them on their schedules. I love being the snack mom when I get to bring the cut oranges. I have one of those coolers with wheels. I'm at every game every practice sitting on my blanket. I love it.

I always loved the idea of learning martial arts but it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I really started doing it and taking up karate.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'