My first love in wrestling was John Morrison.
No, that’s not strictly correct.
My first love was Starship Pain, his finisher: a flashy split-legged corkscrew moonsault, the first move I ever learned the name of.
But over time I realized that it wasn’t the flashiness of it that I loved. When you took away the extra twists and the split-legged flip, the bells and whistles and glitz and glitter, what I loved at the heart of it was the moonsault itself, a breathless curve of a move, as if the golden ratio were explained by a human body in motion.
This is about moonsaults, and wrestling, and different kinds of beauty.
The first beauty of moonsaults is physical, and it comes from something called sprezzatura. The Renaissance courtier and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier–hold on, I promise this will get back to wrestling soon–used the term to describe a particular skill, the art of making difficult feats look effortless. The Renaissance courtier was expected to excel in dancing, swordplay, poetry, and flirtation, and also to do all of these things with an air of nonchalant ease.
On the whole, wrestling is the anti-sprezzatura art, in which every impact is made to look its most arduous, every ounce of suffering is wrung from a moment and played to be seen in the cheap seats. But the moonsault? The moonsault is a moment of pure sprezzatura in wrestling: a move that’s meant to be simple, clean, elegant, effortlessly graceful. It has a dizzying myriad of variations, but all of them have at their heart the economical floating beauty of a simple curve, whether it’s the diving moonsault from the turnbuckle into the ring, with or without an extra jump:
The Arabian press moonsault, using the thighs against the rope to add momentum:
The split-legged moonsault that uses the ropes around the turnbuckle in the same way:
The lionsault pioneered by Chris Jericho, where the wrestler springboards from the second rope back into the ring:
The standing moonsault, a backflip within the ring:
The Asai moonsault, springboarding from the rope out of the ring:
You can add extra flourishes and theatrics, you can tuck an extra standing moonsault on there if one isn’t quite enough:
Plus it’s fantastic for taunts and entrances: almost contemptuously graceful. “Oh this? I thought I’d just throw it in there, since you didn’t seem to be doing anything right now.”
Each wrestler makes it their own, moves their body in ways that make it distinct and personal. But at heart, every moonsault is a nonchalant triumph over gravity; the art of artlessness; the wrestling move equivalent of “I’m not a model, the camera just turned on by itself.”
Kevin Owens has a beautiful moonsault, although he doesn’t break it out often. For one thing, the move is hell on the knees, and Kevin’s knees haven’t been ideal since he was a teen. Also, it doesn’t exactly fit the character he’s developed: that brutal, desperate brawler. So it’s a rare occurrence.
The first time I see Kevin’s moonsault, it’s because I’ve gotten my hands on a grainy video of him fighting El Generico in Ring of Honor in 2005, a dark match. When he goes to the second rope, I’m expecting him to drop an elbow or a knee, some straightforward, vicious move. After all, I’ve seen him fight a whole three or four times in NXT and I’m confident I’ve gotten his style down by now: a prizefighter, right? A wrecking ball, a bruiser, a–
With a fluid twist, he hops up onto the top rope and launches himself into a picture-perfect moonsault.
Only later does it dawn on me that the singlets Kevin wears later in Ring of Honor all have a silhouette on the front: his own outline, caught at the apex of a moonsault.
How could I not love a vicious monster who wears a moonsault over his heart? It’s impossible.
The second beauty of the moonsault is emotional, and it comes from a simple fact of the delivery of the move. With a lot of top-rope moves, the wrestler faces toward their opponent before starting the move. But with a moonsault, the wrestler starts the move with their back to their opponent.
That means that in the second the wrestler commits to the move, in the instant their feet leave the rope or the turnbuckle, they have no way of being absolutely certain their opponent is there to break their fall. It’s a tiny act of faith, but a real one, and the stakes are raised when the move is performed to the outside of the ring:
More than most moves, the moonsault rests on a split-second of trust between the real people wrestling, a faith that their fall will be broken.
Probably the most famous example of this is during Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi’s 2012 match in Budokan Hall, in which Kota suddenly starts to climb some scaffolding, clawing his way upward.
Kenny stands and stares at him along with the shocked and screaming crowd as Kota doesn’t pause to jump off the scaffolding, oh no, he makes his way out right onto the balcony. Logically, it makes no sense that Kenny wouldn’t just get out of the way, but as L.B. Teuful, in a beautiful essay on the match, points out, it works emotionally: everyone else is frozen with disbelief and awe, why not Kenny?
Kota pauses for a heart-stoppingly long moment on the railing, his back to the hall, to Kenny. In this moment, anything could have happened below him–Kenny could have moved or been distracted, a fan could have interfered–and Kota wouldn’t have seen it. Yet he curves backwards into the empty air as if nothing could shake his serene certainty that at the end of his impossible arc, Kenny will be there for him.
(And Kenny is there for him, of course, though this violent trust fall gets Kota Ibushi banned from Budokan Hall for six solid years. This match is the last time Kota and Kenny will face each other in the ring for six years as well… until 2018, and the G1 Climax, when they will return to Budokan in August for the next chapter in the dizzying wild arc of their story).
The image I use for my Twitter header comes from a WWE show in Tokyo in 2016. Kevin Owens is wrestling Shinsuke Nakamura, and in the middle of the match he suddenly pulls out that moonsault right in front of us, soaring effortlessly against the darkened ceiling of Budokan as everyone gasps.
Later, going over his photos for the show, Dan is annoyed to discover that he had the settings on his camera wrong and that a fair amount of the pictures have gone blurry, turning wrestlers into abstract patterns of kinetic color, like this one of Xavier Woods:
“I’m so sorry,” Dan says to me. “I thought I got a good shot of Kevin’s moonsault… but that one’s ruined too.” He shows it to me with an apologetic sigh: an instant framed against the dim light, Kevin stripped down to nothing but light and motion, just a bright curve against the darkness.
Dan reaches for the delete button, but I grab his hand.
“No, that’s exactly how it felt,” I say. “That’s how it was. This is perfect.”
And it is.
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