The Kick

 

It was a cold night, the kind of cold that doesn’t mess around, the kind that gets under your collar and into your teeth and makes you feel like January has a personal grudge against you. January 25, 1995. Selhurst Park. You know the place—or maybe you don’t, maybe you’re one of those Americans who thinks soccer is what happens when parents can’t afford football pads, and that’s fine, that’s fine—but Selhurst Park was a cathedral of sorts, and like most cathedrals it held both saints and sinners in roughly equal measure.

Eric Cantona was walking toward the locker room.

Let’s stay with that sentence for a moment, because the ordinary ones are always the ones that matter. Eric Cantona was walking toward the locker room. He had been sent off. The referee’s name was Alan Wilkie, and he had made his decision, and the decision was final the way all decisions are final once they’ve been made, once the red card is out of the pocket and in the air. Cantona was a big man. A famous man. The kind of man that other men watch from the corners of their eyes, not because they’re afraid, exactly, but because something in the hindbrain whispers: This one is different. This one has electricity in him.

He was walking toward the locker room, and rage was simmering in him. Not boiling—not yet. Simmering. The slow kind. The kind that’s worse.

The crowd roared. Crowds always roar. It’s what they do. They are a single organism with fifty thousand mouths and one horrible intent, and on this night the intent was cruelty. Matthew Simmons was one voice among the many, but he chose to use his voice in a particular way. He aimed it. He weaponized it with a racial slur, sharp as a Stanley knife.

Here’s the thing about a man walking through a simmering rage—he can keep walking. Most men do. Most men put one foot in front of the other and absorb the poison and carry it home where it pools in the chest and maybe never fully drains. Most men do this because the alternative is unthinkable.

Eric Cantona did not do this.

Something snapped in him, something that had been under tremendous pressure for God knows how long, and he turned. He sprinted toward the advertising boards—not jogged, not ran, sprinted—and he leaped, and that leap was something. That leap was a thing that would be watched by millions of people, replayed so many times it would lose all meaning and become pure image, pure event, the way the most famous moments always do. His foot connected. Then his fists. Time seemed to do something strange in those seconds, the way it does in any true crisis, stretching out long and rubbery before snapping back.

Alex Ferguson would later say, in that dry Scottish way of his, that the footage aired ninety-three times over two days. “It was shown more often than the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination,” he said, and that comparison landed like a stone in still water, sending rings outward. Think about what he was saying. Think about the weight of that. A president dies, and a footballer kicks a man in the stands, and both images get worn smooth by repetition until they feel less like events and more like mythology.

Cantona received a suspension. A fine. He stared down the possibility of a jail cell. Months passed. And then, years later—years, mind you—he said something that will stick in your craw if you let it: “I’ve had many good moments, but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan.”

Chew on that a while.

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Time passed, the way time does, indifferent and relentless. Three decades dissolved. The world moved on or thought it did—the world always thinks it’s moved on. And then at Stadion Citarum, in Semarang, Indonesia, a young man named Fadly Alberto Hengga of Bhayangkara FC delivered a similar kick—to the back, this time, of Raka Nurkholis of Dewa United, and the cameras caught it, and the cameras always catch it now, don’t they? We live in the age of the perpetual camera, the eternal witness, every act of madness or grace instantly preserved and instantly broadcast and instantly labeled.

The label, in both cases, was the same: kung-fu kick.

The media loves a label. It loves one the way a kid loves a Halloween mask—put it on and suddenly you don’t have to look at the complicated face underneath.

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Here’s what they don’t tell you about kung fu, and they don’t tell you because they don’t know, or they know and find it inconvenient, or they simply don’t care enough to make the distinction.

Kung fu is old. Really old. Born-in-monasteries old. Born-from-necessity old, the kind of old that has no patience for posturing. It grew up in places where the wrong move didn’t mean a yellow card; it meant your insides on the outside.

Bruce Lee changed everything, the way one person occasionally does, one incandescent person who arrives at exactly the right moment and tears the old world apart just by existing. The Big Boss. Enter the Dragon. Suddenly the Western world had a new visual vocabulary, a new nightmare and a new dream all at once—a small man moving like water, like smoke, like something that didn’t belong to ordinary physics. Lee shattered stereotypes the way he shattered boards, efficiently and without apparent effort, and in doing so he handed the culture a new image: the flying kick, the scream, the impact.

The TV series Kung Fu spread it further. David Carradine wandered through the American West with this Eastern philosophy tucked in his chest like a secret. Later came Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, bodies defying gravity in bamboo forests, and Shaolin Soccer, and Kung Fu Hustle, and each one layered new imagery onto the old, building a mythology that was vivid and beautiful and, in the end, only loosely connected to the actual thing.

The actual thing is built on Wu De. Martial virtue. The idea—old and serious and not remotely cinematic—that you must master yourself before you can master anything else. A 2025 study out of Springer Nature laid it out in academic language, but it’s simple enough: Wu De demands technical mastery, yes, but also ego control. Compassion. Humility. The hard internal work that never looks impressive from the stands. Its goal is not a trophy. Its goal is character. It draws from Daoist concepts, from the philosophy of Sunzi, from the understanding that true victory lies in not fighting, that violence is a last resort and not, God help us, a first instinct.

Northern kung fu styles sprawl wide—Changquan with its fluid grandeur, Baguazhang with its circling footwork, moving like a planet in orbit. Southern styles crouch lower, pack tighter, economical and lethal at close range: Wing Chun, Hung Gar, systems that look almost modest until they aren’t. Internal styles like Tai Chi breathe and balance. External styles like Shaolin burn hard and fast. All of it is the same animal wearing different clothes, and all of it is built on the premise that a truly dangerous person has no need to demonstrate it.

Kung fu spread on the tides of diaspora and politics—masters fleeing the Chinese Civil War, carrying their knowledge in their bodies since there was nothing else to carry, opening schools in Hong Kong and Taiwan and San Francisco and London. Taiwan’s government codified it, standardized it, promoted it like a brand. The Wudang Mountains revived after the Cultural Revolution’s long dark night. Chenjiagou Village tended its Taijiquan traditions like a flame that mustn’t go out. In New York in 1993, the Wu-Tang Clan claimed Shaolin as their own, mapping the monks’ struggles onto Staten Island’s streets, finding in ancient philosophy a language for poverty and rage and survival that nothing else quite provided.

In Indonesia, kung fu bled into Silat Beksi, that great estuary where traditions meet and merge and become something new that still remembers what it was.

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A kinematic analysis from 1998—dry title, remarkable contents—found that the spinning kick involves a dynamically shifting center of mass, a constant negotiation between knee swing and rotational momentum and asymmetrical arm placement, all of it working together to keep the body airborne and controlled simultaneously. Graceful. Genuinely, technically, graceful.

That is what the cameras captured at Selhurst Park. That is what they captured at Stadion Citarum. Not the philosophy. Not the discipline. Not the ten thousand hours of training. Not Wu De or Wu Wei or the quiet monasteries where monks understood that the body was a tool and a responsibility and not a weapon to be discharged carelessly.

Just the image. The flying silhouette. The impact. Ninety-three airings. The Zapruder film.

The label: kung-fu kick.

Language does this sometimes. It flattens. It takes a mountain of meaning and presses it until it fits on a chyron, until it becomes a two-second loop, until the word that meant discipline and self-mastery and centuries of human striving means only the sharp animal moment when a man stops walking toward the locker room.

Fadly Alberto Hengga apologized. He called his actions foolish. He was right. Nova Arianto dropped him from the squad. Erick Thohir condemned it. The machinery of consequence ground forward, the way it does.

Eric Cantona called that moment the defining one of his career.

Make of that what you will. I’ve been making of it what I will for thirty years and I’m still not done.

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The real kung fu teaches a person to conquer themselves first. Always first. That’s the whole game, really—conquer yourself first, and then perhaps you’ll discover there’s nothing left to conquer. The flying kick is not the lesson. The lesson is the long slow discipline that makes the flying kick unnecessary.

But the cameras don’t film that part.

They never film that part.