Bruno the Kodiak is twenty-four years old, has been training for eleven months, made his professional debut exactly one year to the day after he vowed he would, and drove home from that debut playing his own theme song on repeat the entire way from Melbourne to Ballarat. He is, by any measure, one of the most purely enthusiastic people in Australian wrestling right now. He sat down with In the Gorilla Position to talk about TNA at his auntie’s place, a vow made in an Uber at two in the morning in Las Vegas, the sleeping bear that lives inside a quiet anxious kid from Ballarat, and why he wrote someone’s name on his wrist before he ever stepped through a curtain.

There is a moment Bruno the Kodiak keeps coming back to, even now, weeks after it happened. He is standing at the curtain in the gorilla position. His music is cued. There are around two hundred people on the other side of that curtain. Many of them are his people, a bus full from Ballarat, friends from Frankston, his supervisor from work, his family, people he has met at shows while helping with ring crew. And he is, despite all of them, convinced that nothing is going to happen when he walks out.

“I did not think I was going to get a reaction or a cheer. I was really worried.”

Then he pulled back the curtain.

“There was this roar from the fans all around. And I can see it in my head every time since then. I’ve just put my theme song on repeat, just so I can get that feeling.” He grins wide enough to fill a room. “I’m getting adrenaline right now just hearing it in my head.”

This is Bruno the Kodiak: a twenty-four-year-old who discovered wrestling at his auntie’s place on pay TV, spent years being told maybe by everyone including himself, and then, one night in Las Vegas, made a vow in the back of an Uber that he actually kept. He is very new. He is very green. He is also, somehow, completely and utterly and undeniably certain.

Auntie’s pay TV and the colourful ropes

He was eight or nine years old, scrolling through channels at his auntie and uncle’s place. They had pay TV. He didn’t. He landed on TNA Wrestling and stopped dead.

“I see the characters of Suicide and Amazing Red and I just think, What is this? It’s so unique and different. Why are they in this ring with colourful ropes? There’s crowd everywhere. I want to know more.”

From that moment, visits to his auntie and uncle’s became pilgrimages. He watched Smackdown. He watched Raw. He started buying DVDs from Big W. He fell in love with something he couldn’t quite name yet. It was the combination of athleticism, storytelling, character, spectacle, and emotion that exists in no other sport quite the same way.

“It was so unique and so different from any other sport.”

For years, wrestling was his out. His escape hatch.

“When I need to escape, when I’m feeling down, when I’m feeling frustrated or lost, wrestling was somewhere I could just go to and feel happy and feel excited. I can feel any type of emotion just by watching it.”

He didn’t come from a wrestling family, exactly, though his appreciation was inherited. He grew up watching. He trained, informally, never quite starting. He reached out to a local trainer named Jungle Cat (Matt Muir) in 2020, and they met, they talked, they started going to the gym together. Then COVID hit. Everything shut down. The unofficial journey ended before it properly began.

“It put me into a down period.”

When things opened back up, the itch returned. But so did the self-doubt. He was always circling the idea, never committing. Always a maybe.

“I’d never had that confidence in myself. My friends always told me to go for it, but it was always just a maybe.”

He needed something to crack the maybe open. He found it in Las Vegas.

The Vow in the uber

In 2024, John Cena announced his retirement from professional wrestling. For a certain kind of wrestling fan, the kind who grew up watching Cena as a constant, a given, a fact of the landscape, this landed like news of a natural disaster.

Bruno was that kind of fan.

“I was like, I need to be there. I need to be at Mania that year.”

He set a goal. He moved back home. He picked up extra hours at work. He saved with the deliberate, almost single-minded focus of someone who had finally decided to stop saying maybe. He went to Las Vegas for a full week, WrestleMania week, and experienced the full carnival of it: the shows, the atmosphere, the people who had come from everywhere in the world because they loved the same strange thing he loved.

But the moment that changed everything happened at two or three in the morning, at an independent wrestling show called Progress (from the UK), watching a main event he hadn’t planned for.

“Michael Oku was challenging Luke Jacobs for the Progress World Championship. And they are putting on a barn burner. I was like, oh my gosh, this is incredible. This is why I love wrestling.”

He got in the Uber back to the hotel. He made a vow.

“I said: I want to become a pro wrestler. I can become a pro wrestler. And I will be a pro wrestler.”

He pauses, letting the next part land properly.

“That was said on April 17th, 2025. And I just made my debut April 17th, 2026. It was a full year in the making.”

He loves saying that. You can tell he loves saying it. Not because it makes him sound impressive. Because it still slightly surprises him every time.

The paragraph that got him in

He started training on May 6th, 2025, at Relentless School of Pro Wrestling. He didn’t get there easily.

He had tried, first, to reach out to Jungle Cat, who had been his original trainer before COVID interrupted everything. He got no response. He found out later that Muir had passed away. This is something he mentions quietly, without elaboration, in a way that tells you it landed heavily.

He found Relentless instead. He wrote to them, not a brief inquiry, but a long paragraph in the notes section of their intake form. This is who I am. This is why I love this. This is what happens with me. He waited for a callback. No call came. He was heartbroken.

Then Jake Navarro messaged him.

“He said, hey, our phones actually went down for the day, so unfortunately we couldn’t give you the call. But because you’ve written so much in your notes, we’re willing to just accept you from there if you want to come in.”

He came in on May 6th. He has barely left since.

He trains at Relentless under Jake Navarro, Fox, JXT, Sid Parker, and Erica Reid. This is a roster of trainers he describes with the reverence of someone who cannot quite believe his luck. He is, he will readily admit, still very green. He has been doing this for eleven months. He has also, in that eleven months, won the school’s training championship which is awarded to whoever completes the most sessions in a given month. Not once, but five times.

“Last month, March, I had twenty-one sessions.”

He says this with the slightly guilty expression of someone who knows they’ve gone too far and would absolutely do it again.

“People call me a machine. People call me unstoppable. People were like, you should probably share the award. I was like, I just love wrestling that much.”

He drives from Ballarat to Melton, nearly fifty minutes each way, four days a week. He comes home from wrestling and watches wrestling. He talks to his friends about wrestling. He studies footage of his own matches, fan footage from his debut, looking for what he could have done differently, how he engaged with the crowd, what his entrance could have been, how not to get blown up so quickly.

“I study it down to the T. Like, I love professional wrestling.”

Taking the Bear for a walk

Bruno the Kodiak is, in real life, a quiet and anxious person. He doesn’t naturally interact with people. He is, by his own description, someone who kept to himself.

The Kodiak is not that person. And yet the Kodiak is not, either, a fiction.

“There’s not that much difference between the Kodiak Bruno and my actual self. It’s literally just me turned up to one hundred. Maybe even one hundred and ten percent.”

The bear gimmick came together at Relentless, shaped partly by Sid Parker, who helped Bruno understand what the character actually was. They call it taking the bear for a walk. The idea is that Bruno, the quiet and anxious and contained Bruno, has something sleeping inside him. A hibernating version of himself that, once woken, is a different proposition entirely.

“Once it’s woken up, it’s game time.”

The character works because it’s true. It’s not an invention but an excavation. The anger that reads as animalistic in the ring is the same passion that drives him to train twenty-one sessions in a month, to save for a year to go to WrestleMania, to write a long paragraph about himself to a wrestling school and wait, heart in mouth, for them to call back.

“It’s just me as a burning ball of passion and love and energy. And then, because you keep poking the bear, because you keep pestering it, keep prodding it, it becomes an angry ball of energy.”

He describes wrestling as something that has given him somewhere to be himself without being belittled for it. The ring is, he says, a place where it’s safe to be Bruno.

“I just get to unleash whatever is inside of me. This passion that I can freely go: hey, I am here, I want to do good, and I hope you guys can see that and reciprocate it back, so we’re both feeding each other.”

The night the curtain opened

Before the official debut, there was a first training match. Erica Reid, he says her name with audible gratitude, gave him his first match against Nate Hunter at the school. There were three people watching.

“To me, it felt like three hundred, because of the amount of reactions that was going on between everyone involved.”

Then came April 17th, 2026. The debut. He had brought a bus down from Ballarat with around thirty-five people who had come specifically for him. Add the friends from Melton, the friends from Frankston, the coworkers, the family, the people he had met at shows while helping with ring crew. Add the people from Relentless who had watched him train for eleven months and were there to see what that training had become.

He had planned an entrance. He had choreographed it. He stood at the curtain convinced that nothing was going to happen when he walked out, that all those months of training and driving and early mornings and sore muscles were going to be met with silence.

Then the curtain opened and the roar hit him.

“It made me lose sight of what I was supposed to be doing in my entrance. I had this whole entrance planned and none of it came through. I just went based on feeling.”

He does not seem remotely disappointed about this.

“It was an incredible experience and I loved every second of it. There’s no feeling like professional wrestling. It’s a completely different feeling when you transition from a fan to being a professional wrestler. It’s unlike any feeling in the world.”

He had also, before he went out, written something on his wrist. Two words. Hidden by tape, invisible to the crowd, not visible in the footage. A private dedication, one for Jungle Cat, who had been his first trainer before he passed away, and one for someone else he had lost. Guides, he calls them.

“I hope I did them proud.”

The Bear Nation and the merch

He is twenty-four years old, has been a professional wrestler for about three weeks, and already has merch! Multiple designs. His mother has a Cricut machine at home and has been putting his logos onto shirts, making stickers, producing a range for a fan base that is, he admits, still working out what to call itself.

He designed the logos himself. He’s self-taught on Photoshop and Premiere Pro, after an application to RMIT didn’t work out.

“I tried to apply for uni, but they needed year twelve completion and unfortunately I got expelled in my final year.”

He says this with the matter-of-fact acceptance of someone who has made peace with a thing and moved on from it. The self-teaching filled the gap. The skills transferred.

The fan name is still under discussion. He has workshopped Brodiacs, the Cubs, the Cub Tribe, Bear Nation.

“I’m still workshopping with the fans’ support. If anyone comes up with something, I’ll definitely listen.”

He also edited his own theme song. At the beginning, before the music kicks in, there are claw slashes and a bear growl.

“It’s to make sure people know, oh, the bear character’s coming out. Here we go.”

These are, he knows, small details. He also knows they’re not small at all.

“It’s those little things that establish you as a character. The dumb small things like the sound effects when you’re coming out. That’s what makes people go, oh, this is the bear guy.”

The dreams he keeps ticking off

Ask Bruno what it would take for him to feel like he’d made it, and he gives an answer that catches you slightly off guard.

“I feel like I’ve already made it now.”

He’s not being dismissive of the question. He’s being precise. He thinks about his life as a series of dreams that he sets and then accomplishes: New York in 2021, Las Vegas and WrestleMania in 2025, training started, debut made. Each one was, at some point, impossible-seeming. Each one happened anyway.

“It just keeps changing. What the dreams are, what to go for from there.”

The next tier is forming. He wants to win a championship: a real one, he adds, given that he has technically already won a championship, being the school’s most-sessions award, five times over. He wants to work every state and territory in Australia. He wants to go overseas to America, Japan, the UK, which has been a fascination since he first got into independent wrestling. He mentions, only half-joking, that wrestling in every continent would be pretty cool.

“It would be pretty hard for Antarctica, but you never know.”

He is twenty-four. He has time. He also does not intend to waste it.

“I’m hoping to do at least some of those dreams before I turn 30. Like, look what I did in just under a year. Being able to train and go to America and being able to debut. Now we’ve got the ball. We’re just going to keep running with it.”

He has also been warned about the five-year mark. Its the point at which, JXT tells him, the passion starts to get harder to sustain. He has filed this away carefully.

“You can see so many people who don’t even wrestle today, who definitely could have still kept going. They were so talented. But because they lost the passion and drive, we unfortunately don’t get to see them anymore. I hope I don’t get that way.”

He pauses, and something flickers across his face that is part self-awareness and part the particular stubbornness of someone who has been proving people wrong, including himself, for the past year.

“I’ve got a long way to go. And I hope I reach really far. I hope I reach the zenith of everything.”

The road home

Every morning since his debut, Bruno has driven from Ballarat to Melbourne which is nearly an hour each way. He puts his theme song on repeat. He plays it the entire drive. He relives standing at the curtain. He relives the moment the roar hit him.

“I cannot wait to look at my Spotify at the end of the year. The Spotify Wrapped, just to see how many times I have played my theme song. I could be like, damn, what a mark. But it was so worth it.”

He knows he is chasing a feeling. He knows you never get a debut pop twice. He knows the road from Ballarat is long and the body gets tired and the passion, one day, will be harder to find than it is right now.

He drives anyway. He plays the song anyway.

The bear is awake. He has no intention of letting it sleep.

What he wants people to say

He doesn’t really believe in hanging up the boots. It’s definitely not as a future he can picture now. He trains like someone who intends to go until the body simply refuses to climb into the ring ever again.

“If I’m ever not nervous for a match,” he says, “maybe then it would be time. But I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. I’m always nervous. I’m always anxious when I’m coming into a matchup. But then you just have to lock in and go for it.”

What he wants, eventually, is simple enough. He wants to have been good. He wants to have put smiles on faces. He wants to have been, for someone, the thing that TNA on his auntie’s pay TV was for him.

“I want to be remembered like that one kid, little Timmy in row forty, way yonder, who goes, wow, he was cool. I want to be inspired to wrestle because of that guy.”

He thinks about this.

“Being an inspiration is really what I’m trying to strive to be.”

There is something quietly moving about sitting across from someone who is still so new to all of this and hearing them talk about what they want to leave behind. He has had one match. He has driven fifty minutes each way to train four days a week for eleven months. He has a bus full of people from Ballarat who came out on a Friday night just to cheer for him.

He is, in his own way, already doing the thing he wants to be remembered for. The legacy starts in row forty, but it starts with showing up. And Bruno the Kodiak shows up.

---

Bruno the Kodiak trains at Relentless School of Pro Wrestling and competes for Mayhem Pro. He can be found on social media and will, he confirms, be keeping a very close eye on his Spotify Wrapped this December.

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