The world's end: Doomslayer and the dream he wrote in his yearbook
Doomslayer is forty-one years old, started training at thirty-six, has wrestled for fourteen different companies across Australia, taken a superkick from James Storm, and is currently exiled from the only wrestling company in Tasmania by his own choice.
Image credit: ASHJO Photography
He is, by the character’s own design, a bloody idiot. He is also, beneath the pink gear and the physical comedy and the frog splashes into empty canvas, one of the more thoughtful people in Australian indie wrestling. He sat down with In the Gorilla Position to talk about a twenty-year gap between a school yearbook and a wrestling debut, the character who was born from a British sitcom, what it means to make it when you’re the furthest from everywhere, and why he keeps getting on planes.
In his grade ten yearbook, in the year 2000, there were two questions. Dream job: be a wrestler. Wildest desire: be a wrestler.
“And then just a shade under twenty years later, I have my debut wrestling match.”
He says this with the particular satisfaction of someone who has both fulfilled a dream and understands how ridiculous it is that it took that long. He is sitting in Tasmania, the island at the bottom of Australia, where there is one wrestling company, six shows a year, and no alternative. If he wants to wrestle, he gets on a plane.
He has gotten on a lot of planes.
The Name
Ask Doomslayer where the name comes from and you get a question back: what do you think it’s from?
Most people say the video game. Doom. The Doomguy, renamed Doomslayer in the 2016 reboot. Reasonable guess. Wrong answer.
“I stole the name from Bottom. The Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson live shows.”
Specifically, from a bit in their live show Hooligans Island, where someone is talking about an eagle.
“It’s like, come here, Thunderwing Doomslayer. And at that point I thought if I’m ever a wrestler, my name is going to be Doomslayer.”
This was at least ten years before he ever stepped into a ring. The name just sat there, waiting. When TCW (Tasmanian Championship Wrestling) finally said you’re wrestling next month, you’ve gotta have a name, he had his answer immediately.
He started under a mask as El Hijo de Doomslayer. This was partly character evolution, partly practicality, since he was also doing referee duties and the mask let him do both without blowing his cover. Eventually he took the mask off, put on some pink, and became just Doomslayer. Not the most dramatic evolution, he acknowledges cheerfully, but it’s something.
“It’s hard to define what Doomslayer is until you have history. Once I’ve got things I’ve done, like I’ve failed at or whatever then I’ve got something to talk about.”
The island problem
Tasmania has one wrestling company. Tasmanian Championship Wrestling runs roughly six shows a year. Every show draws at least two hundred people, with their signature Annihilation event regularly pulling over three hundred. By Australian indie standards, those are not bad numbers at all.
But six shows a year means five or six bookings at most, and not necessarily on every card. For the first couple of years of his career, that was the entire scope of Doomslayer’s wrestling world. Which meant that his version of the five-year hump (the point at which many wrestlers start to feel the limits of their momentum) might hit differently than it does for someone in Melbourne or Sydney.
“I feel like the five-year hump might be coming up for me,” he says. “Because the first two and a bit years, you wrestle five or six times a year in Tasmania. You’re not necessarily on every show.”
What changed things was getting on the mainland. And that took a while.
“It took my eleventh company I messaged before I got booked interstate.”
He sent out Dropbox folders with photos, promos, match clips, heel match and face match to promotion after promotion, and got nowhere. The eleventh one said yes. Shout out, he says, to AWF, who gave him his first interstate booking and started everything that followed.
Fourteen companies later, the folder has proved its worth.
The exile
At the time of this conversation, Doomslayer is technically banned from TCW. He cannot wrestle for the only wrestling promotion in his home state. This is, he explains, entirely his own doing.
He had been in a feud running almost a year. He was meant to win it. The storyline had been building toward him as the victor.
“And then I said, how about I lose that match, and it’s a Loser Leaves Town match, and I just go away for at least a year.”
This, understandably, complicated some plans. The response from the bookers: that kind of screws up some things we had for you.
“I need the break.”
He had found himself getting too deep inside the anxieties of the wrestling world and caring too much about everything that was happening around him. The solution was to write himself out entirely, in the most dramatic way the storyline would allow, and step back.
The original plan for the time away was to also play Australian rules football with his brother at a small country club level. Low pressure. Family time. The team had been so short of players in previous years they’d had to forfeit games.
“I’ll wrestle a little bit interstate, play football with my brother. I’m way too old to do it, but I can do this.”
The team, freed of its personnel shortage problem by the sudden arrival of new recruits, proceeded to win games and fill its roster. Doomslayer played one match, got dropped from the second, and does not expect to return.
“Everyone wants to play this year.”
So the football plan collapsed. The break from TCW continues. He is spending it getting on planes.
James Storm and the Cairns leg
The most recent plane took him to Cairns, for Pro Wrestling Power. Two nights. The first night, a singles match against Marshall Sampson. The second night, a three-way tag match.
Featuring James Storm.
“I took a superkick from James Storm. That’s not something I ever thought would happen in my life.”
He had originally been booked for a singles match against Johnny Hardwood on night two. The promoter came to him with a different offer: do you want to do this tag match instead?
His first instinct was no. A singles match is so much easier. Way less to plan. Way less moving parts. But.
“These opportunities don’t come along ever. So I’m going to do this.”
He did. He took the superkick. He loved every second of it.
This is the shape of Doomslayer’s career now. He has wrestled Xyon Quinn, who used to be in WWE and was part of the tag champions in All Japan Pro Wrestling. He defended the TCW North Esk Championship in Queensland. He won the Extreme Capital Championship Wrestling heavyweight title in Queanbeyan which is a place he’d never heard of, near Canberra and held it for approximately two minutes before someone cashed in, and counts it among his proudest achievements. He went to Rockhampton for Wrestling Allegiance and got to face Dick Riggs, a fellow Tasmanian and one of his favourite Australian wrestlers.
“I never would have gone to these places if it wasn’t for wrestling.”
He tries to make a holiday of each trip with his wife, who has been, he says, remarkably patient with the whole enterprise. The Blue Mountains for AWF. Rockhampton. Cairns. Next, he is booked for May 23rd in another part of the country he has never been to. After that, Singapore and Japan on holiday. Strictly holiday with his wife, he’s at pains to clarify, because he would not dream of taking a day away from a trip they have planned to go find a ring to fall around in. She has been very patient over the years.
The map of Australia keeps filling in.
The character is an idiot
Doomslayer is, by his own characterisation, a bloody idiot. He means this as a compliment.
“He’s a bit of an idiot. He likes to be the butt of a joke. Physical humour.”
He tells two stories that explain the character better than any description could.
The first is from Alpha Pro Wrestling, a match against Blake Malik which is one of his favourite matches. They’re up on the top rope. Doomslayer has been poking his opponent in the eye throughout the match, cheating steadily. He goes for the eye poke again. Blake blocks it, turns it around, pokes Doomslayer back. Doomslayer reaches up to grab his eyes in pain, releases his grip on his opponent, remembers he is standing on the second rope with nothing to hold onto, and takes the big bump to the canvas below.
“So I take the big bump from the top into the ring. Like an idiot.”
The second is from a match at Alpha against John Stop Action, whose gimmick involves freezing when someone says stop and resuming when someone says action. Doomslayer, wearing stolen pieces of Stop Action’s gear, finds himself increasingly susceptible to the same command. The match builds to its climactic stupid moment: Doomslayer up on the top rope, ready to deliver a frog splash, completely under the spell of Stop Action’s power.
Stop calls action with the crowd: three, two, one
“And then I just do this huge frog splash straight to the middle of the ring.”
He is clearly delighted by both of these. More delighted, if he is honest, than by many of the things that actually worked.
“Sometimes I just want to pop the boys. Sometimes I’m more willing to entertain the people backstage or the person I’m wrestling against. Like, this is going to be so fun, I’m going to do this thing, they don’t know I’m going to do it, it’s going to make them break character.”
The character, he acknowledges, is genuinely him but not in the easy sense that it’s him turned up to twelve. It’s more that Doomslayer took a long time to have definition because definition requires history. Once he had been to places and failed at things and done matches and told stories, he had material to build with.
“A lot of what my character is, in quotation marks, is just my experience as a wrestler.”
He attended an online seminar with KrackerJak through Alpha Pro and asked, during the Q&A, how you maintain a consistent character when different promotions want different things from you? Face here, heel there, a role-player everywhere. The answer was about core tenets. What would Doomslayer never do? What is always true regardless of the context?
“A key aspect of what Doomslayer is: he’s a bloody idiot. And he likes making people laugh.”
Everything else can flex. The idiot is constant.
Great nights
He knows a match has been great, he says, by how quickly he’s moving toward the person he just wrestled post-match.
“The quicker you’re trying to find the person you wrestled, you know how good it was. When it’s like, give him a hug, get a high five, everyone’s like, oh, that was sick. That’s that sort of thing.”
Two moments stand out.
The first was TCW Annihilation, some years ago. He was the North Esk Champion. Four-way match. The crowd was beginning to turn on him, treating him as a heel. His opponent, Deano, was the overwhelming fan favourite. Both of them hit their finishers at almost the same moment. Doomslayer got the cover. The referee, not seeing Deano’s pin, counted three. Doomslayer retained.
“The crowd. Oh my God. They wanted to take my head off. They booed me so much. And I was just face to face with Deano, holding the belt.”
In the moment he had an impulse. He did not follow it. He has regretted it since.
“I think I should just hit you (Deano) in the face. With the belt. Right now.”
Deano talked him out of it. No, no, you don’t need to do it. But Doomslayer remains convinced that one shot with the belt, unprompted, unplanned, would have taken a huge moment and made it legendary. You can hear the regret in how he tells it.
The second is a more recent match at MXW. A twenty-minute ironman-style match with a visible countdown clock, featuring Doomslayer, Miss Fortune, Tommy A, and Max Kelly. Multiple timed intervals, cues to hit at the five, ten, and fifteen-minute marks, the constant anxiety of not knowing if you’re running ahead of the clock or behind it.
“Man, this is … what if we get to the end and we’ve run out of time? What if we’ve got way too much time?”
They improvised their way through it, constantly checking the clock, making adjustments on the fly. At the finish, Miss Fortune hit a moonsault on all three of them simultaneously to retain the championship. The clock showed eight seconds.
“Holy shit. That couldn’t have gone any better. I don’t know how that happened. So, yeah. That’s one of my favourite matches because I had no idea how it was going to work out.”
Made it
He thinks he has made it. He says this without irony, and with a specificity that makes it clear he has thought about what the phrase actually means.
“I have done everything and more.”
The list is significant. The James Storm superkick. The cage match alongside Xyon Quinn. The Queanbeyan championship, even if only for two-minuts. The Blue Mountains for AWF. Rockhampton. Cairns. The fact that there are now multiple companies around Australia for whom he is simply on the booking list. They send the dates, he says which ones he can work, he is on the show.
“I’ve got options. I’m appreciated at so many of these different companies now that they send through the dates and I say which ones I can work and they’ll put me on the show.”
He does not have grand aspirations toward the bigger promotions. He is comfortable where he is.
“I keep getting asked about MCW, PWA, EPW; all these bigger ones. I’m fine where I am. I’m friends with so many people. I’ve been so many places around Australia that I never would have gone to.”
There is one remaining goal inside TCW. Not the championship, necessarily, though he would not turn it down. He wants a singles main event. He feels like it was within reach before the Loser Leaves Town decision took him out of the picture. He watches the shows from exile, aware that plans have moved on without him, aware that the calendar is finite and the slots fill up.
“If they dangle the carrot longer, I’ve got to keep doing it longer.”
He seems genuinely unbothered by this. The dangling carrot is, in its way, the point.
What wrestling gives him
He has been a creative person his whole life doing podcasts, home movies, video editing, audio production. Most of those outlets have faded. Wrestling is what replaced them.
“There’s only so much of that you can do as a wrestler when you’re just fulfilling a role for people. But I’ve got to put my creativity somewhere. That’s something creatively I can input into. That’s what wrestling is for me.”
He does a promo for every show he works. Every one except the very first booking where he was added to the card at the last minute and simply didn’t have the chance. He used to dread the microphone and having to talk, having to do it in front of people but that dread has entirely reversed.
“I love doing promos now. Being able to help tell a story. This is something I can control. As long as I stay within whatever restrictions I’ve got, you get a bit of leeway. And that way it’s not just what you do between the bells. You give the audience and the company something.”
It is, he believes, a significant part of why he keeps getting invited back.
“I get a bit annoyed when wrestlers come down to Tassie and just don’t do a promo. A little promo? Seriously?”
He pauses, reconsidering.
“Some people probably shouldn’t.”
The best advice he got
The best advice he ever received came from Diablo, the original owner of TCW.
Never go out there and do something you’re not comfortable doing.
It sounds simple. In practice, he explains, it is the single most important thing a wrestler can understand. If you put someone up on the top rope to do something they are not ready for, they are not going to do it cleanly. They are going to panic. They are going to turn their body in a funny way at the wrong moment. They are going to get hurt, or hurt someone else.
“If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, there’s going to be other bookings.”
He extends this outward. Trust your judgment about places and people too, not just moves. If something feels off about a situation whether it is a show, a promoter, a context. There will be other shows.
“You don’t need to wrestle every show that’s offered to you. You don’t need to go everywhere. This is supposed to be fun.”
He has had experiences where he didn’t follow that instinct. He is not specific about them. He does not need to be.
What he wants people to say
When it’s over whenever over turns out to be, and he is emphatically not planning for retirement; Birdman is sixty-something and still going, and Doomslayer is only forty-one, he has a clear picture of the legacy he is building toward.
“He looked like a wrestler. He was good. He was good at it. I had fond memories of watching that person wrestle.”
From his co-workers: he was good to work with.
From the promoters: he added something to their show.
He is notably uninterested in being remembered as a nice guy. Not because he wants to be remembered as difficult, but because nice guy is the thing you say when you don’t have anything else. He wants the other things to come first, and the nice guy to be the footnote at the end.
“I don’t want people to say he was a nice guy. It’s got to be all the other stuff. And he was a nice guy.”
In his grade ten yearbook, twenty-five years ago, he wrote the same answer to two different questions. In the year 2000, on the island at the bottom of Australia, with no idea that wrestling existed there and no plausible way to imagine making it happen, he wrote it down anyway.
The gap between the yearbook and the debut was twenty years.
The gap between the debut and the superkick from James Storm was less than five.
He is still getting on planes.
Doomslayer wrestles for Tasmanian Championship Wrestling and across the Australian indie scene. He is currently exiled from TCW. He can be found on Instagram at @doomslayer_pw.
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