The pest controller who learned to stop taking wrestling so seriously

Mason Stoneheart has a very simple measure of success.

It is not a contract. It is not a belt, although the belts have finally started arriving. It is not even a particular spot on a card, a dream opponent, or the kind of mythical overseas tour that Australian wrestlers talk about with equal parts hope and realism.

For Mason, success is much smaller than that. Smaller, but not lesser.

“If I can go out there and deliver a performance that gets across what the booker wants from me and entertains that crowd, I’ve done my job,” he says.

That might sound modest, maybe even too modest, until you realise it is the kind of answer that only comes after years of chasing, learning, failing, adjusting, and eventually finding peace with the thing you love. Stoneheart entered 2026, his seventh year as an active wrestler, having never won a championship. For a long time, that fact might have sat heavier than he wanted to admit. Then something changed. He stopped treating championships as proof that he belonged.

“I basically just went, I don’t care,” he says. “I don’t care if I never win a championship. It’s not my source of satisfaction.”

Then, naturally, wrestling did what wrestling does. As soon as he stopped gripping so tightly, it gave him three titles.

There is a lesson in that, although Mason is careful not to present himself as some all-knowing veteran sage. He is 30, realistic about the Australian scene, honest about his own ceiling, and more interested in helping the next wave avoid some of the traps he stepped in than pretending he has solved the whole business. If there is a theme that runs through his story, it is not glory. It is perspective.

That perspective was hard-earned.

From WWE recaps to Jeff Hardy: the moment wrestling hooked him

Stoneheart grew up in the generation where wrestling was simply around. It was what kids at primary school watched, what floated through weekend television, what existed in recap shows like WWE Experience. He remembers Goldberg. He remembers Batista becoming his guy at 10 or 11. He remembers the Undertaker and Randy Orton feud in 2005, all “spooky pookie phenom bollocks,” as he lovingly puts it, catching his imagination in exactly the way wrestling is supposed to catch a kid’s imagination.

But the moment that sealed it was Jeff Hardy.

Specifically, Jeff Hardy launching himself off the Raw set onto Randy Orton.

“I saw that and my eyes just about popped out of my head,” Mason says. “I could not believe or wrap my head around that a human being actually jumps like that.”

That was the gateway. Not technique. Not booking. Not psychology. Just a human being doing something that looked impossible.

Like many fans of his generation, Mason understood the Hardy Boyz first through feeling. Matt Hardy may have had the stronger in-ring body of work, he says, and may have seemed to want it more. But Jeff had something harder to define.

“The nickname Charismatic Enigma was not just a nickname,” he says. “Jeff just had that aura.”

Years later, Mason would begin training in October 2017, stepping into a part of Melbourne wrestling that he now talks about with the fondness usually reserved for places that were both formative and deeply imperfect. His first year was spent, as he puts it, “hidden away” in NAW, George Julio’s old promotion out of Albion.

Starting out at NAW, George Julio’s gym, and Melbourne wrestling’s old school pathway

NAW, in Mason’s telling, was not glamorous. It was not the polished image of independent wrestling that promotions increasingly try to present now. It was rougher, dingier, stranger. He calls it “the redheaded stepchild of the Melbourne wrestling scene,” but he also says he was one of the few people who loved it.

“It was the kind of dingy carny vibe,” he says. “But I loved it.”

To Stoneheart, NAW mattered because George Julio’s gym mattered. For a long time, he says, you did not really make your way through Australian wrestling without passing through George’s world at some point. JXT started there. Jake Navarro started there. A long list of Melbourne names used it as a springboard before moving on, sometimes with gratitude and sometimes with a few choice words on the way out.

Mason does not romanticise it as perfect. But he does defend its place in the ecosystem.

“It was more of a springboard platform for guys who were just starting out,” he says. “There’s a whole litany of talent who have been prodigious everywhere in the Melbourne scene for years, and they got their start under George Julio at NAW.”

His first day walking into George’s gym was also his first meeting with someone he jokingly calls his “wrestle dad”: Mad Dog. Mad Dog was taking training that day, and for Mason, stepping into that room was the scales falling from his eyes.

“This is what it’s like to enter this world,” he remembers thinking.

Why Mason Stoneheart calls Mad Dog his “Wrestle Dad”

Mad Dog remains high on Mason’s list of people he would love to wrestle. There are others too. Mike Kaos, who he has shared a three-way no-ring deathmatch with but never a one-on-one. Kobe Reid, jokingly described as his nephew. Gore, who was Mason’s second ever opponent and, by Stoneheart’s recollection, absolutely mauled him. KrackerJak, who he admits is probably unrealistic, but would make his career. There is affection in the way Mason talks about these names, but also a working wrestler’s clear-eyed understanding that dream matches are only partly about dreams. Timing matters. Politics matter. Availability matters. Whether you are on someone’s radar matters.

And then there are the matches that already happened but still feel unfinished.

Nate Hunter, Kryal Castle, and the match Mason remembers mostly for sunscreen

He wrestled Nate Hunter at Alpha Pro Wrestling’s King of the Castle, a huge one-night tournament show held in the jousting arena at Kryal Castle. It was a first-round match, six or seven minutes, and by Mason’s account, it was easy and fun. Nate was easy to work with, happy to throw ideas at him and trust him to deliver.

Still, Mason’s clearest memory of the match is not the work.

It is sunscreen.

“When we went on, the sun was still out and I’m a pasty white boy,” he says. “So I put some sunscreen on and I spent that whole match with sunscreen in my eyes.”

He would like another one with Nate under different circumstances. Less squinting, presumably.

That mix of humour and self-awareness is central to who Mason Stoneheart has become as a performer. It was not always there. His first year as a babyface, he says, was tough because he had almost no character. He was the classic white-meat good guy: there to wrestle, high-five kids, and hit his moves.

“Funnily enough,” he says, “did not get over very well.”

The way he explains it now, heel work came easier at first because it gave him something to do. It is easier, he says, to make people hate you than to make them like you. Working heel taught him structure. It taught him tag-team psychology during his time in The Grey, a faction that presented as mobsters or gangsters. It taught him what he wanted from a babyface when he was working heat on them. Then, when he eventually turned babyface again, he understood the role properly.

“Sell!” he says. “Show people what you’re going through. They will be with you every step of the way if you give them the right cues.”

The Grey is also where the Stoneheart name came from. It was, in his words, a more performed version of himself. A darker character. A character he could make work for a few years because he is tall enough and physically imposing enough to create an immediate intimidation factor. But it had a shelf life.

“If it’s not a genuine part of you that you’re showing, it has a shelf life,” he says.

Eventually, the darker edge ran out of steam. Then came the brainstorm that would change everything: Mason Stoneheart, pest controller.

This is not some abstract gimmick pulled from a list. Mason’s full-time job really is in pest control.

“That’s where the gimmick comes from,” he says.

And from that real-life job came the thing that unlocked him. Somewhere along the way, someone realised that the best version of Mason Stoneheart might simply be Mason Stoneheart: a self-described “wacky ass corny white dude,” a “silly dickhead,” a bloke who can make the crowd care about him trying to kill a toy rat.

It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. That is the point.

At Peak Pro Wrestling, Mason found himself in the kind of wrestling that only works if everyone involved commits to the bit with complete sincerity. When Peak launched, he says, the idea was that it would be a place to get reps. Weekly shows in Australia are almost unheard of, and the concept had value. But the product itself quickly became something stranger and looser.

“At first it was like, how’s this going to work?” he says. “Then you see what the product is and it’s like, it’s a farce. It’s all over the place.”

Then he understood it. Treat it like the closest thing to working PWG that he was ever going to get. It was an in-joke for fans willing to go along with it. He was wrestling a rat because he was a pest controller. That is not something to be handled with po-faced seriousness.

“The more you lean into how preposterously stupid it is, the more fun you’re going to have,” he says.

Not everyone gets it. Mason knows that. Some people walk into a Peak show and wonder what the hell they are watching. But the people who do get it make the whole thing worthwhile. There is a group of fans, he says, who are always in the front row, fully invested in the year-long story of him trying to kill a toy rat.

That storyline eventually led to Terry Shaw getting Mason high enough, in storyline logic, for Stoneheart to realise that the rat was never the real problem. Now they are tag champions.

“I’m sure some other cooked idea is going to come along to spice that up again,” he says.

Australian wrestling, burnout, and why Mason believes perspective matters

The silliness matters because it connects to a deeper philosophy. Mason does not like over-planning most matches. He will adapt to whoever he is working with, and if someone needs structure, he will give them structure. If he is in there with someone inexperienced, he will plan more because newer wrestlers can get lost. But generally, he prefers to leave space.

“If you get lost in your mind trying to remember what spot comes next, you’re not in the moment the way you should be,” he says.

That belief comes from experience. There are things he does now, instinctive responses to the environment, that he simply did not have in his first year. He learned them on the job. He believes there should never be a match where you do not learn something new about yourself or wrestling.

The dangerous ones, he says, are those who think they are done learning.

He has seen it before: someone walks into training, picks things up quickly, starts believing they know everything, stops being teachable, and then disappears from the business within months.

“Wrestling is a business of respect,” he says. “If you don’t show proper respect, you’re not going to last because people aren’t going to want you on their shows.”

At the same time, wrestling requires ego. You almost cannot do it without one. You have to believe you belong in the ring. You have to believe people should watch you. You have to believe your body, personality, timing, and imagination are worth paying attention to. The trick is knowing when to turn that ego up and when to turn it down.

Mason’s relationship with bookers reflects that same pragmatism. He is not one of those wrestlers who refuses ideas because he thinks he knows better.

“They’re the boss,” he says. “I treat it like any job. You do what the boss tells you to do.”

That does not mean every idea is good. It means his job is to make it work as well as he can. Different bookers require different approaches. Some have a clear vision and will not budge. Others have a general direction and are open to a pitch that might spark something new. Part of being a working wrestler is learning how to talk to each of them.

There is craft in that. There is also survival.

Australian independent wrestling, as Mason sees it, is not a place where many people can make a full-time living. In fact, he goes further.

“I believe it’s impossible to work as a wrestler in Australia full time,” he says. “I don’t think it can be done.”

He would be happy to be proven wrong, but his view is blunt: there simply is not enough money behind professional wrestling in this country. If you want to make a living, you probably have to go overseas.

The Japan dream: why one match overseas would complete the career

For Mason, the dream has always been Japan.

“My career goal since I started has just been to wrestle in Japan,” he says. “Even if it’s just one match, that’s the goal. If I do that, career complete.”

He once asked Brian Kendrick at a seminar what he would need to do to go to Japan and actually impress people, not just go for the sake of going. Kendrick’s advice, Mason says, was fairly direct: he was already halfway there because he was a big white guy, and that gets over. The rest was fundamentals, moveset, and continuing to improve.

There is nothing in the works yet. But Japan remains on the radar.

Even so, Mason’s definition of success has softened into something more grounded than the fantasy of being discovered. He is 30. He knows major wrestling companies tend to look for younger talent. Rather than resenting that, he seems at peace with becoming someone who can pass on what he knows.

“I’ll happily be the guy who knows the shit that I know here and can help the young guys starting out get to that level if that’s what they want,” he says.

He does not call himself a teacher. Not really. He does not run classes. He does not go out of his way to instruct. But he gives feedback to people who are open to it, and he hopes they get something useful from it. Maybe that makes him a source of creative critique more than a coach.

What he admires in good teachers is the ability to recognise that different people learn in different ways. Mason himself is hands-on. He learns by doing, by feeling his way through something. Others need the physics explained. Others need the dynamics broken down. The best teachers, he says, can adjust the same lesson to different minds.

“I don’t know if that’s something that can be learned,” he says, “or if that’s just something innately that some people have.”

Burnout is another thing he has learned to recognise in others, even if he has been lucky enough not to experience it deeply himself. His low-bar definition of success may have protected him. He is satisfied by fun, performance, connection. He has never stopped having fun.

But he has seen wrestlers who want more from the business start to fray. He has seen frustration build. His advice is simple: step away for a minute. Take a few months off. Watch the wrestling you grew up loving. Reconnect with the thing that made you fall in love with it before you knew how to pick it apart.

Because once you become a wrestler, you never watch wrestling the same way again.

Mason cannot consume as much wrestling as he used to. He sees too much now. The seams show. The choices stand out. But Japanese wrestling still gets him. Those big Japanese main-event matches still have a way of pulling him in, even when he can see what they are doing and how they are doing it.

“There will always come a point in those matches where they’ll get me,” he says. “Okay, I’m along for the ride now. You’ve got me.”

He names Misawa and Kobashi as matches he can watch over and over. They are not templates to copy directly, especially not if he is walking into Peak to wrestle a toy rat. But they are inspiration. He looks at that style and asks how he can scale it down to his level, his context, his place on a card. If he is walking into a title match, even a mid-card title match, he can carry a little of that feeling with him. He can try to get fans jumping at two-counts.

That, again, is the art.

Mason understands the argument around wrestling as art. Kenny Omega once stirred up discourse by calling it that, but Mason agrees with the idea.

“If you really look at it and analyse what we’re doing, we kind of are,” he says. “It’s physical theatre.”

It is also, for him, the kind of physical expression nothing else in his life can quite replace. Wrestling scratches an itch he does not think anything else could scratch in the same way. It is creative, physical, ridiculous, painful, communal, and addictive.

Sometimes very painful.

Thumbtacks, barbed wire, and the carpet strips he never wants to feel again

Mason is not afraid of deathmatch elements. He will do thumbtacks. He will do barbed wire. He is not scared to bleed. But glass is where he gets cautious, because one wrong scatter can open the wrong part of the body in the wrong way.

And carpet strips? No thanks.

A no-ring deathmatch with Jason ‘Krusher’Cole remains one of Mason’s favourite matches, scars and all. Krusher’s back was already in bad shape, Mason says, but he had a point to prove. That point involved Mason smashing a stool wrapped in barbed wire over his back repeatedly.

It also involved carpet strips bundled up like a kendo stick, spikes out.

“That is the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” Mason says.

There are levels.

That match with Krusher also connects back to NAW, because Crusher is one of the few people Mason says will happily talk fondly about the place. Ask Krusher about NAW, he says, and he will wax lyrical. Mason includes himself in that small club of people with fond memories of the strange, scrappy world where he began.

There are parts of the wider Australian scene Mason would like to see change. He does not name names. He does not need to. But he wishes things were less cliquish. He sees levels where people clearly have their group, and that group becomes the group. There is an exclusivity he does not think needs to exist.

“If everybody just booked on merit, it would be a much healthier scene mentally for people,” he says.

That is not bitterness so much as observation. Mason comes across as someone who has spent enough time inside dressing rooms to know how the machine works, but not so much time that he has lost affection for it. He can talk about cliques, burnout, money, and ego, then still light up at the thought of an entertaining match, a weird storyline, a front-row fan invested in a toy rat, or a dream opponent he may never get.

He can also laugh at himself.

Someone once told him they used to think he was scary because they had only seen him during The Grey run. Then they spoke to him for ten minutes and realised the truth.

“Oh no,” they said. “He’s just a dork.”

Mason owns that.

The scary version had a shelf life. The dorky pest controller appears to have legs. It works because it is closer to the truth. It works because the crowd can feel when something is real, even when the real thing is wrapped in absurdity. Especially then.

What Mason Stoneheart wants his wrestling legacy to be

By the end of the conversation, Mason is asked what he wants his legacy to be. His answer is, again, smaller than the question seems to demand.

“Probably just that I was an entertaining dude,” he says.

That would satisfy him. To know he gave people some entertainment. A distraction. A moment away from how heavy the world can feel.

“If I can just know that I have provided a little bit of entertainment and distraction from how shit the world is for a minute for some people, I’m happy.”

There is something quietly beautiful about that. In a business built on spectacle, Mason Stoneheart’s ambition is not to be immortal. It is to be useful. To make people laugh. To make them care. To help the younger wrestlers who want help. To keep learning. To maybe, one day, wrestle in Japan. To keep turning up, doing the job, and finding the joy in it.

He is a pest controller by trade and a wrestler by compulsion. A former dark mobster, a current babyface oddball, a man who has wrestled a rat and made people care. He is not pretending the Australian scene is easier than it is. He is not pretending wrestling owes him anything.

He is simply still here.

Still having fun.

Still squishing bugs.

You can find Mason Stoneheart on Instagram

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