Heart of the Nation: Thornbury 3071
Luke Guyett, a mild-mannered family man from Melbourne, has an unusual alter ego: Slex, aka The Business, a warrior hero who slays villains in the wrestling ring.
By day, Luke Guyett is a mild-mannered dad from Dingley Village in suburban Melbourne – a quiet, humble bloke who loves his family, barracks for Essendon and works at a firm that hires out dome marquees for public events. But come the weekend, under the mantle of his wrestling alter ego Slex, aka “The Business”, he’s a supremely confident warrior hero, ripped and preening, who swaggers to the ring in sunglasses and a suit jacket studded with thousands of sequins and rhinestones.
Slex will step into that ring, take off his sparkly jacket and sunnies – this moment always elicits a roar from the crowd – then for the next 15 minutes or so put on a thrilling show with his opponent, exchanging chokeslams, guillotine drops, airplane spins, spinebusters, pancake slams, piledrivers and the like; he’s pictured performing a moonsault – a backflip off the top rope, to land on his supine opponent. There’s always a hero and a villain in pro wrestling matches (Slex is usually the hero in front of his home crowd); the action is roughly scripted, and the ending predetermined, but the big hits and the madcap acrobatics are real, and they hurt. Think of it as a violent soap opera, Guyett says.
He recalls the exact moment when all this started. He was 11 years old, a reserved kid who loved to act, when the US wrestling show WCW Nitro came on the telly. “I was instantly hooked,” he says. “I just thought, ‘I need to do that.’ He watched every wrestling DVD he could get his hands on, started training at 13, and had his first match at 16. His stellar career has since taken him all over Australia, and on tours to Japan and the US. The 36-year-old is pictured here by Owen Jones, a part-time statistician for the AFL and VFL who has a passion for photographing the Australian wrestling scene.
Guyett’s two kids, aged five and three, will be in the crowd for the first time at Melbourne City Wrestling’s season opener at the Thornbury Theatre on February 11. Perhaps they’ll see him win with one of his signature “finishing moves”, such as the Slexecution – a spinning kick to the head. Before delivering the coup de grâce, he will often put his sunnies back on. That’s just how Slex “The Business” rolls. “The ring is his office,” Guyett says of his character. “It’s where he does his best work.”
See more of Owen Jones’ photography at instagram.com/digital_beard and digitalbeardphotography.tumblr.com