John Wayne Parr

John Wayne Parr is an Australian boxer and kickboxer known as “The Gunslinger”. He competed in Muay Thai boxing and won an incredible 10 World Championship titles. He gained wider fame after finishing runner-up in the 2008 reality series The Contender Asia, which was broadcast in Australia, the UK, and the USA and was the subject of the 2011 documentary Blessed with Venom.

Originally from Australia’s Gold Coast, Parr's interest in combat sports began at 11 when he began training in taekwondo. Aged just 12, he won a silver medal at the state championships, but within a couple of years, had turned to kickboxing. By his late teens, he had won both the national and South Pacific championship titles. In the mid-1990s, he relocated to Thailand, the home of Muay Thai boxing, to train. He remained there until the end of the decade, establishing himself as one of the top fighters in the country (he was voted Thailand’s Best Foreign Fighter in 1997) and gained the nickname “The Gunslinger” thanks to his signature move of imitating a gunfighter drawing his weapon at the end of the pre-match ritual. His biography The Fighter: The Legendary Life of an Australian Champion, co-authored with Jarrod Boyle was published with Hachette Australia in 2024.