So here's a thought: If a young man in Canada was more receptive to getting punched in the face, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers might not have a touchdown dance; Floyd Mayweather might be wearing giant gold medals around his neck as he walks to the ring (Olympic judging screwjobs notwithstanding); and wrestling superstars like John Cena and Daniel Bryan might be fighting over a towering trophy on Pay-Per-View in front of thousands upon thousands of fans.
But because that young man decided that he preferred shooting the leg to firing off jabs, Rodgers flashes his hands around his waist after big plays, Mayweather's entourage carries gold and leather over their heads, and superstars of professional wrestling get to wear giant, jewel-encrusted belts as proof that they're the biggest names in their business.
The man responsible for the belt craze is Reggie Parks: 80 years old, a now-retired veteran of the wrestling business in five decades, and the King of Belts.
Ironically, unless you're a hardcore wrestling fan, there's a good chance that you've never heard of Reggie Parks. By his own admission, he has no idea who owns the rights to the tape libraries his matches are featured in, and only three of his matches can be found on YouTube. It shouldn't be that surprising, considering he began his wrestling career in the 1950s at 16 years old. Born in the province of Alberta, Canada, Parks grew up as a farmboy, the youngest of four brothers. He got his start in the squared circle thanks to his amateur wrestling trainers, who would be found wrestling in preliminary matches on cards at the local sales pavilion. At the time, Alberta was the promotional territory of the legendary Stu Hart, patriarch of the Hart Wrestling Family and father to WWE champions Bret and Owen Hart—if there was wrestling going on there, you could bet that Hart had a hand in it.
Hart's reputation as a legitimate fighter (a "shooter" as Parks called him, with an accompanying gun-hand gesture) came out in his training. "We went down into the Hart Dungeon, and Stu laid this open-hand slap across my chest, over and over again; my chest was bright red," Parks says. After a flight out to a series of shows in Seattle, the wrestlers in the back wondered why Parks looked so worn out ... until he mentioned Hart's name. They quickly understood from there.
After a few years of regular bookings in Alberta, Parks joined up with a friend who got a deal working a carnival that traveled across the provinces to British Columbia, a six-month journey. This was during the days when wrestling could be a circus sideshow act with audience participation, promising $100 to anyone who could take wrestlers to a certain time limit.
"I was the guy inside, taking on lumberjacks and farmers and coal miners," Parks says. While he was going on with some of the strongest, toughest wrestlers of the Great White North, Parks had something in his favor that the various strongmen didn't: conditioning. "They were tough, but they could only last a minute or two," he says. "You let them grab a hold of you, and pretty soon they're gasping for air. You didn't have too much of a battle after that."
It was on that road, he says, he earned his cauliflower ears, a symptom of the matches he was in. "Those guys would just grab you anywhere, anything they could hold onto," he says of his opponents, recalling that he once had to wrestle 10 fifteen-minute matches a day against the crowd.
"We were supposed to have boxing and wrestling," Parks says before winking. "But, there was never any boxing—the fighter somehow always got hurt at the last town we were in."
It wasn't long after that promoters across the Great White North began to recognize his talent—and just as importantly, his look. This was a time when pro wrestlers were built more like the hulking masses you'd see pounding beers after a day in the mines, solid masses of humanity that resembled mountains as much as they did men. Parks was no small man himself, standing 6'2'' and weighing about 200 pounds.
The difference is that Parks happened to be a physical specimen: Cut with a bodybuilder's physique, piercing eyes and a strong jaw, Parks was perfect to be the upstanding babyfaced hero that crowds could get behind, and a perfect foil to the villainous heels that stood across from him in the ring.
The fact that Parks had the Hart Family stamp of approval only increased his pedigree and soon afforded Parks the opportunity to travel up and down the Pacific coast, from Washington to Portland, Hawaii to Texas, Japan, Korea, across the Southern U.S.—you name it, he's probably wrestled there, and taken on some of the area's most famous wrestlers of the time, working with men such as Harley Race, Fritz Von Erich, Maurice "Mad Dog" Vachon, Larry Hennig and a young Ric Flair, among many others. Of primary importance in his matches, he talks about the importance of psychology and storytelling within the ring.
Which was appropriate, really. While we talk, Parks constantly goes off track with new stories about the names he worked with, such as how the Iran-born and Olympic wrestling champion Iron Shiek would confide in him and ask why he'd get shipped out of a territory in two weeks, as fast as he would arrive. Parks responded simply "It's because you keep hurting them," perhaps presaging Shiek's later claim that he would break the backs of his enemies, making them humble.
A particular favorite story, Parks says, comes from his days on the road with Andre the Giant. Parks remembers a time when he and Andre, along with a few other wrestlers, were riding together on the way to their next show. The group was driving fairly buzzed; Andre could drink an entire case of beer by himself, while the rest of the boys split a second amongst themselves. "The cops pulled us over, and started talking to the driver. One by one, each of us stepped out; asking 'Is everything OK officer?' Every one of us ... until Andre stepped out. 'Everything OK boss?,'" Andre asks the cop (while Parks provides a deeply-voiced impression). "The cop took one look at Andre, and said 'oh, yep! Everything's fine! Have a good night!' before he went right back into his car and drove off."
From start to finish, Parks' wrestling career spanned five decades, during which he filled a host of roles; for a time, a tag-team specialist; a masked wrestler known as The Avenger; he was the Man With the Cast Iron Stomach, who had a car drive onto his stomach and rest there before driving off, leaving a visible tire-tread; and for a while, after suffering a back injury in his 40s, he was a part-time referee before quitting as an in-ring performer to open up a carpet-cleaning business. His final match took place in 1999, when he was 64, when he took on Jose Lothario, the trainer of legendary WWE wrestler Shawn Michaels, in a "Legends Match" in New Mexico.
But as capable as he was in the ring, he can say for certain that his real mark on the wrestling buisness wouldn't have come were it not for a ridiculously large trophy celebrating his status as a midwestern tag-team champion.
Along with his tag-tea partner Doug Gilbert, Parks was champion of a promotion headed by Joe Dusek, who provided his wrestlers with a giant, six-foot trophy that proclaimed their status ... the only problem?
"The damn thing wouldn't fit in our car!," Parks says.
Talking with Gilbert and Dusek, Parks decided that he'd try his hand at making championship title belts for the two of them to wear.
His first attempt was simple: A black leather strap, chrome centerpiece with sparse engravings, and discs featuring greco-roman wrestlers as sideplates; basic as basic gets, when compared to the gaudy designs of today, but miles ahead of what existed at the time.
He realized that he might have a future in belt-making when a champion vs. champion match brough Race and Hennig to take on Parks and Gilbert.
The way Parks tells it, the two refused to wear their championship titles, believing that they paled in comparison to the hardware Parks and Gilbert wore around their waists. Legendary Minnesota wrestling promoter Verne Gagne found out about the superior belts and called Parks immediately to commission a pair for his wrestlers; from there, things exploded for Parks' business. A tour of Japan during which he replaced an injured Jimmy Snuka brought Parks' craftwork to a new, global audience; it wasn't long before he could call himself the King of Belts, the man making the titles everyone wanted as their sport moved from carnival sideshows into living rooms via television.
For a long time, Parks was the belt-maker; he could (and still does) count independent promotions, corporate clients and even sports teams among his clients. But significantly, he was the man supplying the World Wrestling Federation with their championships during the wrestling boom of the '80s. That's when he produced some of the company's most famous title designs, including the World Tag Team Championship, the classic Intercontinental Championship, and World Heavyweight Championship titles that went around the waist of Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin.
It was during this time that Parks met a young fan of championship belts named Dave Millican, who had gone from making belts out of cardboard for himself and his friends to producing belts for small independent promotions.
"I was making my own belts, but I really wanted my own Reggie Parks belt," Millican says. After calling Parks to place an order, the two got to talking, and Millican mentioned his affinity for making belts. "He said to me 'I'd like to see them,' so I sent some pictures and about a week later we talked and he said that I had a lot of potential, and asked 'Why don't you [make belts] like I do it?'"
What that meant was a process that involved photo engraving images onto zinc, plating those designs in gold or nickel, cutting leather into precise shapes, careful installation of jewels, and tooling accents into the leather itself, all before assembling the collection of disparate pieces into a finished, finely-crafted work of art.
From there, Parks took Millican under his wing and before long the two were fast friends and business partners, working alongside Virginia-based designer and artist Rico Mann. Collectively, the group works with a number of local vendors for their work, giving their work to companies Royal Plating, Tucson Trade Engraving, and Tandy Leather Factory, among others, before piecing together each belt component by hand.
As the years passed, Millican began moving out of the shadow of his mentor; fittingly, he now calls himself the Ace of Belts, and within the last 10 years began building championship belts for WWE much like Parks did.
But despite his success, Millican hasn't lost sight of the fact that, without Parks holding his hand through the process, he wouldn't be the success he is ... and moreover, that without Parks' work, the belt industry (one in which championship belts can be seen everywhere, from album covers to toy aisles to replicas resting on the shoulders of collectors) as we know it wouldn't exist.
"There are people who have made money in our business that never acknowledge [Reggie]," Millican says. "If you take Reggie out of the equation, there would be belts, but the engraving and ornate work is what Reggie brought to the table. The process evolved with him," he says before citing a fairly recent example: not long ago, someone began to infringe upon their work; in particular, the designs that Parks would hammer into each piece of leather by hand, using a rubber mallet and small, die-cast tool. Millican confronted the counterfeiter, saying "I asked him about it, and he said that it was just 'generic wrestling belt tooling.'"
"Generic wrestling belt tooling? I told him to find someone that did this 'generic belt tooling' before Reggie Parks. What he called 'standard wrestling belt tooling' was something Reggie created; that's how much of an impact he's made, that what he's created has become the standard."
These days, when he's not building belts, Parks lives a fairly quiet life. He shares his home with his girlfriend and a cat he recently took in. He rides his vintage motorcycle to make sure it runs, and still works out regularly. He has begun winding down his carpet-cleaning business though, noting that he can't quite carry his 100 pounds of cleaning equipment up the stairs anymore. "I'm lucky if I can get myself up the stairs now," he says. Still, he's in surprisingly good health, which he attributes to a clean diet and lifestyle (beer aside, of course ... he is Canadian, after all).
A week after this story hits newsstands, Parks will be in Las Vegas at the annual reunion of the Cauliflower Alley Club, which brings together retired wrestlers and boxers from across the country to meet together and catch up. There, he'll be meeting with his friends, including Millican and Mann, and swapping stories of the past, doubtlessly including the ones he told me in the process of putting this story together.
It is, however, a fact that Parks is starting to recognize fewer and fewer names among the membership rolls of the CAC. The ravages of time and the brutal nature of the profession he dedicated so much of his life to are taking their toll on his contemporaries, with small-type lists of the recently passed sometimes taking up to a full page in the Cauliflower Alley Club newsletter.
Talking with him as he reads the obituaries of his friends and colleagues who've recently passed, there's mournfulness, sure. But there was just as much recollection of the good times; for every name he recognized, he had an anecdote to accompany it ... and truthfully, it's invigorating watching his eyes light up with every story of the ribs he and the boys played on each other, as he talks about the good old days.
Parks, he told me, isn't interested in what his legacy might be. "I'll leave that up to whoever comes up with something that sounds good," he says.
Well, here's a shot:
Parks will forever be known as the man who made beautiful championship belts, sure. He gladly embraces his title as King of Belts, after all, oftentimes wearing a shirt that features his own picture holding one of his designs above his head. But more than that, he found a way to affect culture as a whole without even really trying, placing the image of the championship belt as the pinnacle achievement of the excellent individual...and for no other reason than to tell a great story.
