How WWE Championship Belts Are Made And The History Of Title Belts, Explained
If you could own any one belt which would it be?
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Championship belts are the top prize in professional wrestling and have been since the sport's inception. But how do they get made, why are titles changed and why are belts even used as a prize in the first place. Laurie is back to explain it all.
If you could own any one belt which would it be?
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Championship belts are the top prize in professional wrestling and have been since the sport's inception. But how do they get made, why are titles changed and why are belts even used as a prize in the first place. Laurie is back to explain it all.
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00:00 If you're a wrestler you keep your eyes on the prize.
00:10 Sure, sometimes you wrestle out of love, out of hatred, because that man is much shorter
00:15 than you and you are really angry about it, but in most promotions around the world all
00:23 of the emotion in wrestling is on the way to and in service of a shot at some sort of
00:31 championship belt.
00:32 Big gold, winged eagle, intercontinental, el clasico, these are the top prizes for the
00:38 different divisions and you can see why wrestlers want these to signify that they are on top
00:44 of their game.
00:45 It's harder to imagine why they want the godforsaken spinner one or the divas butterfly
00:49 one, but that's where the acting comes in.
00:52 She's really crying because it's hideous.
00:54 Over the years many belts and designs have come to represent the different championships
00:58 in WWE alone, but how do they get commissioned and made, why do designs change and why does
01:05 wrestling even use belts in the first place?
01:08 I'm Laurie Hailing from partsFUNknown and this is Championship Belts Explained.
01:20 Before we crack on please do consider giving this channel a subscribe.
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01:44 So professional wrestling and it's championship belts are designed to ape sports like boxing
01:49 or MMA.
01:50 And that means you can market the thing as title match combat, which brings with it this
01:54 sort of baked in sporting story that the person who holds the belt is the best at wrestling
02:00 in the world and likely making the most money.
02:04 Now due to wrestling's predetermined nature we know that not to be true, instead storylines,
02:08 viewership and gait tend to determine who the champions are at any one point.
02:12 And there are things you just don't see in other combat sports like the money in the
02:16 bank briefcase which means that just about anyone can be a champion with a shock cash
02:21 in.
02:22 It's a quick fix injection of PR and interest in an effort to boost ratings.
02:26 Though I think the story still holds water that if you hold the belt you become the person
02:31 to beat, whether that reign lasts a few short minutes or 2,803 days.
02:36 It's just this accepted part of the wrestling legend that you compete for title belts.
02:42 And they can mean all sorts of things, they can denote the best person in a certain weight
02:46 class like the Cruiserweight Championship, or it could be a regional thing like the US
02:49 and Intercontinental which are really about building up and coming talent, or they can
02:53 be about roll ups and crap jokes like the 24/7 title.
02:56 But even those gimmick titles like the Hardcore title at least revolved around a certain…
03:02 like discipline is the wrong word but you know what I mean, like stabbing each other
03:05 is a skill.
03:06 They're basically props and tools for storytelling and as we saw at WrestleMania this year they
03:10 add instant gravitas to a match.
03:13 But why belts?
03:15 Like most other sports have a cup or a trophy or medals for their respective champions,
03:20 it's just boxing, MMA and pro wrestling that have their heart set on belts.
03:26 So let's rewind a bit.
03:32 All the way back to 1810 where Bristolian boxer Tom Cribb fought and defeated American
03:38 former slave Tom Molyneux in a 35 round bout at Thistleton Gap.
03:43 Thistleton Gap.
03:44 I'm British and that place sounds like something out of a fable game even to me.
03:49 According to the story this crowned Cribb as the world champion and he was awarded the
03:53 first ever title belt by King George III himself.
03:58 That belt was made out of lion skin, decorated with silver claws and was designed to remind
04:04 them of his love.
04:09 Now obviously that is just f***ing mental and likely didn't set the precedent for
04:14 title belts otherwise we'd be out of lions.
04:20 The assumption is that belts became the common award for boxing sometime during the 1820s
04:26 and may have been an allusion to a tradition of boxers bringing coloured cloths and flags
04:31 to tie to the ring posts in their corner ahead of their bouts, or that they would wear coloured
04:36 sashes tied around their waist.
04:39 Then the winner might claim the other person's colours after a fight and wear them like a
04:44 belt.
04:45 So belts, sans lion skin, became the de facto prize for boxers and then when professional
04:50 wrestling emerged as a genuine competitive sport throughout the late 19th century and
04:54 early 20th century it adopted the tropes of boxing, including the belts.
05:00 The first recognised wrestling title was created in 1905 with George Hackenschmidt being the
05:06 first man to hold the World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.
05:09 A title that had a convoluted 51 year history with many promotions laying claim to it before
05:14 it was folded into the legacy of the NWA World's Heavyweight Title, which can then be traced
05:21 all the way through to the current WWE Championship, with a change to WCW and that being unified
05:26 into the Undisputed title.
05:30 Wrestling belt history is incredibly messy.
05:34 And the same belt gets used loads of times in all that as different belts.
05:38 The big gold belt, that beautiful bastard, started life as the NWA World's Heavyweight
05:43 Championship in 1986, became the WCW Championship in 1991, had a very brief stint as the real
05:49 World's Heavyweight Championship after a $25,000 dispute between Ric Flair and WCW
05:54 Vice President Jim Hurd, was unified into the Undisputed WWF Championship, brought back
05:59 as the World Heavyweight Title in 2003 and then unified again into the WWE Championship.
06:06 Little side note here, because the history of the World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship
06:10 that Hackenschmidt won kind of straddles the line between shoot wrestling and the modern
06:14 kayfabe format I thought this was quite interesting.
06:17 Because the exact moment that wrestling crossed the line from legit competition to fabricated
06:21 fight is lost in the murk of history.
06:24 But one account from Bret 'The Hitman' Hart in his book Hitman, My Life in the Cartoon
06:28 World of Wrestling said that he had a long and fascinating talk with Luth Thesz in 81
06:33 and he said a title was a huge part of the process.
06:36 He said Thesz told him "the business was a total shoot until about 1925, at a time
06:42 when Jack Dempsey was knocking everyone out in a couple of rounds and Babe Ruth was smashing
06:46 the home run record in baseball.
06:48 The average world title wrestling match often lasted five or six hours and ended in a stalemate."
06:56 Ed 'Strangler' Lewis, Thesz's mentor, was impossible to beat so he eventually worked
07:01 title loss to pump some new blood into the business and make a nice payoff.
07:06 And that was when it all changed.
07:08 From there you can see how the title change would become the cherry on top of wrestling's
07:13 best told stories and begin to signal the passing of the torch from one star to another.
07:19 Which admittedly was a far rarer occurrence before the TV era, stars like Bruno Sammartino
07:23 dominated the 60s with a seven year reign as the WWWF World Heavyweight Champion but
07:29 he held multiple versions of the belt during that time.
07:32 Then in the 80s the WWF title changed hands only eight times whereas the modern WWE Championship
07:38 has had over 40 separate runs since 2010.
07:42 There have been three different champions this year, all technically the same title
07:46 lineage by the way.
07:47 There's an argument to be made that hot-shotting the belt around between different competitors
07:51 can damage the reputation of the belt and of the champions themselves, but huge long
07:56 title runs like Bruno's would also make a stagnant stale product in the modern era
08:03 and make the company rely too heavily on just one star.
08:06 And considering the propensity for injuries, that's not a good thing.
08:09 There's also WWE's big belief that big stories need the belts for that added bit
08:14 of flavour, kind of like The Fiend winning the Universal title.
08:18 Bray was someone with ulterior motives for wrestling matches, but to give it that main
08:22 event razzle dazzle they included the title, which then backs WWE into the booking corner
08:28 at Hell in a Cell because they didn't want Seth to drop the title, they do a do-over
08:32 where The Fiend wins and it eventually leads to the loss to Goldberg and the real start
08:37 of the downward descent for Bray's new gimmick.
08:40 Sometimes a title can be a curse.
08:42 Because while championship belts can lift a storyline, they can also be a weight around
08:47 its waist dragging it down.
08:50 Even just logistically.
08:52 Ultimo Dragon once held and defended 10 titles simultaneously, his diary must have been crazy.
08:59 Then you've got the problems of champions being injured or in the case of 2020 just
09:03 trapped overseas because of lockdown you end up with people being stripped of the titles
09:08 or interim champions being crowned like Santos Escobar.
09:12 For better or for worse a belt puts the focus on one particular star, and if they can't
09:17 compete that is a major spanner in the works of a promotion.
09:33 So with all the prestige and pomp that goes into the presentation of wrestling titles,
09:36 especially those in WWE and the sheer weight afforded them in storyline, I was imagining
09:43 the creation of them to be a big corporate enterprise.
09:49 Instead a lot of it is just lone craftsmen in workshops.
09:53 Guys like Dave Millican, a lifelong wrestling fan who started making belts out of cardboard
09:57 when he was a kid and now crafts belts seen by millions of people on WWE TV from his garage.
10:22 Dave was trained in the art of belt production by Reggie Parks, a former wrestler who became
10:26 a belt maker after giving up life inside the squared circle.
10:30 It was Reggie who crafted the Winged Eagle WWF Championship used from 1988-98 and most
10:35 of the iconic Hulkamania era belts from 1984 onwards.
10:40 The rest were left over designs from another retired wrestler, Nikita Malkovich.
10:44 More recently WWE looked to Orange County Choppers to fabricate a redesign of the WWE
10:50 Championship that Dave Millican originally made in 2014 to coincide with the company's
10:53 wide rebranding.
10:54 But a lot of the look carved quite closely to what Dave had created.
10:58 I found this excellent breakdown of how boxing belts are made from Sartonk, the company founded
11:04 by the grandson of Ardash Sahagian, the godfather of the modern boxing belt, who revolutionised
11:10 the design by turning the flat 2D metal designs into 3D reliefs, the same sort of designs
11:16 that are used in modern wrestling belts.
11:18 So the belts are entirely handcrafted and when commissioned a sketch is prepared for
11:23 each metal piece of the design and a clay, plaster and metal model is created with a
11:27 rubber mould used to cast the final piece of metal, which is then refined with files,
11:32 chisels and automated tools.
11:34 Orange County Choppers actually used a precise water jet cutting machine to blast their faceplate
11:39 into shape.
11:40 They then used a rolling machine to curve it so it would conform to the body of the
11:44 wrestler when placed on the belt.
11:46 However the pieces are being shaped, once they're done they're polished on a buffing
11:49 wheel to then be plated with either gold or rhodium and electroplated with copper, nickel
11:55 and 18 karat gold.
11:58 For embellishments, crystals are then placed into moulded cavities, which is something
12:02 you can see on the WWE Championship.
12:04 In boxing this can also be diamonds and rubies at the behest of the champion, which is madness,
12:10 but I don't think wrestling bothers with that.
12:15 The boxing straps are made of high-grade bonded leather measured out and then cut out with
12:19 a knife.
12:20 They are then adhered to more leather or high-grade vinyl and stitched with black spandex.
12:26 Basically it's a lot of work and small companies like Orange County Choppers are doing it and
12:30 Dave Millican is doing a lot of it.
12:33 And for each belt design, whoever's crafting it would have to create multiple belts as
12:37 WWE will give champions a belt to take with them on the road and to signings and appearances
12:42 and that sort of thing, but they need to keep a pristine HD belt for TV.
12:47 Speaking of HD belts, Millican said that HD belts take their share of abuse and when a
12:51 new one is made or one is refurbished, the previous one usually drops down to being what
12:56 is used on the road.
12:58 Hence why you sometimes spot those little mix-ups where the belts have the wrong plates
13:01 on TV when the HD version hasn't been shipped across.
13:06 In recent years we've seen the United States Championship and Intercontinental Championship
13:10 change design, NXT's championship got bigger, The Fiend got a custom Universal title, the
13:16 IWGP World Heavyweight Championship amalgamated the heavyweight and intercontinental title
13:20 belts into this rather contentious design, AEW had a couple of stabs at the TNT Championship
13:25 before retiring the red version in honour of the late Brodie Lee.
13:29 But beyond tragedy, the creation of new divisions or the unification of old ones, belts likely
13:35 change to signal the start of a new era.
13:37 Whether that's a full rebrand or not.
13:40 Like look at the spinner belt, that was basically the PG era given form, it was a toy.
13:45 Or maybe belts are a way of sweeping past mistakes under the rug, or just a way of refreshing
13:50 a championship run without actually changing the champion.
13:54 They are also a very good excuse to sell merchandise.
13:57 Because with new belts that means new replicas, new artwork, new version of all the champion
14:02 toys, it all gets to change and you get to sell it again.
14:08 And people want to buy them because belts are meaningful, they represent wrestling working
14:13 at its best.
14:14 The right person holding the right belt is either a confirmation of something that fans
14:19 have wanted to see for ages, or it's the first step on an exciting new run, or it is
14:23 a much needed refresh for an entire division.
14:27 And even when the belt isn't on somebody you like, there's always that hope that
14:31 someone comes along and rescues that beautiful belt and brings it back to the light.
14:36 Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed this dive into how title belts are made and where
14:50 they come from.
14:51 Please do like, subscribe and comment and share this video around if you really liked
14:54 it as that would help us out immensely.
14:57 And if you are in the mood for more explained, why not watch this one about luchador masks,
15:01 or check out Adam's latest fantasy booking of John Cena's final run.
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15:11 See you next time, Jam That Jam.