Jill Torrance / Arizona Daily Star

Other articles by Coley Ward:

Her name may be strange, but she's very down-to-earth Family has two Malaysian spots Refugee fills need for Caribbean fare You can vave your turkey and bowl one, tooRighting pizza wrongsOK Corral closed; owner still on fenceCalling all scenestersShe hopes to go from prom queen to Disneyland princessBeyond the margaritaThe law of the letters

Education
Assessment Technology, Inc
Social Studies Content Writer General
CORT
WAREHOUSE/DRIVER Health Care
Rio Salado College
PA's/Online Instructors Construction
Komatsu Equipment Co
Mechanic General
CORT
Warehouse Supervisor

Reggie Parks sits in front of his computer searching MSN.com to find footage from Madonna's new concert tour. The 73-year-old has been a fan of the Material Girl ever since she became his most famous client.

Parks taps his foot as Madonna and Justin Timberlake perform their duet, "4 Minutes," at Madison Square Garden.

"She's pretty good, eh?" he says.

Madonna ordered two championship belts, the kind usually worn by large-bodied professional wrestlers and boxers, from Parks this spring. She wears a diamond-studded black leather belt on the cover of her new album, "Hard Candy." The second belt was sewn onto her skin-tight costume, to allow her extra mobility on stage.

"And we might be making a third belt, for the wax Madonna at the Madame Tussauds museum," Parks says.

Parks didn't invent championship belts, but he has been the driving force in their evolution from simple trophy to elaborate accessory. He designed many of the belts worn by boxing and wrestling champions over the last 40 years. As a result, he's earned the nickname "King of Belts."

The 2007 Tennessee Titans defensive line, the 1989 World Series champion Oakland Athletics, a chapter of the Hells Angels — and now Madonna — are all customers of Reggie Parks Championship Belts.

Constructing material for the Material Girl – it's not a bad gig if you can get it. And it's something Parks never imagined he'd be doing.

Parks was wrestling professionally in Omaha, Neb., in 1962 when he made his first belt. The league promoter awarded a trophy to the winner each week, but Parks had a better idea.

"That trophy was so big, about 6 or 7 feet tall," Parks says. "We had to take it apart just to get it in (the promoter's) car. We'd put this thing together in the dressing room and carry it out to the ring, and then the bad guys would kick it over and it would fall apart."

The league needed belts instead of a trophy, Parks told the promoter. Although he didn't have any experience working with leather, he felt he was crafty enough to do a good job.

"(The promoter) said if you can make something presentable, we'll use it," Parks says. "That first belt cost me about $75. I cut out a piece of copper and had it plated. Then I glued it to the leather."

Wrestlers and boxers were awarded belts as far back as the 1920s, Parks says. But those first belts featured metal that was poured into a mold, rather than engraved.

"He was the first person to apply the process that's used today for making belts," says Rico Mann, who lives in Virginia Beach, Va., and designs belts for Parks. "He was the first person to do tooling around the leather. If you look at the outside of the leather, there's a little stamp that goes all the way around, a border tooling to make it look like the leather is made in separate pieces and it's really not."

Parks started making belts for the World Wrestling Federation (now called World Wrestling Entertainment). He made belts worn by Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan, and by Hogan's character, Thunderlips, in "Rocky III."

After the WWE told him it wanted the rights to all royalties from replica belts, Parks says he stopped making them for the league. That was 10 years ago.

Today, most of Parks' belts go to athletes in other sports.

"I make a lot of belts for the Ultimate Fighting Championship," he says. "They're our new big client."

Still, there are lots of wrestling fans out there who want to own belts just like the ones that their heroes wore.

"We've got a contract with Figures Inc.," Parks says. "They make belts that are exact replicas of the belts I made for the WWE, and we get a little bit of a royalty every time they sell one."

It takes four people about two weeks to create each custom championship belt, the base price of which is $1,000.

First, Mann consults with the customer and designs the belt.

"Some belts are totally new," Parks says. "But sometimes a guy might want a buckle like we've done in the past, but maybe with different words. And we'll work with him."

Then it's time to do the metal work. The buckles start out as a sheet of zinc alloy. Ted Miller at Tucson Trade Engraving engraves the sheets using an etching machine that sprays acid. After the sheets are etched, they are cut into the proper shape and the edges are sanded down.

Parks rolls the buckles so that they are the proper rounded shape. After that, the buckles go to the platers, where they are dipped in copper, then nickel, and sometimes gold.

"Most of our belts are nickel-plated," Parks says, "though some are dual-plated with nickel and gold."

Next, it's time for the leather work.

Starting with a 10-by-50-inch strip of leather cut into the proper shape, Parks does the tooling, pounding designs into the leather using a series of 20 instruments.

"The leather starts out brown and most belts end up black," he says, "though some are red, blue, turquoise, yellow, pink, brown, green, any color you can imagine."

After the leather is dyed, it's time to attach the buckles using bolts. The bolts are ground down and then covered up with a black cloth that is adhered to the back of the belt.

Finally, it's time to start painting the metal. "Usually, I'll use black paint to accent the lettering," Parks says. "I had one belt that had 16 different flags on it, so I had to paint all those flags. It can be tedious work. Those flags were as big as postage stamps."

As the business has changed, so has the look and feel of Parks' belts. For starters, he says his belts have gotten bigger over the years.

"As guys got bigger and television came up, they wanted belts that were bigger and gaudier and easier to see," Parks says. "Before, you were lucky if you had a belt 4 to 5 inches high. Now they're a foot high."

Many belts are decorated with jewels and can be expensive.

"We sent one off to Japan recently and it weighed 15 pounds," Parks says. "That belt cost $12,000."

Things weren't always all rubies and dollar signs.

Parks grew up on a farm in Edmonton, Alberta, where he milked cows by hand, drove the tractor and fed the pigs. When he got to high school, he joined the wrestling team, winning a trophy for amateur wrestling at 15. A couple years later, he left home and joined a traveling carnival as part of a wrestling act.

"We toured all of western Canada one summer," he said. "I would take on all comers. We'd offer them cash prizes if they could last five minutes on the mat with me. If they could, they'd win $15."

Even today, Parks stays in excellent shape, regularly lifting weights in his garage. But as a youth he was a 6-foot-2-inch specimen.

"I stayed between 215 and 220 pounds my whole career," he says.

It wasn't often that Parks would lose.

"You'd run into some real interesting characters out there," he says. "Lumberjacks and oil workers who were pretty strong but they weren't in shape. They'd turn all blue and run out of gas."

Parks says he suffered a few minor injuries while touring with the carnival but "nothing serious."

"I got bruised and beat up a little bit," he says. "But the guys I felt sorry for were the poor rodeo guys. They got banged up a lot more than we did. Bull riders, boy, I'll tell you, I have a lot of respect for them."

Before long, Parks left the carnival for a career in wrestling. He spent the next 50 years wrestling in front of fans across the world, from Tampa, Fla., to South Korea.

"In those days, they never taught you how to jump off a ladder or climb on ropes," Parks says. "You were taught a bunch of moves, and if you were good enough they sent you out on the road."

Mostly, Parks wrestled under his own name. But for a period in the mid-'70s he wore a mask and was The Avenger.

"It was just a name," he says. "They had other guys, The Super Destroyer, The Spoiler, all kinds of masked men. And they were always from the same place — parts unknown."

Parks likes to relax in the garage of his modest East Side home. He calls it his barefoot bar. A workout machine and a cooler filled with cans of Milwaukee's Best Ice sit on top of a slab of utility carpet. He doesn't drink light beers, because "they taste like water to me."

Also in the garage is Parks' 1988 custom soft-tail Harley-Davidson that he has driven to Canada eight times (these days he sticks to shorter trips).

Though cluttered, Parks' kitchen and living room have a distinctly feminine touch. The walls are decorated with butterfly and flower stickers and vases hold silk flowers. They were put there by Parks' girlfriend, Trish, who lived with him for 22 years and passed away in 2006.

"That's why you see all this stuff around here," he says. "Because if I took it all down, there wouldn't be anything left."

Parks does much of his work in the adjacent office, which is decorated with pictures from his younger days and a poster featuring four women wearing colorful thongs.

Parks is divorced and never had any children. He returns to Canada at least once a year to visit family and go fishing with his friend Pat Widugiris, who is also a Tucson resident.

Widugiris says she and Parks met on a blind date 26 years ago and, while there was never any romance, a friendship blossomed.

"He's got to be my best friend in the universe," she says. "He's a kindhearted, soft-spoken, gentle man. People don't believe us, but we're strictly a platonic relationship and have been all these years."

What do Widugiris and Parks talk about on their fishing trips?

"Absolutely nothing that's serious or intelligent," she says. "He's the only 73-year-old man who can act goofy like a little boy. That's when I get to hear all these stories about him and these wrestlers and all the stunts they used to pull on each other."

Stories like how in the old days, when wrestlers traveled by train, they'd throw each other's shoes out the window and have to go walking around barefoot looking for them.

Today, Parks' hands are rough and his hair is silver. His skin has thinned, resulting in more wrinkles and less-defined muscles. He wears glasses and squints when he builds his belts.

But at an age when most men think about slowing down, Parks is busier than ever.

"Now we have orders going all over the place," Parks says. "Europe, Australia and Japan — any place that has wrestling fans."

"The business has just ballooned," says Miller. "It used to be three or four belts a month. Now we're working on about 20 belts at a time."

Ten years ago, Chicago wrestling promoter Ed Chuman approached Parks about selling his belts online. That's when business really started to boom.

"Chuman saw the potential in what we were doing here," Parks says. "He opened up a Web site and used the site for his business and also to promote our belts. Everybody in the world knew about us then."

Parks says people like his belts because of what they signify.

"They represent winning and champions and all that," he says.

Madonna's interest could make championship belts more in vogue.

That would be fine with Parks, who says retirement isn't in the cards.

"I'm too busy to retire," he says.

Long live the king.

• How much: Custom belts cost a minimum of $1,000. Figures Inc. replica belts cost $99 and up.

• How long: Belts take an average of two weeks to create. Orders can be rushed, but that's more expensive.

• Online: www.midwestwrestling.com.