and told him they weren’t going to wear the world titles to the ring if Parks and Gilbert wore their belts.

It’s sort of funny that Parks only made the Midwest tag belts because he didn’t want to carry around the trophy that represented the title. Belts were easier to carry. Suddenly, a career was born.

Soon, Parks was making titles for AWA owner Verne Gagne. From there, business took off, and Parks was creating belts for territories all over the country for the next couple of decades. One of his high-profile assignments came when Greg Valentine destroyed the Intercontinental title won by Tito Santana in the early 1980s. The WWE called on Parks to craft the new championship belt. The design was an obvious upgrade from the trophy-style beltsthrow the Intercontinental championship belt into the river. Instead, he tossed a beat-up old tag team title in the water. But Austin wasn’t the first to do this angle. Ronnie Garvin did the same thing with the Knoxville, Tennessee, version of the Southeastern title in the 1970s, and Dick Slater did it with the Mid-South TV medallion in the 1980s, tossing it into the Arkansas River. Jerry Stubbs threw the Alabama title into Pensacola Bay, and Playboy Buddy Rose lofted the Pacific Northwest title into the Columbia River in Portland.

Related: Stealing the Wrestling Title: How RON GARVIN and BOB ROOP Led a Rebellion

Watch Archived Footage of Dick Slater Throwing the Mid-South TV Title Medallion into the Arkansas River:

The big loser there was Stubbs. While Mid-South/UWF and PNW debuted