Championship Belt
It all started with a roll of vegetable tanned cowhide thick enough to carve on, a swatch of thinner leather, but not too thin for stamping, some buckskin dye, a foot square sheet of bare 20 gauge aluminum, fifty stainless steel hex bolts complete with washers and nuts, some wax thread, and a hazy crazy dream.
Actually it really all started when I was learning about the tradition of the Vancouver poetry slam finals, the picking of the team itself and the grand slam champion. I recall asking RC if there was any trophy or anything. There isn’t eh? Mayhap I could whip something up in my shop where I do all sorts of nutty art projects. Now being a worker of fine carved leather products in my spare time I don’t know why it took my good friend, comedian Daryl Bedford to come up with the next part… “Hey, what about a championship belt?”
“Brilliant!” I replied, and then I asked RC what he thought. Well the next thing I knew the word was spreading through the scene and the poets were all a-buzz. So suddenly I found myself in a familiar old place… promising that I could and would do something before calculating the incredible investment of time and work needed to complete said task. But there was no turning back as I got busy Googling wrestling and boxing belts alike. You see, while I have made many hand carved leather items in the past such as seats, tool bags, saddle bags, regular old hold-up-your-pants-type belts and so on, this was my first ever attempt at anything like this.
Actually it ended up being a labor of love. The Vancouver slam scene has given so much to me that it was my pleasure to put in the forty or so hours it took to complete this piece. The leather was all traced out and cut by hand. The buckles are hand polished and hand engraved. (In case anyone is curious, the large central buckle is cut out from the tracing of a 10-inch dinner plate while the two small ones are made from tracings of the bottom of a spray paint can) The holes for all of those sexy little hex bolts are hand punched. The do-up straps at either end are hand stitched on with wax thread. And lastly but not leastly the Latin phrases around the buckle are hand carved into the leather itself.
So why Latin? I wanted the piece to look official and most official seals and standards, along with official currency and stampings seem to have Latin sayings on them. What do the two phrases on the belt mean? Well I will start off by telling you that I do not speak Latin (other than Pig-Latin, which I am quite fluent in) so I got on the Google machine again and rustled me up an official Latin translator! Then I just kept throwing poetic-like phrases at it until I came up with two that contained the same number of characters so they would look symmetrical on the belt. The upper phrase, “IUNCTUS PER PROFESSIO” means, “United by art.” While the bottom phrase, “EXIMIUS ORATOR CAMENA” translates loosely to, “The finest spoken poetry.”
2008 Grand Champion, Scruffmouth, wearing the belt as the top-scoring poet on Van Slam's Team Playoffs Finals Night
Those of you who have seen the slam belt will notice one great distinction between it and the ones that people like Mike Tyson and Hulk Hogan have sported in the past… most professional sport title belts seem to be dyed black. But in my research I came across an old photo of an early 20th century boxing belt with a natural finish to the leather. I knew this was the way it had to be, hence the buckskin dye instead of black.
In the end it was all well worth the effort and I had a blast watching the presentation at finals night. And although Scruffmouth is the first official recipient of the belt, one can see that I have paid tribute to past grand slam champs by including their names on the piece as well. I can only hope that all future winners will be as deserving. And while I stamped/signed the piece down on the do-up strap end as the creator/artist, I have still yet to buckle it around my own midsection as I am saving that for the day (if it ever comes) when I actually might earn the right to have my name stamped on the winner’s section. But for that we will have to wait and see, as there is much brilliant talent and competition out there for me to face.
– Clint “Father Goose” Wilson (June 2008)
