The Ready 2 Rumble World Champ belt was the second I designed and built, and probably the hardest one to work on.

When I first conceived the idea, I wanted it to be an obvious parody of the title belts used by the alphabet boxing organizations (the WBC, WBA, IBF, WBO, WBF, IBC, etc.). Most of these title belts are pretty ugly and lack the intentional gaudiness that characterizes wrestling title belts. Still, I decided to parody the WBC belt, whose main plate features an image of a faceless boxer holding his hand up, indicating victory, while his body is encircled by flags of the WBC's most prominent member nations (this is also, I believe, the WBC corporate logo).

I was able to find a caricature of a boxer that looked a lot like the Boris Knokimov character in the game, but making the flag ribbon to encircle him proved to be a real challenge. Indeed, it took well over a week just to make the flag ribbon, and several days more to get it around Boris. Another problem was I decided to use the ECW Heavyweight title belt as the base for this project. Unlike the ECW TV title belt, which has a circular main plate, the plate on the Heavyweight belt has an odd shape that's very difficult to cut around. The only reason I used this belt was I was unable to get ahold of another TV title belt and had this one onhand. (In my later projects, I was able to get TV title belts and have made a conscious effort to stay away from the Heavyweight belt shape.)

But in the end, it was worth it. The resulting belt is a pretty good rip-off of the WBC belt. This was also the second design where I removed flourishes because they created distractions in the major elements, and I have since shied away from these types of accents.

Here are some images of the finished belt: