8 Wrestlers Who Put Insane Details Into Things You Didn't Notice
2. The Smoking Skull Snakeskin
There was no storyline reason why Steve Austin suddenly whipped out a personalised championship belt during his first title reign in 1998 - not least because the company had no idea it'd been commissioned. In a piece of brilliant meta-commentary, 'Stone Cold' caused friction with his bosses by rejecting their sharp-edged, purple-strapped relic, updating it with a less corporate trophy more befitting the era and his aura.
Implicitly, the suggestion was that Vince McMahon, rejecting Austin as the face of the company, refused to let him wear their official strap - so the Texas Rattlesnake went into business for himself. Which he legitimately had.
That said, the belt itself has all the subtlety of an ITV Christmas special, save for one fantastic detail: the leather is lined in snakeskin. If the obverse is overt, the rarely-seen reverse is the opposite, in the same manner as the diamond slyly encrusted on the back of Ted DiBiase's otherwise ostentatious Million Dollar Championship - another strap Austin held, as it happens. Perhaps that's where he got the idea?