In early 2016 I was lucky to meet Jay Lethal at a wrestling event in Las Vegas. Most wrestlers have their own head shots that they have ready for autographs but personally I enjoy drawing out my own design and asking them to sign it. When I do, I bring an extra one for them just in case they want to put it on their bathroom wall. I did a portrait of Jay and from there we kind of hit it off. He liked what I was capable of doing and came up to me after the show and asked if I was willing to help out with designing song T-shirts and things.
So during the summer of 2016 I did a few t-shirt designs for him that were put on prowrestlingtees.com, and after a few of those he asked me for a big project. There was a special event going on in California for New Japan Pro Wrestling. They were having their first ever tournament for the IWGP United States title. It was coming down to a tournament and Jay Lethal was a part of it so he asked if I could come up with some unique ring gear for that event. This was the equivalent of being asked to create Superman’s new costumes of course I said yes…
Here’s the quick results but scrolldown further to see specific design layouts and thought processes:
The vest crest I’ll cover in another post
Since I was coming up with the whole design it was important to me to find gear that really reflected the wrestler himself and construct designs that really stuck out to me from what I thought was most eye catching. Some of the gear that really suck out to me while I’ve been a fan of wrestling has been the wrestlers that treat wrestling like it’s an actual competitive sport. I don’t particularly like the pageantry, silly comedy gimmicks, super ultra strong guys, and I don’t particularly like the over the top looking entrances. People that treat it like a real sport, where wins and losses matter, using actual wrestling holds, with college wrestling outfits and shoot wrestling pads that head straight to the ring to get to business…that really stands out to me.
The jacket design was inspired by some of the All Japan wrestlers in the 90s like Kobashi, Misawa, as well as Daniel Bryan’s American Dragon ring gear. At this point in time Jay was in the position of the top performers in his wrestling company similar to the others I could mention so in my opinion he needed something prestigious or professional. Unfortunately, the first thing he wanted to do was take the sleeves off which if you have arms like his, I guess I understand.
The trunks just continued with the design is that he normally used on his current set of trunks but with the updated color scheme and the white stripe that follows around the back side. Something that some of the Japanese wrestlers were doing was putting their country of origin on their right hip, so since this was Jay’s tournament was an international one I thought it would be important to do something similar.
The shin pads would again continue the white stripe and wing design across the outside of the shin. It turns out that Jay doesn’t get the support that he needs from these types of shoes let’s go with these pads, he’s more of a boot wrestler which I wasn’t sure of at the time. Apparently it gives you more stability in the ankle whereas a shoe, not so much. He also frequently used the title of “the greatest first generation wrestler” so I tried to fit in “1st GEN” in wherever I could get it to fit.
Overall it was a success. I’m being honest here, it was my first time ever creating something like this so it was definitely a challenge. Here’s a few pictures from the event itself that I pulled from the original video:
I can’t remember exactly when the event took place but we did in fact have tickets to go to California where he would be performing in the gear that I had designed. Unfortunately California is pretty expensive, it was quite difficult to find any places to stay within my budget that were handicapped accessible after our initial Airbnb location canceled on us last minute. I have a feeling that our host got wind that there was a big event in town that weekend because we got a heck of a deal. Silly me, I ended up mentioning how grateful we were for being within walking distance of the particular venue on that busy weekend, and then suddenly it was gone! I still got to watch though, my wife and I tuned in and were pleasantly surprised that he was wearing the gear that I made. It’s like if you got to design the suit for your favorite superhero when they clobbered the bad guy. So I basically got to design Superman’s costume…that was a big day.
-mh
