40 Best WWE Intercontinental Champions Of All Time

Well, 39 plus The Mountie.

by Benjamin Richardson
40 IC champs at 40
WWE

On 1 September 1979, Pat Patterson didn't beat Johnny Rodz in the final of a Rio de Janeiro tournament to unify his recently-won North American Championship with its entirely fictional South American equivalent. On that day, WWE pretended the Intercontinental Title was born.

This week, we celebrate four full decades of the most beautiful belt in wrestling's glittering and occasionally - mostly recently - not so glittering history. In the forty years since Patterson's pretend coronation, the championship has been on a dramatic journey from a guaranteed stepping stone to stardom to a mid-card irrelevance, before being scrapped entirely at its nadir only to be gratefully revived in 2003. Since then, it's faced an uphill struggle to regain relevance. Sadly, it's still a long way off.

Nevertheless, the title's travails of the past fifteen years or so don't erase the decades of prestige which preceded them. 171 men - and one woman - have laid hands on WWE's de facto secondary strap; a huge chunk have went on to even better things.

Appropriately, then, we mark 40 years of Intercontinental action with the 40 best. Well, 38 best, plus The Mountie and Dean Douglas.

Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Benjamin was born in 1987, and is still not dead. He variously enjoys classical music, old-school adventure games (they're not dead), and walks on the beach (albeit short - asthma, you know). He's currently trying to compile a comprehensive history of video game music, yet denies accusations that he purposefully targets niche audiences. He's often wrong about these things.