Untold Story Behind WWE Champion Drew McIntyre
Entered into the main event of WCPW Loaded that September, Drew was the big-name scalp that the promotion was hoping would cement Joseph Conners as a serious World Champion. They had a stormer, a title-change looked genuinely possible, but during the finish of the match Drew landed hard on the top of his head and lost the feeling down part of his arms. As the crowd filed out into the unusually-warm Newcastle evening, he lay there, awaiting an ambulance, fearing the worst.
In the end, he missed over two months of bookings, including his Impact Grand Championship final against Aron Rex (Damien Sandow) at the promotion's showpiece Bound For Glory event. For an independent wrestler, whose ability to work is their entire ability to put food on the table, it would have felt like a lifetime. When he finally returned to the company in a shock after-the-bell moment in November, the apoplectic reaction that greeted him marked him out as the company's obvious new standard-bearer.
By the end of the month he was WCPW Champion. A company that had been dismissed as a flash in the pan now felt unignorable, largely thanks to a man who'd spent the past two years doing precisely the same.
2016 ended with a number of UK wrestling awards for both parties, and 2017 saw us all traverse the length and breadth of the UK with Drew flew the flag in the show's main events. The year rattled on with feuds against Joseph Conners, Joe Hendry, Paul Robinson, Bully Ray and Joe Coffey, but arguably peaked in March with a match against Will Osprey.
On an understated card of which only Cody Rhodes was arguably a bigger draw than the two men in the title picture, the pair put on promotion's most critically lauded bout in its relatively short history. For 19 minutes they fought around and through the sell-out UK crowd before putting together one of the most enthralling final sequences in this golden age of British professional wrestling
"This night belongs to Drew Galloway" was Dave Bradshaw's call on commentary, and indeed they had for the better part of the last 6 months. But they were drawing to close.