The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 WWE Secondary Title Reigns

If you’ve been hanging around Internet wrestling sites over the last fifteen years, you’re sure to have seen pundits lamenting the devaluation of secondary titles—in the context of WWE, the United States Championship, the Intercontinental Championship, and previously the Hardcore, Cruiserweight, and European titles.

These titles change hands willy-nilly. They go to unworthy champions. They are forgotten and go undefended for months at a time. The champions are not protected, but rather jobbing out to bigger stars in non-title bouts to the point that the title itself seems meaningless.

These are all legitimate criticisms that have come up in different situations at different times, and WWE’s recent history, they’ve sadly become more the norm than the exception.

Just the same, there are those times when secondary titles have been used to push and advance talents. As the focal point of compelling storylines. As the foundation for great matches. Some of these examples are distant memories, some come from the surprisingly recent past.

For the purposes of this countdown, I’m ranking championship reigns, not champions. So, for example, the fact that Chris Jericho has held the Intercontinental Championship more times than anyone else has no bearing on this list—I’m looking at each individual instance of someone reigning as an isolated occurrence.

How am I evaluating “the best?” Primary considerations were what winning (and more to the point holding) the title did for a performer’s career and the surrounding WWE product. Championship storylines and match quality were also strong considerations. The length of a title reign is a lesser consideration—its main impact is how much time the performer had to cultivate a legacy. As is always the case, personal opinion weighs heavily here as well. One last disclaimer: for the purposes of this countdown, I’m not counting the Women’s, Diva’s, or Tag Team Championships as secondary titles, but rather the top prizes for their respective divisions—thus, none of these reigns are eligible for this list.

Chris Jericho vs Chris Benoit vs Kurt Angle… by sportsvipwiner

#7. Kurt Angle as Euro-Continental Champion, 2000

You can argue that the Euro-Continental Championship wasn’t a real thing. After all, it was a somewhat silly invention of the WWF Attitude Era, coined when a wrestler held both the European and Intercontinental Championships, which first came about when D-Lo Brown relieved Mideon of the European Championship, and then Jeff Jarrett for the Intercontinental Championship (only for Jarrett to take both titles off of him, after which they were separated for a time).

In 2000, Kurt Angle repeated Brown’s feat, after defeating Val Venis for the European strap and Chris Jericho for the Intercontinental Championship.

The reign only lasted a little over a month, but it earns its spot in this countdown based on its integral place in Angle’s big 2000 push. After making his television debut in the late stages of 1999, Angle exploded into the WWF’s mass-consciousness as a terrific promo man and even better in-ring worker, with Olympic credentials to back him up. He was instantly over at the top of the heap of the WWF mid-card, and in bragging about his own successes as Euro-Continental Champion, he simultaneously earned himself some very good heat and planted the seeds that he really was a great wrestler.

So, the Euro-Continental run cemented Angle as a top-of-the-mid-card, fringe-main-event-level talent, and the way he lost the titles at WrestleMania 2000 did nothing to lessen his stature, as he defended both titles in two separate falls of a three-way match, and was never pinned or forced to submit in this losing effort. This was a textbook example of how, even in a very short run, secondary title reigns can establish and push talents, while making the title itself important.

#6. Shawn Michaels as Intercontinental Champion, 1992-1993

The Intercontinental Championship has served many functions and earned many monikers. It’s the workhorse’s title—held by lesser names who are better mechanics and put on the match of the night under a lesser spotlight than the main event talents. It’s a stepping stone—used to establish the kayfabe credibility of a character, while grooming the worker for a main event run.

Rarely have these elements of the IC title converged more effectively than for Shawn Michaels in his first singles title run. In the fall of 1992, Michaels was a brash young heel, coming into his own as both a worker and a character. The world title scene was in upheaval with the arrival of Bret Hart at the top of the card, and heading into 1992, Michaels found himself in the unlikely spot of being catapulted straight from the mid-card into the number one contender’s spot heading into Survivor Series.

As a masterstroke in making Michaels a reasonably credible challenger, Michaels defeated Davey Both Smith for the Intercontinental Championship on a Saturday Night’s Main Event special. Not only was the match good, and not only did it offer Michaels some hardware, but the win had tremendous symbolic value given that Smith had won the title off of Hart that summer.

Michaels wouldn’t win a world title for another three and a half years, but put on a great match with Hart to add to the catalog of great matches during that time as he started to develop and refine a well-earned reputation as a phenomenal in-ring talent. During this period, he put on tremendous matches with former partner Marty Jannetty and the surging Tatanka. Moreover he seemed to grow into his persona during this period, all around using the IC strap to its fullest, to grow into the role of one of wrestling’s all-time greatest all-around talents.

#5. Pat Patterson as Intercontinental Champion, 1979-1980

In a countdown like this, it’s difficult not to recognize the first person to hold the longest lasting secondary title (there were WWWF secondary titles other than the IC belt, but no others that survived the transition from the WWWF to the WWF to WWE).

Pat Patterson became the very first Intercontinental Champion in 1979 after winning a fictitious tournament in Rio de Janeiro, and the accomplishment read something like a capstone to his twenty-plus-year career. He would never defeat Bob Backlund for the World Championship, but holding this title confirmed his status as one of the greats of his day, besides giving the title the instant credibility of not only being linked to the North American Title Patterson had won off of Ted Dibiase, but also Patterson’s own reputation as an elite performer. It was during his title reign that he switched from his long-time heel persona to working face.

After establishing the Intercontinental Championship as a title second only to the World Championship in WWWF mythology, Patterson dropped the title to Ken Patera in controversial fashion (the ref didn’t see that Patterson got a foot on the ropes). Patterson got one last highly memorable angle that culminated in a Boot Camp Match with Sgt. Slaughter before transitioning from in-ring performer to creative mastermind who most famously suggested The Royal Rumble (and plotted many of the best iterations of it) and championed top IC champs of years to follow like Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart.

#4. Bret Hart as Intercontinental Champion, 1992

In plotting this countdown, I found Bret Hart particularly difficult to place, not because he wasn’t worthy, but because it’s nearly impossible to separate his first Intercontinental Championship reign from his second—all of it really a part of one sustained mid-card push that ultimately led to The Hitman getting promoted to the main event.

The IC title has a reputation as the worker’s title. The main event had its big muscles, big egos, and big moments while the Intercontinental Championship matches tended to have action that was faster paced, more technical, and often, in a vacuum, more objectively entertaining. Hart was the epitome of this sort of IC champ.

With all due respect to Hart’s first reign, which started when he defeated Mr. Perfect in a superb bout at SummerSlam 1991, it was Hart’s second, slightly shorter reign that shored up his budding main event credentials. He started this one by pinning Roddy Piper off of a nifty sleeperhold reversal at WrestleMania 8. In addition to delivering startling good matches with jobbers across the country on WWF TV, Hart spent much of this reign working Shawn Michaels on the house show circuit—a run which quietly included the WWF’s very first ladder match. The reign would end no less epically than it had started—with Hart dropping a fall in the main event of SummerSlam 1992 so Davey Boy Smith could pick up the biggest win of his career in front of his countrymen in sensational match, and Hart could prepare to challenge Ric Flair and become the new face of the company, besides laying the groundwork for Smith to later advance to the main event scene.

#3. The Honky Tonk Man as Intercontinental Champion, 1987-1988

In the lor of Intercontinental Champions, The Honky Tonk Man is a strange bird.

In the late 1990s, and all the more so in the 2000s and 2010s, the IC title lost much of its meaning, and it wasn’t all that peculiar for a comedic or not-particularly-over champ to arise. But The Honky Tonk Man is directly preceded as champion by Randy Savage and Ricky Steamboat, and followed by The Ultimate Warrior, Rick Rude, Curt Hennig, and Kerry Von Erich—frankly HTM just doesn’t seem to fit.

Just the same, there may be no single performer whose name is more synonymous with the IC strap than The Honky Tonk Man.

HTM won the title by cheating to pin Steamboat, and went on to field challenges from Savage to Brutus Beefcake to George “The Animal” Steele to Billy Jack Haynes. In the process, HTM became something akin to a poor man’s Ric Flair or nWo Hollywood Hogan—a slimy heel who not so much beat other wrestlers as survived them, cheating to win sometimes, but just as often accepting DQ or countout losses, or letting the time limit expire to remain champion by default.

HTM’s four-hundred-fifty-four-day reign as champion stands as a record to this day, and is iconic enough that it remains a topic of conversation, and was most recently a piece of Santino’s comedy bit as he used the Honk-a-meter to gauge his own tenure and greatness as IC champ in 2008.

The Honky Tonk Man was a heat magnet, and the end to his reign was perhaps the greatest part of this run. He arrogantly challenged anyone who wanted a piece of him to come to the ring for a title shot at the inaugural SummerSlam, and The Ultimate Warrior utterly squashed him in front of a rabid Madison Square Garden in a key victory that would lay the groundwork for Warrior himself to further the IC title legacy as a way of grooming future world champions.

#2. John Cena as United States Champion, 2015

I’m quite certain I’ll have dissenters on this one, and even more sure that I’ll have folks guffaw at the idea that I came close to putting this title reign in the number one spot. The thing is, after working as the face of WWE for over a decade, and arguably enjoying one of the ten best careers of any WWE talent ever, John Cena’s reign as United States Champ that started at WrestleMania 31 nonetheless stands out to me as probably my favorite work of his whole career.

John Cena is a very good worker. From a purist perspective, he’s no Shawn Michaels or Daniel Bryan, but he has held his own in enough big matches with a diverse enough array of talents that it’s laughable to say he’s a lousy wrestler. This US title run put Cena’s in-ring chops on display, as he put on excellent matches opposite an array of performers that included Dean Ambrose, Stardust, Neville, Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Zack Ryder, Bad News Barrett, and Cesaro, in addition to feuding on and off with different permutations of The New Day. That’s not counting a good (if ultimately drawn out and frustrating) feud with Rusev to start the reign, and a very good bout at SummerSlam with Seth Rollins, at which point Cena’s first US title reign of 2015 ended.

Thus, Cena’s US Open Challenge became a canvas on which to portray good-to-great matches week-in, week-out for four months. In addition to good wrestling and a masterful fighting champion gimmick, the US Open Challenge also benefited from Cena’s supreme level of over-ness, because he operates at a level at which even a competitive showing (much less a win) puts over his opponent. Look at the list of challengers from the previous paragraph, and you’ll see young stars on the rise or undercard guys looking to regain some ground. For all the flack the Cena character gets for being too dominant for too long, this reign—in addition to the shorter follow up reign fall—was the gimmick giving back to the roster at large, making it a unique and exceptional secondary title run that I probably would have pushed all the way to number one on this list had it gone a few months longer.

#1. Randy Savage as Intercontinental Champion, 1986-1987

Before there was a Bret Hart or a Shawn Michaels—supreme talents who honed their crafts as mid-card champions—there was Randy Savage, who used an electric combination of aggression, aerial abilities, and selling in the ring, plus outstanding mic work to become a superstar as the Intercontinental Champion.

Savage won the title off of Tito Santana, who was more or less in the prime of his career and as over as he would ever be—a well-respected, well-loved face, so that it made it all the more crushing when Savage KOed him with a foreign object to steal the title. Savage would go on to successfully defend against Bruno Sammartino and engage in a memorable feud with George “The Animal” Steele that set a template for jealousy over Miss Elizabeth becoming a defining factor in Savage’s most-heated storylines. Finally, he feuded with Ricky Steamboat in an iconic angle that saw Savage crush The Dragon’s throat with a ring bell to put him out of action, leading up to their legendary bout at WrestleMania 3—all of which paved the way for Savage to ascend to the main event scene a year later.

Savage held the IC title for over a year, had memorable matches and rivalries, and used it as a platform to plead his case as a worthy talent to team with and ultimately feud with Hulk Hogan. That’s good enough for the number one spot in my book.

Which reigns would you add to the list? The Miz’s and John Cena’s first US title runs, Crash Holly’s work with the Hardcore Championship, and Intercontinental reigns for Mr. Perfect, Chris Jericho, Triple H, Razor Ramon, and The Rock were among my top runners up. Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.