The Mountie Recalls Finding Out He Was Winning WWE Intercontinental Title, Working With Roddy Piper

Jacques Rougeau had a brief reign with the WWE Intercontinental Championship as The Mountie, something he recently looked back on in an interview. Rougeau famously held the title for just two days after he defeated Hart on January 17th, 1992, but then lost the championship to Roddy Piper at the 1992 Royal Rumble.

Rougeau recently spoke with Wrestling Then And Now to promote his appearance at 80s Wrestling Con next month. He spoke about finding out he would be winning the title and working with Piper. You can see the highlights below:

On Finding Out He Would Win Intercontinental Title:

“Well, it’s Vince [McMahon] and Pat [Patterson]. They just called me in a room. And they asked me to go in that room and they told me they had great news and bad news. And they asked me which one I want first. I said, ‘Well, give me the good news.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re going to become Intercontinental Champion tonight.’ [I said] ‘What? Wow. I can’t believe it!’

“He said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down, calm down, calm down. I didn’t give you the bad news yet. In two days, you’re going to drop it.’ So it’s like — but anyway, all that to say that yeah, that’s all because Bret didn’t want to drop the belt to Piper. So they used me as an intermediate to do it. So anyway, I have a lot of stories I could tell about that, but I’m going to keep it all positive here.”

On Working With Piper:

“Piper, he was such such a nice guy in the dressing room. Such a a good worker, great charisma, great worker. But not a fun guy I enjoyed working with. Because I am the type of heel that likes to get my babyface down and then interact with the crowd and get my heat. You can’t do that with Piper. Piper, I try to get some heat up on him. He was like a machine. Like I’d punch him, punch him, and he’d fight back. Boom, I punch him, he’d fight back. And everything I did to him, I always fight back, fight back. So, he never got the best part of me out there when I worked with him.

“But great worker. Not a word to say about his work. Loved the guy to death. He’s just a guy who — he knew how to to get himself over more than the other guys. And he had the pen behind him, the office was behind him so he could work like that. Because if he wasn’t so powerful with Vince behind him and wanting him to be like that, some guys would have probably sat him down and said, ‘Hey listen. It’s a give and take here when we go in the ring.’ It’s a two-way street, but it was very much one way when you’re with Piper in the ring. He wasn’t a big die-er. He could sell a bit, but he would never die in the ring. And me, my best heat that I would get with babyfaces is when [I] had them dying. When I had them hurting bad so I could interact, go up the second rope and [say] ‘I am the Mountie!’ and then do my stuff. But I could never do it with Piper so it was like – but I love the guy.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit
Wrestling Then And Now with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.