Fantasy Booking – Part 4: The Intercontinental Championship

In part four of our ongoing series, we’re going to book for Big E’s Intercontinental Championship Belt.

After so much time and urging for Big E to get a run as a singles champion, he pretty quickly made a mark and became the Intercontinental Champion.

This one seems to have a pretty clear direction, with Apollo Crews being the most likely opponent for the belt after adopting “his Nigerian heritage” as part of his heel turn. I use quotes because he is legitimately of Nigerian descent, both parents are from the Vandeikya Local Government Area of Benue State in the mid-belt region of Nigeria. But he was born in Sacramento, raised in military school, and then moved to Stone Mountain, Georgia. Asking him to be this character is not completely unreasonable, especially if he were doing it to pay tribute to his family, but I highly doubt his idea of tribute would be a massive heel turn and having militarized men with scimitars walking him to the ring. I’m not going to travel down the well worn path of cancel culture, so let’s move on…..

I have no issue with the idea of this as a feud going to Mania, but I do think the title sort of begs for more spectacle. I’m not saying good singles matches are not something I enjoy (see the Bobby Lashley vs Sheamus match from the last couple episodes of Raw with no title on the line as a testament to that, they are damn good boss fight matches) but the Intercontinental Championship has long been viewed as a workhorse title, and I’ve long cherished it as an everyman title because you don’t have to be “a Vince guy” to hold this belt.

I could also be biased, having been at Wrestlemania in Dallas to witness the Zack Ryder win in the ladder match and knowing how incredible that match was and how much everyone involved put into it.

Keep the Big E and Apollo aspect, but you’re going to have to work more people in. You can keep it a non-gimmick match if you want, but at the very least we need to get to Fatal Four Way or something. Sami Zayn needs to be a part of this to help pay off this documentary crew crap. Fortunately, they’ve moved on from the Baron Corbin vs Zayn thing pretty quickly and now we can just add KO to the field because who doesn’t want to see KO and Big E in a match together?

But since it’s a fantasy, I’m putting the ladder in play. And if we’re going to fantasy book at ladder match, let’s just stretch the field to six. So we’re at four now. The easiest means of stretching this and getting some of the gratuitous matches off the card would be to put Rollins and Cesaro in here. I don’t like the idea of doing that because first, those two can put on a banger of a singles match, and second, I want to find a way to highlight some of the younger talent or the underappreciated guy that gets a little overshadowed in WWE sometimes, so I’ve got the “dreamer spot” to fill here and I’m going to put an NXT talent in at the sixth spot.

So who is on Smackdown that should get an opportunity to earn a spot in the match? We will have 8 Smackdown talents compete in singles matches on the 4/2 Episode, the winners of those will compete in singles matches the Friday night before Wrestlemania, and those two winners will have a match on the kickoff show for night one to determine the spot.

Now, the Smackdown roster is actually pretty lean, but here are my 8 Smackdown Talents in the quick tournament bracket: Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford, Dominick and Rey Mysterio, Buddy Murphy, Shinsuke Nakamura, Jey Uso and King Corbin (because I need to fill a whole). Now, the most surprising one here is probably Dominick because I’ve been pretty vocal that I think he should have gone to NXT and got some training in, but I want to do something different here. All of this is to get to the point where Montez Ford gets the nod. That dude is fucking amazing (sorry, he’s so good it’s not even worth PG-edits). I don’t necessarily want to map how it plays out, but I think Murphy vs Ford could be an absolute banger.

For the NXT spot, I’m having a hard time deciding. Obviously, I’m prone to want Adam Cole or Ciampa, but both of those guys are probably going to go through absolute hell at TakeOver. So who’s ready for the show? Stay with me here because this one is about to take the Intercontinental Championship TO THE MOON! Cameron Grimes should not only be in this match, I think he should win, and when he does, he should bring back the Ted DiBiase Million Dollar Belt (or at least something designed similarly).

It’s hard to pull against Big E, ever, but it’s Wrestlemania, and you want those “moments”. And I don’t know about you, but the idea of Grimes and Big E going toe to toe in promos is something I’d pay to see, you know, if the planet stops trying to kill us all any time soon.

So there you have it, I’m booking for Cameron Grimes to win a 6 man ladder match for the Intercontinental Title at Wrestlemania and then feud with Big E for a good while over it. Have some fun, WWE. Not everything has to be so serious all the time.