New Intercontinenal Champion crowned

As we learned last week, Intercontinental Champion Christian was voted by the WWE Universe to defend his title for the 1000th episode of RAW, against an opponent to be named that night, beating out Santino Marella defending the WWE United States title and Layla defending the WWE Divas title by quite a large margin.

After Christian was announced for his match tonight (by Hall of Fame legend Bret “Hitman” Hart), his opponent was revealed. His opponent turned out to be The Miz, who returned after several months of absence at Money in the Bank the Sunday before last. After a few minutes of back and forth action, Christian appeared to be on the verge of retaining the title with the Killswitch. Miz reversed into a back suplex, but Christian reversed yet again and landed on his feet. However, he landed badly on his knee, which he had “hurt” earlier in the match. This momentary distraction allowed Miz to nail the Skull-Crushing Finale and get the 3-count to claim his first IC title.

This is Miz’s first televised win since returning to WWE, and he picks up the IC title to boot. In case you were wondering where Miz has been for the last three months, he was filming WWE Films’ latest project, The Marine 3: Homefront. A role originally wrote for Randy Orton, Miz was eventually cast in the role when the actual Marines caused quite a stir with the choice of Orton. Before he got into wrestling, Orton was himself a Marine, and went AWOL while on duty. Understandably, active Marines were upset about his role in the film due to his background and, not wanting to upset one of their biggest sponsors (that being the Armed Forces in general), WWE kicked him off the project and cast Miz instead.

Although Miz was already technically a triple crown winner, winning the IC title puts him in an even smaller, more elite class of men who have won the original triple crown – the WWE, IC and World Tag Team titles. Miz defeated the aforementioned Orton for his one and only WWE title, and with John Morrison, won the WWE Tag Team Championships from MVP and Matt Hardy. He is also a former WWE United States Champion, one-half of the old WWE Tag Team Champions (with Morrison), and a 2-time WWE Unified Tag Team Champion (with The Big Show and John Cena).

The former champion, Christian, will likely have a rematch coming to him, as is customary. Although there have been rumors that Christian would face either Daniel Bryan or Dolph Ziggler at Summerslam, considering he is now the former Intercontinental Champion, a more likely scenario would be Christian facing off against Miz in a rematch for the title at the big event next month.