{"id":98266,"date":"2021-08-13T20:55:50","date_gmt":"2021-08-14T00:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/?p=98266"},"modified":"2021-08-13T20:55:50","modified_gmt":"2021-08-14T00:55:50","slug":"king-nakamura-wwe-intercontinental-championship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/2021\/08\/13\/king-nakamura-wwe-intercontinental-championship\/","title":{"rendered":"#AndNEW: King Nakamura Wins Second WWE Intercontinental Championship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On this week&#8217;s edition of <strong>Friday Night SmackDown<\/strong>, <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/2020\/05\/26\/before-they-were-famous-apollo-crews\/\" target=\"_self\"><strong>Apollo Crews<\/strong><\/a> defended the WWE Intercontinental Championship against <strong>King Nakamura<\/strong>. Both men had their respective allies in their corners; while Crews was backed by <strong>Commander Azeez<\/strong>, Nakamura was backed by his energetic guitarist, <strong>Rick Boogs<\/strong>. Going into this match, Crews seemed to be the dominant competitor. However, throughout a hard-fought match, it was ultimately &#8220;The King&#8221; of SmackDown that emerged victorious with his second-ever Intercontinental title in WWE.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\ud83d\udc51\ud83d\udc51\ud83d\udc51<\/p>\n<p>King <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ShinsukeN?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@ShinsukeN<\/a> is your NEW Intercontinental Champion!!!<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/SmackDown?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">#SmackDown<\/a> @rickboogswwe <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PatMcAfeeShow?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@PatMcAfeeShow<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/lY9wnGVlZt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">pic.twitter.com\/lY9wnGVlZt<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; WWE (@WWE) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/WWE\/status\/1426343652650065920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">August 14, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h2><strong>King Nakamura Wins WWE Intercontinental Championship<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Though the competitors were backed by their respective allies, they wouldn&#8217;t be for long. Early in the bout, Rick Boogs began to play his guitar on the ring apron. This caught the attention of the official, who ejected Boogs from ringside. As this was occurring, Commander Azeez entered the ring, undoubtedly to attack King Nakamura. Before this could be done, the official caught sight of this, quickly ejecting Azeez from the match as well. From there, the playing field became level. The match in question concluded when Nakamura landed the Kinshasa on Crews, picking up the pinfall victory and the WWE Intercontinental Championship.<\/p>\n<p>As stated earlier, this marks the second time that King Nakamura has won the WWE Intercontinental Championship. His <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/2019\/08\/13\/shinsuke-nakamura-is-intercontinental\/\" target=\"_self\">first title win<\/a> took place on the <em><strong>Extreme Rules 2019<\/strong><\/em> kickoff show, where he defeated <strong>Rusev<\/strong> to win the gold. Nakamura would hold the title for 201 days before dropping it to <strong>Braun Strowman<\/strong> on the January 31, 2020 edition of SmackDown. This second title victory also makes Nakamura a 7x Intercontinental Champion throughout wrestling; in <strong>New Japan Pro-Wrestling<\/strong>, where he wrestled from 2002 to 2016, he held the IWGP Intercontinental Championship on 5 occasions.<\/p>\n<p><em>Stay tuned to the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/\" target=\"_self\">Last Word on Pro Wrestling<\/a>\u00a0for more on this and other stories from around the world of wrestling, as they develop. You can always count on LWOPW to be on top of the major news in the wrestling world, as well as to provide you with analysis, previews, videos, interviews, and editorials on the wrestling world. You can check out an almost unlimited array of WWE content on the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/watch.wwe.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WWE Network<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.peacocktv.com\/watch\/home\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Peacock<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On this week&#8217;s edition of Friday Night SmackDown, Apollo Crews defended the WWE Intercontinental Championship against King Nakamura. Both men had their respective allies in their corners; while Crews was backed by Commander Azeez, Nakamura was backed by his energetic guitarist, Rick Boogs. Going into this match, Crews seemed to be the dominant competitor. However, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3354,"featured_media":98269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2192,26,3],"tags":[509,329,118],"class_list":["post-98266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-wrestling","category-smackdown","category-wwe-universe","tag-apollo-crews","tag-intercontinental-championship","tag-shinsuke-nakamura"],"modified_by":"Robbie Sutter","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/prowrestling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}