So I actually interviewed Shelton Benjamin a few years ago and I asked about this.

Can we please run the clip? Everybody, please just run the clip. Now, we remember a few years ago, you were given the gimmick of looking off into the distance and pondering something that had been said to you. Dude, I was desperate to know where that was going to go. I'll be honest. I'm still wondering where that was going to go. Thank you. Now in case you did tune out during that, we were talking about in 2019 when Shelton Benjamin was told what we'd like you to do Shelton is sit down in rooms like I'm doing right now. And as you're being interviewed, we just want you to look around the place like one, he had smelt something bad or two, I suppose, like he'd figured out the meaning of life, but he was going to keep it to himself

because that was going to help him win wrestling matches. Again, as you can tell from the time of this video, nobody actually knows what the plan was, including Shelton Benjamin himself.

This is why sometimes I think we need to be a little nicer to pro wrestlers. What was he going to do if he didn't have all the information, but was still told he had to go

ahead with this segment. You just have to do the best that you can. So sometimes yell at the writing.

Don't yell at the human. And the worst part about all of this is there's only one reason to do that

or not inform somebody with all the details. And it's likely because the creative team hadn't

actually even come up with anything.

And given in 2019, it was still a Vince McMahon vehicle. I can only assume he just woke up one day and went, ha, ha, ha, this will be funny. When he goes to the roster, he's like, well, we need someone to do something. Shelton can do it because Shelton's right there, and at least when it gets down to it, they'll have very good wrestling matches. Now once again, let's not forget when this did go down. It was 2019, which I believe to be one of the worst in WW history, and I'm not saying that for fun, I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy. But you have this, and while it's not necessarily bad, it is super confusing, but you also have the hell in the cell with Seth Rollins and the Feen, which was so so awful. It actually ruined Setherlands's baby face push, and we had to hit reset everything. And my gosh, you have everything with the dog food and Roman Reins and Baron Corbin and people dressing up like dogs, because at the time Roman Rains was the big dog, man, maybe you weren't watching WWE in 2019, and you don't know the old version of the tribal chief. And now you may be saying to myself, maybe I should check that out, do not do it. Believe you, me, it's absolute terrible. You also have Short EG, the worst name in wrestling history, that horrendous loss, courtesy of Kofi Kingston, or courtesy of Brock Lesnar, on Kofi Kingston. And yes, you have the Larner angle, the less said about that, better, because there's offensive then, six years on, it's still pretty damn insulting. I didn't even mention Eric Rowan's fake mechanical spider, but the reason I did want to bring all of these things up is they all fall into the same bracket. Somebody just went, I've got an idea. And somebody else said, well, what's the end of the idea? The original person said, I have no idea when Vincent Mann said, well, we'll put it on TV and we'll just try and figure it out. None of these actually had a proper ending, which included Shelton Benjamin's, sit in a room and look like there's something wrong internally, but actually you're thinking about a joke you were once told? Again, I had to make up a bunch of stuff because nobody knows.

Maybe that's why the Benjamin one does stand out as well, because it wasn't absolutely

atrocious and it did have some element of intrigue to it if we had known what the conclusion

was going to be.

For example, if I just go to the top of my head, maybe Shelton Benjamin somehow had figured

out a way to break into his opponent's iPad

or his iPhone or his smart technology, figure out what their plan for their upcoming matches

were going to be or what kind of moves they were going to make or do, and therefore he was

able to stop the move, or the move came to him and was able to win matches. Now, that barely made

any sense coming out of my mouth, but if there was something where he was able to secretly spy on his opponent to get all the information he did need to be victorious in matches, that could have been okay, especially because eventually you get to a final opponent and you do a proper feud, and it would be that individual that would go, I know what you did,ton. And Shelton would be like, okay, yeah, you've got me. And then they have some proper matches. And listen, it sounds completely far-fetched. You'd have to explain it better than I would. But this did happen in soccer over here in England, in the Premier League, or was it at the championship, one of the two big leagues. But essentially, people from the other teams before the weekend's matches were going to their training grounds and trying to peer in to see what their tactics were going to be. So if you use that as some sort of reality that you could bring into the fiction, maybe you could have made it work. Of course, this would have been a dumb idea. It would have been goofy wrestling for life, but there's nothing wrong with that. You're allowed to have some lightheartedness in your wrestling show. But as we said earlier, the reason it would have worked for Shelton Benjamin is because while everything outside of the ring would have been, ha ha, ha, that's so funny. Inside the ring, he never has bad matches, as he continues to do right now in AW. But if you did have someone like a Cesaro on the other side of this, then you started doing Shelton Benjamin versus Cesaro. Nobody would be mad about that. And let's not forget at WrestleMania's. We've done Edge versus Booker T, and they were fighting over a Japanese shampoo commercial. And of course you want better stories than that. But if you get Shelwin and Cesaro in the ring, and they did the best of seven just to make even more things up, even though they would be fighting about somebody stealing maneuvers, whatever you want to call it, actually the joy that we would have got out of the storyline is everything they would have done in the squared saddle. What is even more crazy is that all you had to do was come up with someone to be the end game of this. And once again, let's just stick with Cesaro because that's where we've begun. What then should happen is the creative guys should sit down with Shelton Benjamin and Cesarro and say, hey, why don't you throw some input into this and we can be collaborative? Especially when it comes to those two guys. They've been in the wrestling industry for years and years and they kind of did a little bit outside of WW.

Well, Cesare did loads.

So he'll be able to bring in extra things too, and then maybe you can create a story and actually build something that the fans like. That was the other issue with Vincent Mann's WWE. It was his way on the highway, and by the end of it, well, a lot of it was just nuts. Instead, what we did is we threw it in the bin instantly, because this did not last that long at all. Like it began, we got a few skits, and then nobody ever mentioned it again, which is why we have videos like this were half a decade removed, and nobody has a clue what WW was trying to do. I don't know about you, maybe this is just me. But if I had a multimillion, almost billion dollar company, I absolutely would want people to know. I hadn't got insane. On a deeper level, it also screwed Shelton Benjamin twice, or at least I would have thought so, because of course he did get released after this. And that's because somebody in talent relations, whoever makes these decisions, would have gone, well we're not doing anything with Shelton Benjamin right now so we can show him the door. It's like, yes, but you were doing something with him. You are the people that pulled the rug out from underneath his feet. So what flippant chance did he have? Well, the absolute proof of this has been everything Shelton has done in all elite wrestling. And we are just doing that so simple, but it is effective. It's like, oh man, here's a wrestling veteran who is incredibly good at this wrestling thing. So if you do try and take him on, he's probably going to whip your ass. And the reason that works, of course, is because everybody believes that Shelman Benjamin can be that guy because he's essentially been putting on bang of matches since, what, like 2005, whatever the flub it would be. Also, look at the dude, he's an imposing specimen. I mean, he's one of the most credible guys that AEW has on their roster at the moment, and of course it ties into the Hurt syndicate thing. I know that sparks his own conversation, but once again, we're just keeping things as easy as possible. There are three jack dudes that are

going to beat you up and sometimes they'll do it for money. If you are going to go one on one with them, you better bring your best. Everybody could understand that and you could expect to your friend that doesn't watch wrestling in around about five seconds. And yes, sometimes it has gone too far. We've seen that on TV, but this is way better than going the other way. once again, would you rather have this or man stares around the room for three weeks before you never see him again? Now, of course, given that we have had the changing of the guard and Vince McMahon's WWE is kind of the old WWE, and we'll say Triple H's and Nick Carnes is a new one, they're never going to address this. They're never going to all of a sudden wrap it up and a nightly little bow. So if one day you were going to write the history of WWE, you'd have to get to 2019 and go for a few weeks. Shelton Benjamin just looked around the room and we can't tell you why. This was also the same damn year when we had the wild card rule. The only reason I throw that in there is because it just sums up everything that happened over that 12-month period. The wild card rule was like, if you are on Raw or Smackdown, you can take somebody from the other brand five times a year. I can't remember the specific number. And then WW, we did five. They're like, nah, we'll just make it six. Mets. We'll just make it seven. If you were introducing your own law into proceedings and then breaking that law, what hope does anybody have? So once again, it was just a crazy man being totally crazy. I suppose everybody around him not being able to tell him no. But if you ever do think about this on a cold winter's day and you've searched the internet looking for answers, very sadly you found me and I'm the one telling you you ain't getting any. We did this because somebody thought it would be a fun idea to do and actually, well it could have been. Again, we've just talked about it. You can have done stuff in wrestling but you do need to have a final page. So it is going to be one that is locked in the wrestling vault forever but the actual good side to this, the positive side to this, is is that even Shelman Benjamin did get released, he has gone to AEW, and I think he's finally showing people what he is made of, and how he was essentially mismanaged in WW for years and years. There was a very good period, I can't remember what it was now, maybe from 2005 to 2010, but even then it never really felt like we pulled the trigger.

Then after he did get rehired, this is all we had for him. Listen, he's not alone. That's why we

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