Matt Hardy says Shelton Benjamin would have gone further if he had come along now, because the things that held him back in 2005 are no longer what the business screens for. Hardy was talking through the Unforgiven 2005 roster on The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy and said nobody in the building had any doubts about what Benjamin could do.
“Everyone knew he was extremely talented. He was just this freak athlete,” Hardy said. “All the athleticism was there.”
What he says stopped it going further was everything around the wrestling.
“In today’s environment, Shelton would have had a much easier path,” Hardy said. “I still think there were a lot of people that were worried about his character and his speaking and everything else. I think that is kind of what ended up holding him back at that point.”
His argument is that the priority order has changed.
“That’s just not as much of an issue nowadays, because if you’re athletic and you’re someone who can really go, they can make something work,” he said.
Hardy pointed to the spot people still bring up, the counter Shawn Michaels hit on Benjamin when he came off the top, which landed around the same period.
“That was such an amazing moment that was replayed over and over again,” he said.
Benjamin held the Intercontinental Championship through most of 2005 and had a run of matches with Michaels that year. He spent a decade and a half in WWE without a world title, was released in 2010, returned in 2017 and was released again in 2024. He signed with AEW that year and is now part of The Hurt Syndicate with Bobby Lashley and MVP, in the most prominent run of his career since the period Hardy is describing.
The same card produced a character that has aged in the other direction. Chavo Guerrero had dropped his name that summer and begun working as Kerwin White, a suburban golf-obsessed act built on the line that if you’re not white, you’re not right. Hardy said Guerrero knew exactly how strange it was and committed to it anyway.
Hardy said the two go back a long way.
“I like Chavo so much. I love seeing him around. Enjoyed working with him,” Hardy said. He recalled the pair being tied together for a couple of months earlier on, when he and Shannon Moore worked against Chavo and Eddie Guerrero as Los Guerreros.
On the gimmick itself, Hardy said Chavo was clear-eyed about what he had been handed.
“Chavo said, oh, this is a weird thing that I’m doing. But he was like, all right, let’s commit to the bit,” Hardy said. “If they want you to do it, then you got to go all the way in. You got to commit to the bit and make it work.”
Hardy’s read is that the effort was never the problem.
“He was trying. He was doing the best he could, but it was definitely an uphill battle,” he said. “Even if you’re looking at 2005, that’s still kind of a tricky character slash angle to pull off.”
Asked whether anyone told Vince McMahon it was a bad idea, Hardy said it would not have mattered.
“I’m sure someone told Vince that. But Vince, if he was adamant about something, he was gonna move forward with it,” he said.
Guerrero dropped the character in November 2005 after Eddie Guerrero died, returning to his own name on the Raw tribute show.
Benjamin had everything the ring asks for and was held back by what the company thought he could not do outside it. Guerrero was handed something he could not have made work, however hard he went at it. Both were on the same pay-per-view.
