WWE: Celebrating African-American Wrestlers Who Impacted Us

Shelton Benjamin

Jeter- Before Kofi Kingston, Shelton Benjamin filled the “hey, he’s a good athlete, let’s make that his gimmick” role in WWE in the mid-to-late 2000s.

After splitting away from his “World’s Greatest Tag Team” partner Charlie Haas via the 2004 draft lottery, Benjamin received a fairly big push out of the gate thanks to a couple of upset victories over Triple H. Keep in mind that this happened during Helmsley’s infamous “Reign of Terror” where he ostensibly made it his mission to bury countless wrestlers in service of bolstering his own star power, so the fact that Benjamin nabbed a couple of wins over “The Game” — no matter how fluky — established him as a legitimate singles competitor.

It was during this early singles run where Benjamin — who won collegiate championships in track and field and was an accomplished amateur wrestler at the University of Minnesota — exhibited his mat skills as well as his ability to create memorable replay-worthy moments in the ring on almost a weekly basis.

After a highlight reel-filled performance in the inaugural Money in the Bank Ladder Match at WrestleMania 21, Benjamin appeared to be on track to become a top star in the company. But then I remembered that he worked for WWE and those thoughts quickly left my mind. Any lingering hopes I had for him were extinguished the second the company introduced his “Momma” to the viewing audience in late 2005 (astonishingly, that wasn’t even the worst gimmick from that year). Once that storyline ended, they turned him into the “angry Black man that always pulls the race card” whenever things didn’t go his way. In case you were wondering, yes, those gimmicks were as bad as they sounded.

Bad booking aside, Benjamin may go down as one of the best wrestlers to have never held the WWE, World Heavyweight, or Universal Championships. Sure, he wasn’t the best talker or the most charismatic — that hasn’t stopped WWE from pushing Baron Corbin — but he was a breathtaking wrestler that made everything he did look effortless (similar to Ricochet or Will Ospreay). He may not have reached the top of the mountain but he gave fans plenty of extraordinary memories in some of the company’s most historic matches.