Wrestlers Who Should’ve Been World Champion

In this edition of The Wrestling Estate roundtable, we list our top three wrestlers who should’ve been world champion.

Chad Gelfand’s Wrestlers Who Should’ve Been World Champion

1. Rowdy Roddy Piper

Piper had everything you could want in a world champion, but due to his hottest run coming during the height of Hulkamania, he never got the opportunity in WWE. The perfect time for Piper to become world champion was right before WrestleMania or between I and II.

2. Razor Ramon

“The Bad Guy” is another wrestler that had all of the tools but never won a world title, partly due to self-inflicted reasons. However, Razor Ramon might have gotten a short run in 1996 if he had never left for WCW. He was proven to be an excellent opponent for Shawn Michaels and that would have been a fun world title feud, too.

3. Shelton Benjamin

Shelton Benjamin is one of the greatest athletes in wrestling history. He helped put the Money in the Bank match on the map and was one of the most exciting wrestlers to watch in his prime. Benjamin’s mic skills are held against him, but even with those limitations, he was red hot in 2005-2006. As a heel, 2009-2010 would have been a good time to put the World Heavyweight Title on Benjamin. WWE was desperate for new top guys and I would have liked to see the “Gold Standard” character given a shot on top.

John Corrigan’s Wrestlers Who Should’ve Been World Champion

1. Razor Ramon

The inspiration for this list, Scott Hall belonged at the top of the card. He was the perfect pro wrestler for the ‘90s: chiseled physique, big man who could hang with the smaller guys, money on the mic and oozing charisma, ahem, machismo. In hindsight, Razor Ramon should’ve dethroned Hulk Hogan at King of the Ring 1993. You can pretty much keep everything else as is, i.e., Lex Express vs. Yokozuna, the title unification ladder match at WrestleMania X. Maybe Bret Hart wins the belt off Ramon at King of the Ring 1994, upstaging his brother’s biggest win again.

2. Monty Brown

Monty Brown should have been Impact Wrestling’s biggest homegrown star. He got screwed in TNA by not only losing his title shot against Jeff Jarrett, but then joining forces with him in a mind-boggling heel turn just two months later. TNA should’ve struck while the iron was hot by having the “Alpha Male” pounce Jarrett out of orbit at Final Resolution 2005, when he was already six months into his reign. Brown could’ve carried the company into the Spike TV era.

3. Johnny Valentine

From the late 1940s until the plane crash ended his career in 1975, Johnny Valentine was one of the top stars in pro wrestling. Although his methodical, realistic style wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, he earned the respect of fans in every territory he went to while becoming one of the most hated competitors in the sport. With a nearly 30-year run, there was plenty of opportunity for the rugged Valentine to win the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. For example, he would’ve been a logical choice (instead of Dick Hutton) to dethrone Lou Thesz in 1957. Or he, rather than Gene Kiniski, could’ve beat Thesz in 1966.

Jack Goodwillie’s Wrestlers Who Should’ve Been World Champion

1. Owen Hart

Owen stands at the top of my list of wrestlers who should’ve been world champion because of how much of a softball it was for the WWF to push him after the Montreal Screwjob. Ultimately, the brain trust at the time was more than content with riding the Steve Austin wave all the way to the bank, and you can’t necessarily blame them for that, though I still feel they left money on the table with Owen, his fate-to-be notwithstanding. Once the Montreal Screwjob went down, it’s easy to imagine all eyes in the company turning to Owen, who was still under contract and ever the professional wanting and willing to do right by his employer regardless of how he felt about the situation.

We got a glimpse of this new, grittier take on Owen with “The Black Hart,” but the character hit a wall after being quickly resigned to midcard status. The character wasn’t just a grittier take on Owen, however. The WWE wanted to steer into the Montreal Screwjob and to Owen’s credit he was willing to play ball. He should have been rewarded for his professionalism, but it’s also not like he didn’t deserve the world title either. Granted, in the initial “Black Hart” promo, when Vince accuses Owen of groveling for a shot at the world championship, Owen responds by saying, “How stupid are you? Is that what you think this is about? You think I give a damn about a worthless title? A piece of leather with tin on it?”

This type of line sort of flies in the face of my argument, but we’ve seen wrestlers involve themselves in title matches before, even though the title itself is merely a prop in the overarching story. The best example is when Ric Flair defended the Intercontinental Championship against Triple H. Sure the IC title was on the line, but the primary story had to do with how personal Triple H had made things between him and Flair. By having a continued involvement with Michaels, Hart would have been naturally elevated in time and, had he not been crowned the champion, could have at least set himself up for a marquee match at WrestleMania. Instead, he went on to involve himself more with Triple H, who at the time was more or less Michaels’ lackey, fighting over the European Championship, an even more “worthless piece of leather with tin on it” than the winged eagle belt.

After Owen’s comments, little else made sense for him other than an opportunity to maim Shawn Michaels. With what we know about how tough Michaels made things on the WWF when it came time to put Steve Austin over at WrestleMania, what if Owen had won the belt at the Royal Rumble in a match with “The Showstopper?” From there, the possibilities are bountiful, as Owen could have continued on as a tweener character, eventually rekindling his feud with Austin from SummerSlam when Owen broke Austin’s neck OR he could have turned heel, aligning with Mr. McMahon after the boss ditched Michaels as his corporate champion. Considering the aftermath of Austin vs. Owen at SummerSlam, Owen as the WrestleMania 14 main event over HBK could have made sense.

2. Scott Hall

I’d be remiss to not include Scott Hall on this list, but he’s been a hot name on this subject for several years now, long before his health issues took a turn for the worse. I don’t think I need to go into detail about why Hall was a world championship-caliber talent, and his influence on the wrestlers to follow, guys like Roman Reigns and Hiroshi Tanahashi, can’t be discounted.

A lot of people preferred Razor Ramon as a heel, but always kind of liked him as the babyface; the classic, chicks want him, guys want to be him character. Though I’m not totally sure where I would have slid in the Razor title run as I’m a little hazy on early-mid 90’s WWF, it would have been a hell of a moment in retrospect if Diesel were the one to put him over. You could also make an argument for Scott Hall in WCW.

Sure, the top of the card was crowded. But there were so many months and years where WCW was just kind of treading water and succeeding in spite of itself that any kind of plan centered around Hall had to be a better long-term option than what we got. Perhaps he could have eventually done the honors for Goldberg, but there’s a bunch of different ways you could book a Scott Hall title run, no matter which era you’re looking at.

3. Shelton Benjamin

Honestly, Mr. Perfect and Ted DiBiase may have been more deserving names for a list like this (though I guess Curt Hennig did technically win the AWA World Championship towards the end of his tenure), but I’m going to focus on Shelton Benjamin in this spot since I’m more familiar with the era and, in fact, I find Benjamin to be a highly underrated Intercontinental Champion. Benjamin had a nine- or 10-month reign with the belt, which came on the heels of a huge win over Triple H on Raw and included his highlight reel sell of Sweet Chin Music where he jumped into it off the springboard.

Benjamin was the human highlight reel. He had the athleticism to put on exciting matches and the technical ability that kept him in the same ballpark as fellow amateur wrestlers turned WWE superstars like Kurt Angle, the Haas Brothers and college teammate Brock Lesnar. Plus, not to mention the elephant in the room, but with his exciting style doing the talking for him, Benjamin seemed like a slam dunk for WWE as a marketable black champion in an era where there were so few.

So, what happened? WWE turned him heel and paired him with his “momma.”

While the gimmick was a nice change of pace that allowed Benjamin to largely continue to be himself bell-to-bell, it simply wasn’t a main event gimmick, putting a hard cap on how far he could go on Raw. In spite of this, Benjamin continued to have great matches. His title vs. briefcase match with Rob Van Dam at Backlash 2006 always sticks out to me as the highlight of the Shawn Michaels and God vs. the McMahons show, and those two could have taken things to a whole new level in a proper feud. If you took Jerry Lynn and replaced him with Shelton Benjamin in ECW from 1999 on, we’d still probably revere those matches just the same as we do now. That’s how good Shelton was. Sure, his personality leaved a bit to be desired, but it’s also not like WWE gave him anything to work with in that department either.

Speaking of ECW, he would join the WWE’s third brand in 2008, becoming “The Gold Standard,” a new heel gimmick which DID happen to have main event upside. The only problem was the follow-through was not there to match, as ECW was only an hour-long show a week and unless your name was CM Punk or John Morrison, it was a tough place to stand out which is part of the reason why “ECW on Sci-Fi” began a “talent exchange” with SmackDown (along with both shows taping on Tuesday nights). Still, WWE never really went “full send” on the “Gold Standard,” and he continued to just kind of top out as a mid-card mechanic type of talent before leaving WWE in 2010 and not really capturing the same magic he once had.

Shockingly, Benjamin has been back with WWE for coming up on six years now, though he never again found a truly featured role on the show. Having said all that, it’s tough to put a pinpoint on when he should have won the title exactly. A heel turn following the initial Intercontinental Championship run was warranted, but with a name manager like Paul Heyman to work with instead of his “momma,” Benjamin would have had the credibility needed to work up the card instead of laterally, and I could have seen something like the Gold Standard gimmick working in lieu of the momma’s boy gimmick. If even one of these things had happened, it wouldn’t have been out of the question for Benjamin to have become the world champion by the end of 2007.