Shelton Benjamin a New Japan Pro-Wrestler was recently interviewed by Chris Jericho’s show ‘Talk Is Jericho’. Benjamin talked about working a one-shot dark match for WWE in 2011, his OVW class, his WWE debut, and who would win in a face off between Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle.
He has this to say about Big Show:
“Honestly, me and Big Show are really good friends and he basically kept hounding me like, ‘come on! Come down [and] say hello to your boy,'” Benjamin claimed. “I was just about to leave and someone said, ‘hey Shelton, Johnny Ace [former WWE Senior Vice President of Talent Operations, John Laurinaitis] is looking for you.’ I was like, ‘okay,’ and [Laurinaitis] was like, ‘hey, do you feel like doing the dark match?’. I’m like, ‘sure, but I’ve got to go home and get my stuff'”.

Benjamin believes his Own class, which included Batista, Randy Orton, John Cena, and Brock Lesnar, was the best class of all time.

“I consider our class to be the greatest class, period.” Benjamin continued, “we had just a stacked class and I think what sets our class apart from most classes today [was that] no one had been called up [to WWE]. I think Bull Buchanan was the first guy that got called up while I was there. And because no one had been called up, our thinking was, we’ve all got to be good because, at the time, there was FCW, there was Deep South [Wrestling], and us, so we wanted the WWE, if anytime they pulled out of our pool of talent, we wanted them to be impressed, so they’d keep coming back to this well. So we all became genuine friends. I mean, we got in there, we pretty much came there early all the time. After class was over, everyone stayed just to get in reps with each other.”

See also: Breaking News! Another Popular WWE Superstar Set To Return from

Benjamin about Cena and Lesnar says:

“[Cena] was one guy that we all knew, ‘okay, when he gets called up, he’s going to be something special’ and once he got called up, they started with the rap [gimmick] and I was like, ‘still, people, they don’t know what they have. Wait till we get away from this whole rap thing and he really starts to open up’ and we had no idea we were looking at basically our generation’s [Hulk] Hogan. Brock, obviously, just the way he looked, we figured he was going to be a star.” More updates coming shortly