Ken Shamrock Believes He Would Have Been A Top Star In Any Other Era

Ken Shamrock thinks that he could have reached greater heights had he been used correctly.

Shamrock was a big crossover star in WWF/E at first. His reputation as a top-level MMA fighter made him a big deal and WWE wanted to capitalize on his legitimacy.

Unfortunately, that never materialized since Ken Shamrock was misused. Instead of making him into what Brock Lesnar is now, Shamrock, an MMA fighter, was using things like hurricanranas and other more “entertainment wrestling” stuff.

Reflecting on his career in an interview with Ten Count’s Steve Fall, Ken Shamrock thinks he’d have better luck either in a different era or with management that better understood what he was about:

“I think that there’s a few guys that were writers there, and you hear it all the time when people talk about how they fell short with really doing anything with myself or even a few other people. They just didn’t know what to do with me.

They already created ‘Stone Cold’, they created the Bret Hart, they created this Attitude Era type thing. But it was almost like they just never really put me in that position to be that guy, like the guy that brought the attitude.

So it just felt like every single time I would start to do something, it was almost like they had so much going on that I just wasn’t one of the important roles. It was almost like it was The Rock and Stone Cold and the Undertaker and Mankind.”

Shamrock, who left WWE in 1999 after two years in the company, believes he would have been a major star in any other era of wrestling.

“Don’t get me wrong, those guys were huge. Any other generation, I probably would have been right up there. I would have been out there in a main thing. But because there were so many guys that they had roles for, there was probably about seven or eight of us that were in that era that they just didn’t really have a commitment to.”

“They just didn’t commit to really finishing off whatever it is or storylines that we were doing. They would involve us because we were an important piece to be involved, but we were never the main focus of the storylines.”

As he continued to make his point, Ken Shamrock pointed out some crossover stars that had success like Olympic Gold Medalist Kurt Angle and UFC legend Ronda Rousey among others.

“You see what they did with Brock, you see what they did with Goldberg, and Kurt Angle [and] Ronda Rousey. You’ve seen it. But it was almost like, because I was the first. I’m the one that opened the door to all this, they didn’t know what to do. I think after I was there, these other ones came in, and somebody figured out how to use it. Like wow, these guys are real, let’s use it. But when I came there, it was almost like I was this eye candy, but they didn’t build a story around it. It was kind of like, let’s use him to build other people,”

h/t Fightful for the transcription