Lodi Recalls Making WCW Nitro Debut Against Chris Benoit

WCW alumnus Lodi recently sat down and discussed working with Chris Benoit in his own debut on WCW Nitro. Lodi’s first match was as a part of Raven’s Flock, who were in the midst of a feud with Benoit, and Lodi recalled his experience working with Benoit. You can see highlights below, per Wrestling Inc:

On making his WCW Nitro debut against Chris Benoit: “Chris was very intense with his work, he was an intense individual, and I considered him a good friend. We had done some work with him already, obviously, because Raven was in an angle with him. [It was] my first match on Nitro. I’m in there with Chris, who I will tell you to this day out of all the guys I’ve been in the ring with, and I’ve been in the ring with all of them, he was by far the best. There was a little pressure there because you don’t want to mess that up. You don’t want to do something wrong, and you’re thinking, ‘There’s nothing I can do that he can’t cover up.’ But still, you want to perform well. And he did, obviously. To this day, the way that some of the things in my career fell. Who gets to have their first televised match against Chris Benoit on a live show? It was a great thing for me, and Chris was awesome.

“Our match got cut short halfway through and we ran into the 9 o’clock hour. And it totally cut out my heat. The best part about it was I had not wrestled. I’d been on T.V. for two and a half months and everybody wanted to see me get killed, and that was exactly what happened. We were almost at the cutoff spot and the referee leans in and says, ‘We got to go home,’ and Benoit said, ‘Lodi, sorry, we got to go home right now.’”

On working with Benoit: “[Benoit] was intense to watch, and he was an intense individual. But he was very safe, and his work was way lighter than it looked. The chops were not light, but his kicks, his punches, all that stuff, [was great].”