Former WWE star Lince Dorado joined The Sessions with Renee Paquette to talk about his wrestling career, all the way from the start until now. While he admitted he got into wrestling through WWE, Dorado revealed that he broke into wrestling after attending a CZW show at the age of 16. In particular, a match between Ruckus and Claudio Castagnoli, best known in WWE as Cesaro, really inspired Dorado.
“I was 16,” Dorado said. “It was me and a couple of other guys, but I was the youngest. I was 16 and we had a backyard wrestling show, and I remember we had a guy from ECW, his name was Tommy and I’m looking at his name, I can’t remember. He wrestled in ECW, but he came to our show. Not Tommy Dreamer. I’m looking at him and I can’t say his name off the top of my head. But he basically was like ‘You six, you should go to the ECW Arena. They have a wrestling school in there, and go ahead and check it out, they actually do shows.’ I was like ‘What do you mean? WWE comes in there, WWF comes in there?’ He’s like ‘No, independent wrestling.’ So I was like ‘What the hell is this?’ Now all of my friends kind of knew about it, but I was like, again, focused like ‘This is the goal. Go to WWF at that point.’
“And so we went to a show for CZW. Now at that point, (Jon) Moxley is from CZW. You know about CZW. So it can be kind of crazy at CZW. But, CZW can also be very lit and have some, like, banger matches. If I had went to any other show that they were holding besides this one, I probably would not be wrestling. But I went to their show called Best of the Best and I saw two dudes in there that blew my mind. And it was Ruckus and Claudio Castagnoli. And I was like ‘These guys are stars.’ I was like, ‘Forget WWF, this is, this is where I want to go.’ The wrestling was awesome. They had great personalities and I was like ‘Sign me up. This is the wrestling school that I want to go to. Let’s go. Let’s do it right now.’ So we had a great conversation with Claudio, (Chris) Hero, a bunch of other guys that were there, and the next week, we signed up.”
Lince Dorado further went on to credit Castagnoli for helping to train him in his formative years. He believes Castagnoli isn’t just great but is one of, if not the, best wrestler in the world.
“Claudio is Claudio,” Dorado said. “He’s the man. Oh my gosh. And I always say he’s one of the best dudes I credit who helped train me as well amongst some other guys. But I’m very, very proud to say, ‘yeah, that dude helped train me’ and one of best wrestlers, if not the best wrestler in the world. Yeah, I put it out there.”
Recently Castagnoli became a free agent following him and WWE being unable to come to terms. While Lince Dorado would like to see Claudio in New Japan or Impact Wrestling, he believes he can contribute at a high level anywhere.
“He’ll go anywhere and become the guy,” Dorado said. “But there will always be somebody saying, ‘Well, he didn’t do it in WWE.’ But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It depends on how he feels and him leaving tells me he’s leaving for himself. So no matter what he does, he’s going to be happy with it.
“Any company would benefit from Claudio. Whether it’s a wrestling role, a teaching role, anything. That dude gets it, 110%. If it was me though, I would love to see Claudio kill it in New Japan or Impact. And the only reason I say that is there’s no difference for him in AEW. I feel like, not that he would be in the same spot, but I think he doesn’t benefit AEW and AEW doesn’t benefit him, at this moment.”
