Chad Gable reveals the moment he knew El Grande Americano connected with WWE fans
Chad Gable never imagined El Grande Americano would become one of the most talked about gimmicks in wrestling. Reflecting on his meteoric rise as the masked wrestler, Gable admitted he was caught off guard by the exceptional fan response.
Gable discussed the creation of the El Grande Americano gimmick with Good Karma Wrestling. He talked about the past month which led to his final portrayal of the character.
“It has been just a wild month for me, as you can imagine, as you might have seen. I’m in good spirits. I feel like I’m in some of the best head space I’ve ever been in wrestling. Things have been up and down for a long, long time. And right now, I feel like we’re in just this awesome spot where I’m just creatively fulfilled. Just everything’s going well on the show. We’ve got some great stories going on and coming off the mask vs. mask match that I was just I’m so proud of for so many reasons and we’re in a good spot.”
Gable admitted that he never expected the gimmick to receive such an overwhelming response from the wrestling world. He recalled a moment when he was brawling with Ludwig Kaiser’s version of the character, that made him realize how much he resonated with the fans. Their loud reaction and cheers were impossible to ignore.
“Not a chance, you know? No way. I mean, that’s the best thing, one of the best things I think about wrestling, right, is you just never know. You never know what it is that’s going to land, what it is that the audience is going to latch on to or why really. And when you really think about the path that we had to go on to get to that point, it would have never happened if it weren’t for so many different variables there. And someday everyone, I think, will become privy to like how many there actually were. There’s a lot more than people even know about, but something as obvious as my injury, right? And me having to go away that if I hadn’t gotten injured, none of this would have ever taken the route that it did.And it’s just magic. That’s what wrestling is.”
“I think for me it was the night if you recall that we had started our story down there a little bit. And it was the night that we got into our first big brawl around the ring and around the arena a little bit. And that started clicking not only for I think the audience, but for me because that was a moment that I was so in the moment and it felt real to me. It was visceral. Like I wanted to hurt this man so bad for taking what was mine, what I had created. And that was life or death for me for those four or five minutes or whatever it was.”
“And when I walked away from that that night, I’m like ‘we got something here.’ This is special because I’ve never felt that way about something in the past yet. And it unlocked this whole new realm and aspect of pro wrestling for me. I’m like ‘man, I can treat this the same exact way as I treated Greco Roman wrestling, as I treated amateur wrestling.’ Like visceral, man. Like feel it, go into it a competition. I’m going to wreck this guy. And that was my mindset from that moment on out. And I think that’s really what both of our mindsets were.”
Following his loss on May 30 at AAA Noche de Los Grandes match, Gable was forced to unmask as El Grande Americano. Since then his appearances on Raw has centered around embracing lucha libre and embarking on an apology tour, particularly toward Alpha Academy for the way he mistreated the group.
Rosanne Raphael is a wrestling writer with over three and a half years of experience covering all things related to the industry. From a kindergarten teacher to PR Associate to turning her lifelong passion for the industry into a career, Rosanne is currently writing for F4W Online where she focuses on wrestling news, analysis, and storytelling.
Rosanne previously contributed to Sportskeeda as an Assistant Content Manager.
When not consumed by wrestling, Rosanne is a musician and an aspiring artist.