Every great wrestling gimmick has an origin story. Turns out Chad Gable wrote his own.
He Put the Mask On Himself
Over the past year and a half, El Grande Americano has gone from a joke to one of the most talked-about characters in WWE, one that eventually spilled over into AAA as well. Gable originated the masked gimmick himself, and in a new interview with WittyWhittier, he explained exactly how it started.
“The El Grande Americano thing started just as me wanting to put more into a story that I was already involved with these luchadors, and I wanted to take it to another level. This was my idea of donning this mask and my way to try to elevate this story, not knowing where it was going to take me career-wise. You never really can predict stuff like that.”
Then His Body Wrote the Next Chapter
What happened next wasn’t part of any pitch meeting. Gable needed shoulder surgery, a torn rotator cuff and bicep tendon among the damage, and had to step away from the character he’d just built. Ludwig Kaiser picked up the mask in his absence and ran with it, and by the time Gable was healthy again, WWE had a built-in feud waiting for him.
“Somebody else took over the El Grande Americano gimmick, and they were doing it while I was hurt. I come back. Now we’ve got a built-in story there. It is like you said, a bit of an odyssey and a journey we had to go through. I would call it valleys and peaks and lows and things like that to get here. But now, where I’m at, it’s almost like, man, I couldn’t have written it any better than it turned out.”
Gable and Kaiser eventually settled it in a Mask vs. Mask match, one Gable lost, forcing him to give up the persona for good. He’s spent the time since trying to make amends with the luchadors he disrespected while wearing it, a redemption arc that’s added real weight to his current run as Intercontinental Champion.
Why Now
The timing tracks. Gable defends that same Intercontinental Championship against Rey Mysterio on tonight’s Raw, so a story about how deep his history with lucha libre actually runs is landing at exactly the right moment. Circumstantial or not, as Gable put it himself, it’s hard to argue with how it turned out.
