Chad Gable Reveals His Growing Appreciation for Storylines

On Good Karma Wrestling, Chad Gable was asked whether he could settle a longtime fan debate as to whether story or matches matter more, since his recent El Grande Americano mask versus mask match had plenty of both. Gable, who has a solid technical background, responded that his feelings have evolved on that.

Initially, as a skilled technical wrestler, he felt technique was everything. “Yeah, so my answer to that has probably changed over the years.,” he said. “When I was growing up, it was always the match. It was always the technical wrestling. Give me, you know, some All-Japan, some New Japan and some of the early indie guys from the 2000s. And I was like, that’s what a match is. That’s what wrestling is. But as you evolve and kind of grow older, [you] learn to appreciate other things.”

He recalled what it was like as a kid for him. “You know, the first time I ever remember feeling emotional about wrestling was watching Macho Man and Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania, and when Macho hoisted Miss Elizabeth up on his shoulders and you see people in the crowd crying, I was like six or seven years old when I saw this and I was crying. A little kid like that doesn’t process those kind of emotions, you know, like that, but it was doing something to me that I couldn’t explain.”

With the mask versus mask match, he felt he finally delivered something similar. “And now I’m looking back and realizing that that is really the ultimate goal of what we do, is to make people feel a certain way. It was never more obvious to me in my own career than that night at the mask versus mask match, because I left that with so many people telling me that they were just moved emotionally like they have never been in such a long time. And to me that was the highest compliment of it of the whole thing. The presentation was just that people, they felt something, man. They really, really felt something that night. So, that was special. So, I think you need both, man. You have to have both.”