Chad Gable recently spoke to WWE.com about his amateur career, teaming with Jason Jordan and more. You can check out the full interview here and read some highlights below.
If getting to WWE was always his goal:
“A lot of people don’t realize that my dream was to wrestle for WWE long before I ever had visions of the Olympics in my head. During my junior year of high school, a wrestling school near my house hosted their own version of ‘Tough Enough,’ which I won. I got the rest of my training there for free as my reward. The training mostly consisted of myself and my friend Kurt Pope going there by ourselves and rolling around after school and just trying to teach ourselves. I had a few matches, but had to stop when the high school wrestling season came around.”
Which professional wrestlers influenced his style as an amateur wrestler:
“I always loved watching guys like Eddie Guerrero, Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko and essentially the entire WCW Cruiserweight division. As my friends and I got older, I would dig a little further and find matches from these guys in Japan, which, in turn, led me to discovering guys like Jushin Liger, Kenta Kobashi and Mitsuharu Misawa.
It got to the point where I had custom singlets made with similar colors and designs as these guys and I would wear them at my amateur wrestling tournaments. I remember getting a tape of a British wrestler named Johnny Saint and it blew my mind. He was doing all these fancy tricks and things I envisioned myself doing if I ever became a wrestler. It opened my eyes to how someone can really individualize a style and make themselves stand out.”
