Chad Gable recently opened up about the exact moment The Undertaker’s coaching finally clicked, revealing how a single backstage speech before his El Grande Americano brawl reshaped his entire approach to performance.
Gable shared the story during an appearance on Cody Rhodes’ podcast, What Do You Wanna Talk About?
Gable said the Hall of Famer managed to draw something out of him that years of other coaching figures could not. He described a long stretch of frustration, feeling like he was failing to deliver what Undertaker wanted from him.
So as far as Undertaker goes, I think he gets the credit for pulling something out of me that a number of people have tried to over the years and just haven’t been able to,” Gable said.
And for whatever reason, he thought a great deal about it. And I always had these coaching figures in my life through amateur wrestling that I always looked up to as we want to please these guys because they are coaches, and you want to make them happy and deliver what they’re looking for.
Gable said he needed to see visible progress in his work and simply wasn’t getting it.
And he was a guy that I think for a long time I never was giving him what he wanted, and it was frustrating the hell out of me,” Gable continued.
Like I’m a guy that needs that progress. I need to see progress, and I wasn’t getting it because he was like ‘Man, I’m not giving him what he needs.’ And then finally one day, he gave us this speech backstage, and specifically, I remember he said some things right before this big brawl I had with El Grande, another moment that everyone was watching.
The Moment It Clicked
Gable said the backstage words flipped a switch during the ringside brawl, sending him into a headspace he had never reached in a wrestling context before.
He lit a fire under me, and something just clicked, and he just turned me into wrestler Greco-Roman wrestler mode for those three five minutes, whatever it was, ringside. I lost myself. I was just in the moment, like I’d never been,” Gable said.
And when I got done with that, and things, the dust settled and cleared, I was like ‘I get it. I see what he meant. I see what he’s been talking about.’ And I looked at him and told him that afterwards. I always wanted to apologize for not understanding it up to that point because then, then it seems so easy. And once you finally get it and it clicks, man. Yeah, he had a breakthrough for me.
Gable’s persona shifted heavily after the mask vs. mask bout at AAA Noche de Los Grandes in May. The storyline has fed directly into the best headspace of his career, by his own account.
The renewed run now leads into a title opportunity. This weekend at SummerSlam, Gable faces Penta for the Intercontinental Championship.
