Chad Gable and Otis of The Alpha Academy sat down with Corey Graves on this week’s “After The Bell” to talk about their friendship and their hopes for Wrestlemania this year.
Chad Gable talking about his friendship with Otis that goes back to 2010:
“Achieving dreams is awesome in and of itself for anybody of course, but doing it with your best friend, alongside him, is something that’s hard to describe. It goes back to our days at The Olympic Training Center. This is in 2010, 2011, and even further than that,” Gable said.
“We realized recently that I had coached against Otis in amateur wrestling matches,” Gable continued. “My brother was an amateur wrestler at heavyweight. Otis would wrestle him and I would coach against Otis before I even got to be friends with him.”
“But then a couple years down the road, we were both living at The Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs trying to make the Olympic team, and our love of professional wrestling bonded us together in the summer of one of those years. We spent a lot of days in what we called the Man Cave at the dorms at the O.T.C. watching pro wrestling in a dark room taking our naps during the day trying to refresh for the next training session. We spent many hours talking about what could be and the possibility of eventually maybe making it ourselves and making something happen. At that point, it was just really talking crap as a couple of young kids, but before you know it, we were on the path doing the NXT thing. All of a sudden it’s 10 years later. Holy crap. We did it man. It’s wild.”
Gable talking about wrestling at WrestleMania this year:
“As it is with any superstar in WWE, your goal is to have that moment at WrestleMania, to get your match, and I’ve never come close to that,” Chad Gable said.
“Not only have I not come close, there’s been years where I haven’t even been on, and that was last year and that was the year before. There’s almost nothing more frustrating and debilitating than peaking, because I still treat it like I would a big amateur wrestling tournament, like WrestleMania is our big one. I’ll get myself ready. I’ll get in better shape. I’ll mentally prepare better because it’s our big event.”
“To do all that work every year and not have it pay off, or not feel like it paid off, is so frustrating. It’s almost like a mission this year to make it happen more than ever.”
Other topics discussed during the episode include finding their groove as a team and the little-known wrestling singlet trading subculture.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit After The Bell with Corey Graves with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription
