Chad Gable has been asked plenty of times about Shorty G. He has rarely been asked whose idea it was.
Cody Rhodes put that question to him directly on What Do You Wanna Talk About, and Gable gave a name, with a caveat attached.
“To my knowledge, I’d have to whittle it down to Eric Bischoff.”
He immediately stepped back from stating it as fact.
“Maybe I don’t, I can’t say that firmly, but he was the one that delivered me the news. So believe it at that. I liked working with Eric, by the way. Another Minnesota guy.”
Gable was rebranded as Shorty G in late 2019, a run that lasted into the following year before he returned to his own name. Bischoff was WWE’s executive director of SmackDown for a stretch of 2019.
Asked whether he thought the character had anywhere to go, Gable did not hedge.
“I felt boxed in.”
“I think I put on the face of this could work. We can make this work. And I tried. I don’t want to pretend like I had, deep down, I knew, man, this might be a killer. This could be the nail in the coffin.”
The text that helped
What got him through it was a message from Luke Harper, the wrestler later known as Brodie Lee, who died in 2020.
“I had a very encouraging text from one Luke Harper after the first promo I did when I essentially named myself Shorty G. That was super encouraging from a guy like that, because that was a low point for sure. Referring to myself as that.”
“He made me feel as good as I could have about it, and I will never forget that. And it was immediate afterwards. Took a lot of the stress off of me.”
Gable said Harper was one of a small group who went out of their way when he arrived.
“There’s a few people both in NXT and the main roster when I got to both places that were, what I say is, unnecessarily awesome to me. And he was one of them on the main roster from the moment I got up.”
He also said there is footage worth digging out.
“You can find some clips of him trying to shoot with me. Battle royals. We should dig them up. They’re pretty good. He gave it his best shot.”
