Seth Rollins says watching Chad Gable become one of the best wrestlers going has been a treat. Rollins posted the line to his Instagram story on Tuesday, the night after Gable defended the Intercontinental Championship against Dragon Lee in Mexico City.
“Watching Gable grow into one of the best wrestlers has been an absolute treat,” Rollins wrote.
The match ran 15 minutes and 40 seconds and closed with Gable retaining, finishing with the ankle lock after Lee had kicked out of everything else. Lee hit a tope con giro over the announce desk early, took an Olympic Slam, and later landed Operation Dragon twice and a Styles Clash without putting Gable away. The Arena CDMX crowd spent large stretches of it chanting that this is wrestling, in Spanish, and sang along with Gable’s entrance music on the way in.
The finish was not the part people have been talking about. Gable stopped the referee from handing him the title, checked on Lee, and raised his arm for the crowd. Lee took his hand, the two hugged, and Gable said something to him before kissing his head.
It was Gable’s second defence since taking the title from Penta at SummerSlam on August 2, after beating Rey Mysterio on the August 17 Raw. It was also his first match in Mexico since losing the El Grande Americano mask, an identity he had held since March 2025.
What Rollins is describing is a career that has been restarted more times than most. Gable was a Greco-Roman wrestler for the United States at the 2012 Olympics before signing with WWE, came up in NXT as half of American Alpha with Jason Jordan, and was repackaged as Shorty G in 2019, a gimmick built on his height that he has since described as difficult to make work. He rebuilt through Alpha Academy, then through the technical run that got him taken seriously, then through the masked character, and has come out the other side of all of it as Intercontinental Champion at 40.
The masked run is the part that sits oddly next to Tuesday’s match. El Grande Americano was a comedy character, an American in a lucha mask pretending to be Mexican, and Gable played it for the better part of a year and a half before losing it. Going back to Mexico City without the mask, in a match the crowd chanted for and sang along with, is about as clean a resolution as the character could have got.
Rollins and Gable worked a World Heavyweight Championship programme in 2023 and 2024 that is widely regarded as the run that changed how the company used Gable, with Gable coming closer to the title than anybody expected and the crowd behind him for it. Rollins retained, and Gable went back down the card afterwards rather than up, which is part of why the last two years have read as a rebuild.
The show was Raw’s first from Mexico City in 15 years and the fallout from TripleMania 34. Roman Reigns beat Penta in the main event to retain the World Heavyweight Championship, Lola Vice made her main roster debut and won a Money in the Bank qualifier, Je’Von Evans won the men’s qualifier over Austin Theory and Big Cass, and El Grande Americano, now a different man under the mask, opened the show teaming with Stephanie Vaquer against Dominik Mysterio and Liv Morgan.
WWE announced a combined attendance of 49,017 across the three nights it ran in the city. Gable is the second man to hold the Intercontinental Championship this year without it being the thing anybody expected of him, and the reaction in Mexico City suggests the audience has arrived at the same place Rollins has.
