The Great American has become a mass phenomenon, especially in Mexico, where its popularity has reached levels never expected by WWE and Lucha Libre AAA. However, this would not have been possible without a series of circumstances and twists of fate, including a change of protagonist and a "mask vs. mask" fight that will go down in the history books of both companies.
Every story has a beginning, and this one in particular started during the rivalry that Chad Gable had with the masked wrestlers of WWE. His defeats against these talents led him to create a character to rival them, as well as to ridicule an entire culture. However, he never expected how it would all end. This is how Gable explained it in a recent interview with WittyWhittier.
"It's funny how this business works, wrestling itself. You never know what will work out, what won't, what will surprise us, and what things will truly connect with the audience. I think that has been the story of this last year and a half or two years. The story of The Great American started simply because I wanted to contribute more to a story in which I was already involved with these wrestlers, and I wanted to take it to another level.
This was my idea of putting on this mask and my way of trying to elevate this story, without knowing where it would take me professionally. You really can't predict things like that. And then, the injuries came. For those who don't know, I had to undergo shoulder surgery; I had a torn rotator cuff, torn bicep tendon, and all sorts of issues that needed to be treated, which forced me to step away," he said.
"Again, it all depends on circumstances. Who knows where we would be now if all these elements hadn't ended up developing the way they did. Another person took on the character of The Great American and was portraying it while I was injured," he continued. "I came back, and suddenly, we had a story already prepared. It's like you said, a bit of an odyssey and a journey we had to go through. I would describe it as valleys and peaks, low moments and things like that until we got here. But now, at the point where I am, it's almost like I think: 'Wow, I couldn't have written this better than how it turned out'."
After Gable's injury and his departure from the company's television programming, Ludwig Kaiser was tasked with wearing the mask of The Great American. No one could have imagined that the German wrestler would be able to connect so deeply with the Mexican audience, leading the company to push him as the top babyface of AAA. In the first half of this year, he had a rivalry with Original The Great American (Gable upon his return) that culminated in one of the best matches in recent times in WWE: a "mask vs. mask" match in which Chad earned the unanimous respect of Mexican fans.
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