Chad Gable & Otis’ Friendship Goes Back Years Before WWE

Alpha Academy, the RAW Tag Team Champions, are quite the odd pairing. Chad Gable and Otis won the titles from RK-Bro on the January 10th edition of Monday Night RAW. They are friends in real life and their bond goes back years.

The pair appeared on After The Bell to talk about their time together before arriving in the WWE, how their friendship evolved over the airs, and the frustrations of not being able to perform at WrestleMania.

“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,” Gable told podcast host Corey Graves.

“It goes back to our days at The Olympic Training Center. This is in 2010, 2011, and even further than that. We realized recently that I had coached against Otis in amateur wrestling matches.

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“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.”

The former Olympian also opened up about the frustrations of being left off of WrestleMania card for years. “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,” he 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,” he further stated.

H/t WrestlingNews

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