Rey Mysterio’s United States Title Invitational finals match with Santos Escobar ended earlier than expected on Friday’s episode of WWE SmackDown.
Santos did an outside dive in the bout, and Mysterio landed on his back wrong during the commercial break. When WWE returned from break, WWE medical checked on the Hall of Famer. The referee called for the bell, with Escobar being declared the winner, and the two hugged it out after the bout.
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer noted Mysterio was knocked silly before the dive, but he was told Mysterio is fine.
Meltzer: “So He’s fine. He did the match with Santos Escobar last night, and apparently, something happened. I was told that it was a move by Santos Escobar that knocked Rey silly, but he continued to wrestle.”
Bryan Alvarez: “So it was not the dive?”
Meltzer: “It was not the dive. Okay. It may have been. Was there a dive before? Because I was told something about Planche. The dive was the excuse to call the match off. Like when he took the dive, and they were tending to him and everything like that, it’s like they had already planned to stop the match, and that was when they stopped. They stopped the match before the commercial break and everything like that. But when they found out that he had already been dizzy before, he was like selling a way to stop the match. He was not actually knocked out there, but he was dizzy before that. So that’s what I was told about how it went down. I don’t think he had a concussion. I mean, it looked like if you watch on tv, it looked like he did, but it was a precautionary measure. They didn’t know. And yeah, what I basically was told, you know, he got back in the ring after that. I’m told he’s, he’s fine. So that’s good. You know, it looked like it could have been scary when he was laying there ’cause they very rarely stopped the match, you know, stopping a match due to injury is a very rare thing in any of these companies. Even at times when quite frankly, you know, it should be done.”
