The Return of Rey Mysterio

A little over 20 years ago, WCW was the top pro wrestling company in the world. Ted Turner’s baby dethroned the then WWF on the back of edgy storytelling, bringing cool back with the nWo, and an undercard of lightning fast, top tier technical wrestling to make the lumbering brutes at the top more special.

There aren’t many from that roster still working high profile matches. Pro wrestlers don’t ever really stop, not really, so you can find all sorts of stars who once wrestled in front of millions doing one-offs in high school gyms and state fairs. But the ones who are visible, out there on television or big live shows, are a small group. L.A. Park, Ultimo Dragon, the quasi-retired Big Show, Chris Jericho (who is probably immortal), and Jeff Jarrett. Certainly, the number of WCW wrestlers who crossed over into WWE is tiny, and the still-active ones tinier, still.

Then there’s Rey Mysterio, arguably the greatest cruiserweight in history, who was recently announced to be returning to WWE for the 1,000th episode of SmackDown.

It’s hard to contextualize just how invigorating it was to watch Mysterio on WCW this far after the fact. How could you make sense of it, when everyone’s a high flyer now? We live in the world of Kenny Omega flying over the top rope without touching it, of PAC forgetting gravity exists and PCO doing moonsaults. Nearly everyone who can do something crazy and acrobatic does.

It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case. Some of the lingering distrust of pro wrestling’s athletic credentials comes from the pre-WCW days, when pro wrestlers lumbered and stomped like elephants on the savannah. Which is not at all to say that they weren’t athletic, but it was a different kind of athletic, one focused on physique and cardio, not nimbleness, jumping, and speed. If you’re of a certain age, you can still hear your parents calling them fakers and fatasses. Sometimes, after Dick Murdoch won his squash match against one or the other of the Mulkeys, you thought they might be right.

When WCW put a premium on smaller, more athletic wrestlers to open their shows—which stole a note from ECW, as so many things in the late 1990s did—there wasn’t any more doubt about whether pro wrestling was real, at least in the athletic sense. You couldn’t, and can’t, fake 360 dives and balletic chain wrestling.

A parade of men came in from other parts of the world and other promotions to fill in the roster. Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit. Chris Jericho, Juventud Guerrera, Psychosis, and Ultimo Dragon. They were a mix of mat technicians and high flyers, and they stole the show more often than not, particularly as nWo and Hogan fatigue set in. The cruiserweights never flagged, though they dropped off, one by one, heading back to Japan, Mexico, or into the waiting arms of WWE.

But Rey Mysterio was the best of all of them. That isn’t to say that he’s had the best career or that he was the best in 2006, but in 1997? No question. None. He was electric. He did things nobody else could, things which none of us in the audience had seen, things which defied and still defy easy description.

Mysterio didn’t just lean on high spots, a valid criticism of this type of style, where the expectation of doing more and more breathtaking feats leads to a barely connected sequence of moves. He had the “it” of timing and dramatic sense, understanding the give and take which makes a good match special. Part of it was that there was something pitiable about him, making him a natural babyface. He’s only 5’6”, and seemed even smaller back then. Even the merest glimpse of his face under the mask revealed that he looked like a baby-faced boy, which made him, quite predictably, a natural babyface.

So Mysterio would go into the ring and get his ass kicked for a while before teasing a comeback or three. He’d get beaten back down and the crowd would boo the heel, especially if that heel took Mysterio to the ground to slow things down. It was rhythmic, but never boring. This is the ritual, that you probably know how a match will work out but you want it nonetheless. When the final release came and Mysterio won, the crowd would erupt. It was never, ever boring.

A good glimpse at prime era Rey Mysterio is his 1997 Halloween Havoc match against Eddie Guerrero, who was just coming into his own as a top tier performer in the United States. The template is there, with the added spice of it being a title-vs.-mask match. Guerrero is vascular and menacing, made larger by the stature of Mysterio. And sure enough, Guerrero keeps grounding Mysterio to boos and groans, Mysterio keeps fighting back, and the final win draws the cheers.

Some of the moves Mysterio does don’t have the sense of speed we’re used to now, but they’re always inventive and unexpected. There’s the topé where he straddles Guerrero on the outside—the expectation is that he just rides the larger man down to the concrete, but Mysterio switches it up, turning it into a hurricanrana in a split second. Mysterio was cool, a wrestling genius who seemed like Spider-Man, who he sometimes dressed up as.

Such genius couldn’t be tamped down, even in a WWE which has always loved its big men. He had a good run in WWE, becoming WWE champion in 2006. But the brass never seemed to believe in him due to the difference in what they liked in terms of size and style; one of his world championship reigns, in 2011, lasted all of one night. Worse, his push felt as though it was linked tightly to Guerrero’s passing—Randy Orton invoked the dead wrestler in his feud with Mysterio, and Guerrero’s shadow loomed large over everything Mysterio did from then on.

Perhaps it was that large shadow which contributed to Mysterio’s decline. Guerrero was the same wrestler he always was when he won the WWE title, but he was bigger. Mysterio was accused of steroid use in 2007, part of a large expose of steroids in pro wrestling which ended up leading to WWE’s Wellness Program. He ran afoul of that program in 2012.

He would never reach those earlier heights again. His knees were worn down and his appearances became less and less frequent, until he finally disappeared from WWE in 2014.

The wrestling didn’t stop, of course. He returned to Mexico to wrestle for AAA. He worked for Lucha Underground. And most hearteningly, the thing which seemed to confirm that he still had a sense of greatness around him, he showed up in New Japan to team up with Jushin Liger and Hiroshi Tanahashi in a one-off, as well as to tease a match with Will Ospreay. That match never happened, at least in New Japan, due to Mysterio carrying an injury, but the buzz around it was palpable. The buzz was maybe more important than the scuttled match: it showed that Rey Mysterio, a man who turned into an afterthought in WWE at the end, still had the ability to tantalize and elevate just from presence alone.

He’s coming back October 16 at SmackDown 1,000. If the abysmal 25th anniversary Raw is an indication, the show stands to frustrate more than entertain, but Mysterio’s presence lends it the air of something magical, exciting, and, well, mysterious. 20 years from the days when he regularly stole the show from bigger stars, Rey Mysterio still fascinates us, and it’s doubtful that will ever stop.