Last night on WWE SmackDown, there was an incident during the match between Rey Mysterio and his Latino World Order teammate, Santos Escobar.
Santos Escobar performed a suicide dive to the outside when Mysterio appeared to hit his head on the ground. The 48-year-old wrestler suffered an injury as a result of the move.
Smackdown was then subsequently cut to a commercial break. After the commercial break, the match resumed, but it was evident that something had gone wrong as Mysterio was being attended to by a ringside physician. The physician later relayed to the referee that Rey was unable to continue. Many speculated that WWE scripted this outcome to avoid any internal conflict within the LWO while still enabling Escobar to win the match.
Unfortunately, it has been confirmed that Mysterio’s injury was real and not part of the storyline. Both Fightful Select and Wade Keller of PWTorch have reported that WWE had to improvise the match ending due to Rey’s injury. Wade Keller mentioned that there were concerns about a possible concussion being the cause of the problem.
Sean Ross Sapp tweeted: “After speaking with additional sources, we’ve learned the Mysterio injury was not storyline as originally suggeste. Santos Escobar was scheduled to go over clean and there was to be a backstage segment follow up that got nixed.”
Escobar is scheduled to challenge Theory for the United States Title on WWE SmackDown in just two weeks.