Rey Mysterio Jr. and Low Ki Had Themselves a Dream Match

Remember how Rey Mysterio left WWE when it was extremely interesting for him to do so and came back right after All In, when it would have been extremely interesting for him to not go back?

In independent professional wrestling, there are two kinds of dream match: there’s the first (or “first”) time match-up between two wrestlers who’ve met a certain threshold for buzz, and there are matches like this.

I don’t watch the indies like I used to, but when I was more heavily involved in the scene, it was the former that always grabbed my attention, live and on tape, because a match like Biff Busick vs. ACH had more on the line for the wrestlers involved than something like Ethan Page vs. Buff Bagwell, to use two very specific examples of things I remember enjoying, but when I’m actually looking for something, it’s always freaky, unexpected matches on the indies or in Mexico or Japan, like Bryan Danielson vs. Kimala or Cactus Jack vs. Jumbo Tsuruta or Chyna vs, Masahiro Chono or whatever – the kind of thing a nihilist books in Total Extreme Warfare, only real.

Rey Mysterio vs. Low Ki isn’t nihilist booking – it’s the main event of Jersey All-Pro Wrestling’s 19th anniversary show, which was also a tribute to their founder, Fat Frank Iadevaia, who’d passed two months prior. This match happens pretty early in that window of time when Mysterio had left WWE after a legitimate gripe about the company’s practice of extending contracts when workers are injured. He signed with AAA and was on two seasons of Lucha Underground. He also worked matches on the indies either against fellow WWE alumni like PJ Black and Kurt Angle, or wrestlers like Amazing Red and AJ Styles for the first time, wrestlers who’d taken what Rey and others had done in the 1990s and ran with it while WWE’s Cruiserweight Division focused on 7-12 minute matches featuring wrestlers who were largely never meant to break out from that position on the card. Rey, as always, was an exception.

Sorry for doing a lot of on-the-fly contextualization, but 2015 was a fascinating time to be a wrestling fan. One year prior, CM Punk’s departure and the rise of Daniel Bryan and The Shield and The Wyatt Family completely transformed WWE. NXT had just made the switch from its (superior) original format of serialized hazing of “rookies” to a WWE Network exclusive hour-long show featuring a WWE developmental system that was a mix of their usual preferences and indie guys who’d largely exhausted the possibilities of indie wrestling. The indies were heating up, Lucha Underground was on TV, New Japan was making serious strides in America on streets paved with Bullet Club shirts, and British wrestling was resurgent to the point that high profile moonshots like WCPW and the World of Sport revival, uh, happened.

In the three years between Rey’s departure from WWE and his return as a surprise at both the Royal Rumble and The Greatest Royal Rumble (the inaugural show in the WWE/Saudi Arabia deal, which probably netted Mysterio a great payday for a guest spot), Mysterio visited most of these scenes, even wrestling in the main event of All In a whole 18 days before signing to WWE full-time in September 2018. Mysterio’s resigning isn’t one of those things you point to in the run up to the 1/1/2019 launch of All Elite Wrestling as reactionary moves WWE undertook to prevent something like AEW from happening, but it was an instructive, early look at what was possible for wrestlers WWE didn’t value if they got tired enough of being a guy to leave. This is Rey Mysterio we’re talking about, not Cody Rhodes, but think of all of the buzzy midcard talent WWE developed and released during their time as an unchallenged monopoly, and how many of them left for places like TNA looking completely unmotivated, as if everything that wasn’t Raw or SmackDown was beneath them. To leave WWE during this time was to fail. 

Rey Mysterio didn’t do that. Instead, he spent three years adding facets to a career that was already, to me at least, enough to place him among the top 1% of wrestlers who’d ever lived. Without WWE’s booking rendering him Another Talented Superstar and without its schedule grinding him down to nothing, he felt like a truly special wrestler for the first time in years. 

Take this match against Low Ki, for example. It feels important, like Rey is finally wrestling someone who represents the next evolution of the style he had spent 20 years at the forefront of. Low Ki’s a weird dude whose legend in wrestling is different depending on who is telling it, but man, his combination of striking and technical wrestling is breathtaking when everything is humming along and he’s not causing Twitter discourse, and I’m glad this happened for the first/only time at the Rahway Rec Center and not on a pre-Raw taping of Superstars because there’s something exceptionally cool about seeing a guy like Mysterio, who made what he did mainstream by sheer force of talent, wrestle Ki, a guy who basically refused to do the same.

The result isn’t an epic classic, but a) it’s not designed to be, and b) it’s about as close as an indie match during this era of Super Indie Dream Matches got without the manufactured hype of WrestleMania week or BOLA. This match goes just north of 20 minutes and is wrestled at something of a house show pace, at least until Mysterio and Ki demonstrate how evenly matched they are through the opening third’s exchanges of holds, counterholds, and pin attempts and the two or three minutes they take after a standoff to appreciate the vibe.

Everybody here, including the announcers who spend too much time talking about marking out, is just pumped to see these two men in the ring with each other. This is the essence of the dream match, the essence of a house show main event in WWE, where you’re there because seeing your favorite wrestlers feels good on its own, and everything else is gravy. Rey’s eventual win with exemplifies this kind of booking: you’re never going to see this again, let’s send everybody home on the high of a 619 and a frog splash.

But this is Rey Mysterio Jr. and Low Ki. There is a lot of gravy.

The opening moments of the match, where Mysterio tries and mostly succeeds in keeping up with Low Ki’s technical wrestling prowess, does a lot of subtle work in establishing Ki as a serious threat to Rey, who really hadn’t wrestled like this since he counted Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit among his rivals. Ki’s quickness and size forces Mysterio back farther than that, though – he’s approaching Mysterio like he’s the WCW Cruiserweight Champion, not the WWE World Heavyweight Champion, and his kicks add another dimension that Mysterio mostly would have encountered from CM Punk, meaning he hadn’t really encountered a striker on Ki’s level before.

You don’t get the sense that Low Ki will be beating Rey Mysterio on this evening, but you do get the sense that he can. As the match builds, you can see that Ki really wants to beat Mysterio. Sometimes that takes the form of mask ripping, but for the most part it’s in how utterly, completely prepared he is for Mysterio, particularly the 619. He has two counters of that move in this match that are astonishing. That nobody has stolen the feint/boot through the ropes is surprising. I’m willing to guess that the low bridge, which is caught on a surprising number of cameras for an indie show and is a patently nasty bump, never became a semi-regular spot because Mysterio actually enjoys not breaking his hips. 

He’s never guilty of wrestling like this is just an indie show, but the amount of fight Low Ki brings to him wakes Mysterio up a little – it’s like watching him run into a logic-driven wrestler like Dean Malenko, where a lightbulb goes off at some point and he finds a way to chip at his defense until a hole in their plan appears that he can exploit. His counter of the Warrior’s Way, for example, or the way he hits Ki with one of the world’s only examples of a good short rana. 

They just get each other. It’s hard to put it any other way. Beyond this match, there are four multi-man tags in Mexico that see Rey and Ki on opposite sides of the ring, all in 2015, but nothing else like this, a one-off meeting of two incredible junior heavyweight wrestlers that showed how much more both of them were capable of at that stage of their respective careers and hints at what may have been a great rivalry, had their careers aligned just a little differently.

This is match that was very of its time, which is to say that it was alive with possibility and promise. It’s the kind of thing the indies aren’t really equipped to deliver in 2023, but has nevertheless became a staple of televised wrestling, from the AEW/NXT back and forth necessitating an opening 20 minutes that were significant and novel to now, where AEW television still features showcases like this between established, made wrestlers and younger talent. WWE didn’t take anything away from wrestling when it resigned a Mysterio – he’d been with them for 13 years up until 2015. But man, it’s fun to imagine them sleeping on resigning Rey in 2018. What a fun couple of years he could have had in an entirely fresh space.