Ask 411 Wrestling: Has Rey Mysterio Ever Faced a Shorter Opponent in WWE?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals . . . through Hel Stryer and brimstone, it’s Ask 411 Wrestling!

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

Hey, ya wanna banner?

Stu from Liverpool is asking about a pool of wrestlers . . . the pool of wrestlers entering into the 1990 Royal Rumble. (Not all the intros can be winners.)

Quick few questions mainly based around the 1990 Rumble which I’m watching through YouTube.

1. ‎Why did Rick Rude enter the match WAY before his countdown to enter? Just to liven up the dead spot before and some extra star power/additional heel for Warrior and Hogan?

I looked and looked and couldn’t find an explanation for this, but every indication from watching the show makes it look like a botched spot. The announcers have no idea what’s going on, and production seemingly has no idea what’s going on because the countdown clock appears when he’s already in the ring and the vanishes seconds later. There’s not a good kayfabe explanation for it, either. I read a couple of people trying to justify it by saying that Rude couldn’t wait to go after his hated rival the Ultimate Warrior, but those two men hadn’t wrestled since August 1989.

2. How long was Earthquake the “Canadian Earthquake”?

This is one of those things that got slowly phased out over time as opposed to there being a clear demarcation point, but the “Canadian” was pretty much gone by the time Wrestlemania VI rolled around.

3. How was Tony Schiavone’s commentary during the match perceived backstage?

According to Schiavone’s remarks on his own podcast and specifically the episode covering the 1990 Royal Rumble, Vince McMahon was generally not a fan of his work. Vince gave him a prominent role during Summerslam 1989 but, after that performance, Schiavone feels as though he was largely put on ice in favor of the announcers that McMahon preferred. He only got back into the lead play-by-play slot for the Rumble because McMahon himself had intended to call the action but was exhausted after a family trip to Boca Raton, Florida earlier in the weekend. Schiavone was a replacement selected on the day of the show.

Bruce Prichard on his podcast has also said that McMahon generally didn’t care for Schiavone’s play-by-play, so this perspective is not limited to Schiavone himself.

Tony’s station in the WWF didn’t seem to rise at all following the Royal Rumble, so one can presume that he didn’t do anything to change the boss’s mind.

For what it’s worth, on the same episode of the show in which Prichard said Schivone wasn’t well-received by McMahon, he did say that the promotion’s other announcers, including Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan, enjoyed working with him. So, even though the guy at the top of the pecking order might not have cared for Tony’s commentary, it seems everybody else was on board with him.

4. Do you miss the days of the managers staying ringside for their charge’s time in the ring for the Rumble?

We really don’t have managers anymore, at least not the way that we did back in the 1980s and early 1990s, so it’s hard to say that managers should return to hanging out at ringside during the Royal Rumble match. I will say that I never really thought managers added anything to the Rumble because, to my recollection, they never worked them into a spot. Had that happened from time to time, it could have been a more memorable part of the bout.

Mike Too Hotty is pitting lucha brother against lucha brother:

Who do you think is a better wrestler – Rey Fenix or Penta? Obviously Penta is way more over with the fans, but I feel Fenix is a better wrestler. Both are amazing, but I feel like Penta does same thing each match, Fenix changes it up and will almost always do something I’ve never seen before.

What can WWE do for Fenix to get him over more? He gets reactions from the crowd but NOWHERE what Penta is getting. Thoughts?

I actually prefer Penta as a wrestler because he’s more charismatic and brings more character work into his matches. Fenix is a pretty spectacular high flyer, but he doesn’t do much to connect with an audience on a more human level. Penta does that, and it makes him more engaging to me as a viewer.

And I think that also answers part two of the question about what can be done to get Fenix over more. Also, Fenix could use a refresh on his gear. Penta has an instantly recognizable look that lends itself to a lot of merchandising and marketing, whereas Fenix’s look is that of just another luchador.

Jase is putting on a snoozer:

What do you think was the most pointless feud in pro wrestling you sat through? For example, I’d go with Chad Gable/Bobby Roode vs The Ascension on WWE Raw in 2018. They traded wins and losses for nearly 2 straight months in tag team and singles matches, with neither team coming out of it any stronger.

Dolph Ziggler and Kofi Kingston.

In the early 2010s, it felt like these guys were wrestling each other CONSTANTLY, sometimes for the Intercontinental Championship and sometimes for the United States Championship, depending on what brand they were on at the time. The matches were never bad, but they just traded wins in a manner that didn’t seem designed to elevate anybody or send their careers in new directions. It was the quintessential feud in which the promotion viewed the two participants as being at a certain level and not having the potential to go any further, meaning we just got to watch them run on a treadmill for months and months and months and months.

James has lifts in his boots:

Has Rey Mysterio wrestled against anyone shorter than him while in the WWE or WCW? If not, which opponent was the closest to his height?

I could find only one instance of this happening, and even then it’s only in the most technical of senses. On two episodes of Monday Night Raw in 2024, Misterio and Zelina Vega wrestled in mixed tag matches, one in which their opponents were Chad Gable and Ivy Nile and one in which their opponents were Dominik Mysterio and Liv Morgan. Rey was taller than both Nile and Morgan, but obviously given mixed tag rules it’s not like he was in direct competition with them.

Otherwise, I could not find circumstances in which Rey had shorter opponents in WWE or WCW.

In an odd side note, Misterio did wrestle Spike Dudley on numerous occasions in WWE, and WWE typically bills Rey at 5’6” whereas, at least for a period of time, they billed Spike at 5’5”. However, if you watch any footage of them in the ring together, Dudley is obviously taller.

You don’t want to know what Tyler from Winnipeg was doing with body paint when he sent in this question:

Can you give me and your readers a summary of Sable in WWF/WWE?

Rena Mero, a.k.a. Sable, signed with the WWF in 1996, at the same time as her then-husband, “Wildman” Marc Mero, who had just finished up a run in WCW as the Little Richard-inspired Johnny B. Badd.

At the time the Meros joined the company, up-and-coming heel performer Hunter Hearst Helmsley was coming to the ring with a different beautiful valet every week, and Sable made her debut as one of those valets at Wrestlemania XII. Of course, Helmsley mistreated her, which lead to Mero making the save and the real-life married couple being paired together in storylines.

For the rest of 1996, Sable did very little other than being a pretty face in Mero’s corner. She was involved in one somewhat controversial angle during the summer of that year, in which Goldust’s valet Marlena intimated that she had a thing for Sable, mirroring the manner in which Goldust would use homosexual overtures to play “mind games” with his male opponents. As the months wore on, it became apparent that Sable was the more popular half of the act with her husband, as the Wrestling Observer Newsletter in its coverage of the 1996 King of the Ring noted massive “Sable” chants during Mero’s PPV match against “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

In January 1997, the company started teasing a split between Sable and Mero, with Sable inadvertently costing him a match on one of the early episodes of Shotgun Saturday Night and the two getting into a shouting match afterwards. However, the next month, Mero suffered an ACL tear, putting him on the shelf.

With the Wildman out, the WWF didn’t seem to know what to do with Sable at first, though it was obvious they wanted to keep her on television. There were some brief teases that she might start managing a new wrestler, but those ultimately didn’t go anywhere, and she instead modeled merchandise and was used in a series of bikini contests along with Sunny and Marlena.

Mero was ultimately able to return to the ring in October, adopting the new persona of “Marvelous” Marc Mero, playing up his history as a boxer, and working a new style that featured less high flying. (A torn ACL will do that to a guy.) The company returned almost immediately to the Sable/Mero tension that had been teased prior to the injury, with Mero now being a jealous, abusive ass. The first male wrestler who stepped up to defend Sable’s honor wsa Dude Love in a feud with Mero that was scrapped verrrrrry quickly after it began. Mick Foley was replaced with Tom Brandi in one of the greatest downgrades in wrestling history.

1998 was the year when things really started to take off for Sable. She stuck with Mero for an absurdly long time, putting up with him being a jerk for months and competing with him in a mixed tag at Wrestlemania against Goldust and Luna Vachon which had the weird dynamic of three out of four people in a tag match being heels. She did suffer a brief setback on April 16 when referee Tim White accidentally stepped on her foot during a house show match and broke one of her toes in three places. That didn’t stop her from having a PPV match (albeit a two minute one) against Luna roughly two weeks later at Unforgiven.

Her animosity with Marc Mero finally came to a head on the May 11, 1998 episode of Monday Night Raw, where Sable challenged him to a match. However, it turned into an angle where Mero initially teased giving her his finisher, the TKO, only for him to put her down and suggest that she submit to him as a result of his showing her mercy. Of course, she didn’t, low blowing and powerbombing him instead. It looked like this was the final nail in the coffin of Sable and Mero being an on-camera duo, but the next week Mero came out and said that due to a contractual relationship, Sable had to continue managing him, whether she liked it or not. She honored the contract but began to intentionally cost Mero all his matches, leading him to lay down a chllenge. Sable was to pick a wrestler of her choosing for a match in which she would leave the WWF if Mero won but Mero would let her out of her managerial contract if her man won.

According to the May 25, 1998 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, it was originally pitched that no less than that Steve Austin would be the one to liberate Sable from Mero, but the company backtracked on that when the powers that be realized Austin was a hot enough act on his own and didn’t need anybody else with him.

The match between Mero and Sable’s mystery wrestler took place at Over the Edge 1998, with Sable selecting herself to fight Mero but the ultimately losing due to underhanded tactics by the Marvelous One. Though her career was supposed to have been over, she came back a couple of weeks later with virtually no storyline explanation other than Vince McMahon wanting her back in the company. She immediately went back to being a thorn in Marc Mero’s side. It was at this point Mero brought in Jacqueline as his new second, and Jackie immediately embarked on a feud with Sable. To counter that, Sable started managing the Oddities, including her old rival Luna. No, I’m not kidding.

The alliance with the Oddities dissipated pretty quickly, as when Sable needed a mystery partner to face Mero and Jacqueline at Summerslam, it turned out to be Edge. (Originally, it was rumored to be Butterbean, who had previously faced Mero in December 1997.) To keep the feud going after Summerslam, the WWF reintroduced its Women’s Championship in September of ’98, with Jackie winning it initially so that Sable could chase and grab the belt for herself at Survivor Series. On the house show circuit, Sable kept competing with Mero and Jacqueline in mixed tags for the rest of the year, first with Val Venis as her partner and later with Christian taking over the spot.

In January 1999, it was announced that, following a photo shoot in December, Sable would be on the cover of the April issue of Playboy magazine with a full pictorial inside the issue.

In February, between the announcement of the Playboy cover and its release, there were reports of backstage issues with Sable developing. Specifically, the February 15 Observer said that she and her husband Marc Mero requested to be released from their contracts but were turned down. Apparently, they were dissatisfied with the fact that Sable was never hired to be a wrestler and never formally trained but kept being put in matches, which they felt was dangerous. (And I can’t really blame them for that.) Sable also caught some heat when she was on TSN’s Gallagher with the other women of the WWF and alluded to Chyna getting her physique from performance enhancing drugs.

In a move that, to this day, doesn’t make much sense to me, the WWF actually turned Sable heel in the buildup to that year’s Wrestlemania and her Playboy release, though based on the sales figures, the heel turn did nothing to put a damper on the mag’s popularity. During the early part of the year, wrestler Terri Power was brought in and feuded with Sable under the name Tori, and Sable eventually gained Nicole Bass as a bodyguard.

Her WWF Women’s Championship reign came to an end in May 1999, about six months after it began, with Debra McMichael defeating Sable in a bizarre evening gown match that Debra technically lost, only for WWF Commissioner Shawn Michaels to award the win to McMichael on the premise that he wanted to award the woman who got half-naked. According to the Observer, this bizarre match and finish was a result of Sable’s continued protestations that she should not be wrestling or taking bumps.

Things between the Fed and Sable got even worse over the summer, with both she and Marc Mero being taken off TV during a contract dispute which resulted from Sable arranging for a second Playboy photo shoot on her own, without going through the WWF. Meanwhile, the Fed claimed her contract with them required her to use them as her agent for such outside projects. This lead to a moment that really doesn’t get as much attention in the retelling of the Monday Night War as it should. On the June 14, 1999 episode of WCW Monday Nitro, Sable – who had recently been the second biggest babyface in the WWF behind Steve Austin – showed up in the audience while still under contract to Titan Sports. She was shown on camera multiple times but never referred to by name.

Ultimately, the WWF and Sable wound up in litigation, with Sable making allegations about facing some truly disturbing sexual harassment while the Fed counter-sued over her efforts to keep using her ring name for non-wrestling projects. The suit was settled just a few months after it began, which was very quick in the grand scheme of these things. Part of the resolution involved both Sable and Marc Mero being granted their releases from the company.

That brings to an end Rena Mero’s first run with the WWF. She would be back in 2003, but we’ll have to cover that stint another time.

That does it for this week. We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.