All Elite Wresting’s New York City debut at Arthur Ashe Stadium started with a simple Google search.
AEW president Tony Khan said the company choosing the venue at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens began with him generally looking for stadiums with a roof.
“I was on Google looking at stadiums with a roof and googled all the stadiums in the world with a roof, and I was looking through them and I found Arthur Ashe,” Khan told The Post in an interview promoting the company’s “Fight for the Fallen” charity efforts. “Obviously, I’m a big sports fan and I was very familiar with Arthur Ashe from watching the U.S. Open over the years. It had never occurred to me that it could be a great wrestling venue. It’s in a historic, incredible wrestling market in New York and I thought it fit so many things we were looking for.”
“We were looking for a big stadium with a roof and I was looking for a great venue in New York and something special that would be a very memorable show and it just fit some many things that it seemed like the perfect venue.”
Arthur Ashe Stadium set up with a stage for a graduation ceremony. James Messerschmidt“AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam” will take place on Sept. 22, a little more than two weeks after the “All Out” pay-per-view in Chicago. It will be the first time a wrestling event will be held at Arthur Ashe Stadium, which added a retractable roof in 2016. AEW will also be at Prudential Center for Dynamite on Sept. 15 for the rescheduled show from the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Khan said he originally was hoping to get AEW to Ashe in 2020 and could see the stadium becoming a home base for the company in New York.
“So we reached out to them, awhile back, long before the pandemic, and had a really good talk and we were going to try to schedule something in 2020 at Arthur Ashe and we weren’t able to do it,” Khan said. “I wanted to do this ‘AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam’ show. It ended up being something we had to shelve for a year and coming back and doing it this year and this September.”
According to WrestleTix, more than 16,000 of the 18,692 tickets currently available have already been sold for the “Grand Slam” show. Khan said the success of ticket sales for the event has him considering having the company run larger-capacity arenas in the future, saying he’s “very happy” with AEW’s ticket sales in general. “Grand Slam” will be the largest attendance for any show the company has put on in its history and AEW should have more than 30,000 fans combined over the two weeks at Ashe and Prudential Center.
“I’m really excited to come to New York City and bring AEW Wrestling, bring ‘AEW Dynamite’ to New York City, which is one of the most important wrestling cities in the world,” Khan said. “So many of the AEW fans live in and around New York City.”
