AEW Announces AEW Dynamite Grand Slam for New York City

All Elite Wrestling will hold its first event in New York City on Sept. 22, as AEW president Tony Khan confirmed while on WFAN Sports Radio on Wednesday. The show, titled AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam, will take place at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, best known as the home of the US Open tennis tournament. New York City has been synonymous with the WWE for over half a century, making this a particularly momentous show for the young promotion.

“No city is more synonymous with wrestling than New York City,” Khan said. “AEW is a new company and our company is in the business of both embracing tradition and trailblazing, trying to start new traditions and new history.”

Chris Jericho spoke with ComicBook several months ago about AEW being in talks to host an event at Madison Square Garden, NYC’s most iconic venue.

“I know we talked about it, pre-pandemic, it was in the pipeline, because it’s The Garden,” Jericho said. “It’s the cathedral of wrestling in New York City. I think that’s one of the reasons why we started with the Prudential Center, and when we sold 15,000 tickets or whatever it was, that’s to show The Garden that AEW can draw. Because I think there’s a lot of naysayers from the other side. They’ll say, ‘Oh, you can’t have AEW in The Garden. WWE’s only drawing 6,000 people.’ Meanwhile, if we had a show at The Garden, we would probably sell it out in 20 minutes. But you have to convince the powers that be that have been [there]. WWE is Madison Square Garden. There’s been a relationship there for 50 odd years. So it’s going to take some finagling for us to get in there.

“But in the meantime, I think there’s other arenas that we could do in New York and sell them up quickly so that The Garden would go, ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ Little known fact, it’s hard to make money in The Garden though because it’s so expensive with unions and all that sort of thing,” he continued. “So I think the only reason why you play The Garden because it’s The Garden. But there’s plenty of other places in New York with the Barclays Center, and like we said, the Prudential Center just down the road in Jersey, that we could do as well. I’m just ready to go back to any arena. I don’t care which one it is.”