Thousands of professional wrestling fans draped in faux championship belts and dressed in cosplay resembling their heroes streamed into UBS Arena in Elmont on Sunday night for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling’s annual “Slammiversary” pay-per-view event.
TNA has a wrestler-sharing agreement with WWE, the global professional wrestling juggernaut, and several performers from WWE’s developmental branch, NXT, were on the card Sunday.
The company last ran a show on Long Island in 2013 at the Westbury Music Fair.
“It’s nice to see more wrestling shows on Long Island,” Mike Irace, 28, of Oceanside, said in an interview outside the venue. “It’s always like, ‘Oh, [WWE] Raw goes to Barclays [Center]. Occasionally, they go to MSG. There’s never really anything out on the Island that’s closer, more local. So having something like this is huge.”
The main event pitted Mike Santana against Joe Hendry and Trick Williams in a triple-threat match for the TNA World Championship. Williams, an NXT performer, entered the match as the world champion.
TNA generated even more buzz for the show Friday when it announced that WWE’s AJ Styles, a former TNA World Champion, would be making his first appearance for the company in more than a decade Sunday.
Keith Elliot Greenberg, a professional wrestling historian and author based in New York City, attributed a lot of the excitement surrounding the show to TNA’s relationship with WWE, which is “deeply enmeshed with Long Island,” he said in an interview.
WWE’s first-ever “Saturday Night’s Main Event” show, in 1985, was at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, Greenberg noted, and when WWE revived the event last December after a 16-year hiatus, the show was held at the same arena.
“If they were operating in isolation, there would not be the buzz we have now,” Greenberg said of TNA. “It links them inextricably to WWE, and it also elevates TNA to a level it has never been at before.”
James Padilla, of West Babylon, arrives for the TNA “Slammiversary” at UBS Arena in Elmont on Sunday. Credit: Jeff Bachner
Santana, a Bronx resident who grew up on the Lower East Side, said in an interview that wrestling for the championship in the shadow of New York City represented the “biggest moment of my career.”
He said he would be thinking of his father, Mark Sanchez, who died on New Year’s Day 2020 at the age of 47.
“My dad was the first person to ever take me to wrestling as a kid. He took me to my very first wrestling show, at Madison Square Garden,” Santana said. “He saw all this for me. He saw me becoming a star. He saw me becoming a main eventer.”
Aaron Jacobs, a Manhattan resident, regularly attends local wrestling events dressed like WWE Hall of Famer “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Jacobs said the UBS Arena holds special significance for him because it was there that he met now one of his closest friends, a fellow cosplayer — a man who dresses like the legendary Dusty Rhodes — during an All Elite Wrestling show years ago.
“Back in the day, the Nassau Coliseum was the place to see wrestling,” Jacobs said. “It’s nice to have another venue, a new one.
“To be able to find a place on Long Island, to see wrestling, to see major events like this, and not have to travel super far, it means a lot to us wrestling fans.”
