The Hammerstein Ballroom is a beautiful place to watch wrestling. The ring is surrounded on three sides by multiple tiers of scalloped balconies, blue with gold trim, a prestige-TV color palette. From the vantage point of the TV viewer, the audience looms over the action in ornate concentric circles—Dante’s Inferno for people who like a good German suplex. Seated on one of the venue’s upper levels, every seat feels close enough to the action for you to fall into the ring if you lean forward far enough. In events dating back decades, the independent wrestling promotions ECW and Ring of Honor helped make the place a mecca for the sport.
My 14-year-old kid, H, has heard me give variations on this spiel for over a year now. (They’ve also heard me explain it’s owned by the Moonies; they’re big on religious cults.) Now, the Saturday before Christmas 2025, they could finally see for themselves. By the time we made it up to our second-balcony seats for “Dynamite on 34th Street,” All Elite Wrestling’s now-annual holiday stopover at the Manhattan Center, however, H was mostly just winded by taking the stairs. They’re the kind of kid who was born to complain about having to run in gym class; they’ve told me repeatedly they’re physically afraid of volleyballs. We have that in common.
That’s always been part of the appeal of pro wrestling for me, ever since I got into it as an adult seven or eight years ago. It’s a sport for all kinds of people, people who don’t like sports among them. It distills athletic competition down to pure spectacle, staging genuinely impressive and difficult feats of athleticism in such a way as to heighten drama and tell stories of the triumph of good over evil. If, like me, you were raised by Yankees fans, it’s nice to have a rooting interest you don’t have to feel vaguely guilty about.
After catching their breath, H settled happily into people-watching mood soon enough. While I’ve never missed a single AEW episode in its six years of existence, H isn’t a TV-wrestling fan. They love the live experience: the crowd, the characters, the lights, the pageantry, the inventive audience chants. You don’t hear repeated cries of “THIS IS AWESOME! THIS IS AWESOME!” when Shohei Ohtani hits his 12th home run of the game or whatever, but you’ll damn sure hear it if Kazuchika Okada hits someone with an especially well-timed dropkick.
H and I have been going to AEW shows since 2021, when the company set its then-attendance record at the beautiful, punishingly inaccessible Arthur Ashe Stadium. (The NYPD sent me to the ass end of nowhere to park; H saved us from wandering around lost at one in the morning by remembering we’d found a spot near a Crab du Jour restaurant.)
That pastime of ours had been on pause for over a year, however, since before AEW’s trip to the Hammerstein in December 2024. I wound up going to that show with a friend instead, because when your child is institutionalized with an eating disorder you’d never heard of before they were diagnosed, they don’t let you take them out on field trips to wrestling shows. I asked.
Last Christmas, my child was in a residential treatment facility for a little-known neurological eating disorder called ARFID, so we missed All Elite Wrestling’s Christmas show at the Hammerstein Ballroom. This year they’re healthy, so we went. I wrote about it all for Defector. Happy New Year, my wonderful readers and friends.