Wrestling, and its amped subculture, comes to the Barclays Center

Y'know, when I stopped by the Barclays Center plaza on Sunday around 6 pm the wrestling fans milling about for SummerSlam, many dressed in wrestling t-shirts, some with wrestling belts, and a few with masks, seemed a little... rowdy.

They were chanting the names of wrestlers at each other: "Rod-dy Pi-per" was one I remembered.

Reports from other nights suggest similar boisterous gatherings--impossible, as I've written, if the original Urban Room were the gathering place, rather than the outdoor, more fluid plaza.

One resident told me that some of fans walking around the neighborhood were similarly amped, a few of them aggressively so. (The masks were disconcerting.) That's the flip side, apparently, of a very engaged fandom, as described below in the Observer piece.

Apparently, the bars on Fifth Avenue got a lot of business.

The Great Park Slope Wrestling Bro Takeover of 2015. #summerslam pic.twitter.com/IJZcFkIdpm

— Tim Donnelly (@timdonnelly) August 23, 2015

Inside, on Sunday, it was reported that "[t]here were more than a dozen instances of fans being escorted out of WWESummerSlam at the Barclays Center last night over bad behavior due to being intoxicated, according to PWInsider." (No one linked to the original source.)

The Monday night event

As Vinnie Mancuso reported for the Observer, in Slam Culture: What I Learned From Attending ‘WWE Raw’ at the Barclays Center:

Last night inside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, I saw a 250-pound physical human specimen assault former Daily Show host Jon Stewart. I also saw a grown man make a seven-year-old girl cry. I also saw a (different) grown man take a shit in a urinal. 

Only one of those things was part of the show.

 And he was reporting on the third night of the three-day event, Monday Night Raw, which was sold out:

Here’s the most important lesson I learned in my three and a half hours of non-stop Raw: The action inside the ring, which despite its reputation is no different from live theater, is second nature to the fascinating subculture that flocks to stadium after stadium to watch it. And if you don’t think that subculture is a large one, your commute obviously didn’t take you along Atlantic Ave past Barclays, where the plaza outside the arena was filled to capacity before the doors opened. Continue down 5th Ave, and from every open air bar you would hear chants you wouldn’t quite understand unless you knew the names of pro wrestlers dating back as far as the 1980s.

That’s the surprising part of all this. You would expect the crowd to be crass (it was) and you anticipate it being on the juvenile side (it was), but nothing I’ve ever attended beat this in pure anticipation..... It reaches a point where at one point during the show the entire audience uses their phones to simulate a sky full of fireflies, and it’s one of the coolest things you have ever seen, and you forget for one second that you’re a fucking culture snob and smile to yourself like an idiot.

Of course, you take this good with the bad.

Saturday's event

The Sportster reported on Saturday's event, in Top 10 Ways NXT Takeover: Brooklyn Was Better Than SummerSlam:

Just how hyped was the crowd leading up to NXT Takeover: Brooklyn? Hundreds of people were lined up outside of the Barclays Center three hours before the doors opened for an event that was not general admission. Even before Triple H began NXT Takeover with a promo inside of the ring, the crowd inside of the Barclays Center was chanting for beloved wrestlers and ready to pop upon hearing the theme songs associated with their favorite acts. That NXT crowd remained energetic and loud past 11:00 pm local time and up through the conclusion of the show, and fans continued to sing the praises of the WWE performers as they exited the arena.