The pandemic era of professional wrestling forced every operational promotion under the sun to get creative. Top televised companies like WWE, AEW, Ring of Honor, Impact Wrestling (TNA), and New Japan Pro Wrestling abandoned their typical fan-filled arenas for empty venues, sending its talent to the ring to compete in front of empty seats or a select group of their peers. WWE’s strategy began with strictly empty arenas, quiet enough that every step wrestlers took in the ring was picked up by camera audio. Months later, WWE filled the WWE Performance Center with socially-distanced prospects in order to create some form of noise. It wasn’t until August 2020 that WWE found its “permanent” pandemic home: the WWE ThunderDome.
WWE SummerSlam 2020 saw the debut of the WWE ThunderDome, a completely virtual wrestling arena filled with fans from around the world that video-called into LED screens that surrounded the ring. The WWE ThunderDome was constructed inside three different Florida-based venues over its 11 months of usage: Amway Center, Tropicana Field, and Yuengling Center.
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Tropicana Field Hit Hard By Hurricane Milton
One former WWE ThunderDome venue has been impacted by Hurricane Milton.
As shared in videos on social media, Hurricane Milton has torn the roof off of Tropicana Field, the home of MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays and the former location of the WWE ThunderDome. WWE ran episodes of WWE Monday Night Raw, WWE SmackDown, and various premium live events out of Tropicana Field from August 2020 until July 2021.
Hurricane Milton is the latest tropical cyclone to ravage through the American southeast, following in the footsteps of Hurricane Helene. Hurricane Milton is described as a “dangerous Category 3” storm. Florida authorities have urged residents to shelter in place in the wake of “extremely dangerous hurricane-force winds” began spreading through the state. Those winds were sustained at 120 mph at landfall but diminished in strength as it progressed inland.
“I loved it. Because it was different, right? It’s so different,” former WWE star Daniel Bryan (AEW’s Bryan Danielson) praised wrestling inside the WWE ThunderDome. “It wasn’t the idea that I’m doing it in front of no one. It’s the idea that the medium has changed. I liken it to the difference between theater and cinema. What we traditionally do in pro wrestling is more like theater. But what we had to do during the pandemic is cinema.
“My realization was that not many people are changing — not many people are realizing that there needs to be this change here, this change in adaptation. I thought that I was one of the best people at adapting to that. It’s a trade-off. You lose some things, but you gain some things.”
Outside of the virtual events inside the WWE ThunderDome, Tropicana Field most recently packed nearly 50,000 fans inside its stands for WWE Royal Rumble this past January. That event saw Cody Rhodes win his second-consecutive Royal Rumble Match, punching his ticket to WWE WrestleMania 40. He would go on to defeat Roman Reigns to capture the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship at that event, ending Reigns’s record-breaking 1,316-day run with the title.
ComicBook sends well wishes to everyone in Florida affected by Hurricane Milton.
