A night with South Brooklyn Championship Wrestling, the city’s scrappiest wrestling promotion
'We try to be safe, but sometimes you've gotta land on a pile of Legos.'
Professional wrestling has a long history in America. In fact 2025 marks 100 years since wrestling went from pure athletic competition where guys grappled each other to exhaustion for hours to fixed outcomes that promoters worked out ahead of time, blurring the lines between sport and art. The artistic nature of pro wrestling has allowed it to take many shapes over the years, from colossal billion-dollar entertainment to church hall brawls, and, with that spirit in mind, it should come as no surprise that a group of scrappy DIY grappling fans have their own version of it that you can catch between punk sets in Bushwick. Also it should come as no surprise that it’s tons of fun.
At a South Brooklyn Championship Wrestling show, there’s no ring to speak of. Instead the action goes down on a pair of gymnastics mats and sometimes around the grounds of whatever DIY venue hosts the promotion, settings that have included Rubulad in Bushwick, Murder Palace in Crown Heights or last Saturday night's venue, The Rabbit Hole also in Bushwick. (While the promotion is named for south Brooklyn, because most of the wrestlers hail from there, the shows themselves have always been in north Brooklyn.)
But there are other grappling hallmarks, like a loudly-styled ring announcer (big shirt lapels, sunglasses indoors), pre-match hype videos giving you the story, a crowd that knows how to be part of the show, and of course, performers willing to lay it all on the line for a big reaction.
A show this past Saturday night at The Rabbit Hole was your typical north Brooklyn rock show evening, with a trio of local bands, a bar that was basically a wooden hutch built into the wall and plenty of confused and awkward conversation about whether a bathroom was currently in use or empty. But also there was a slight buzz because people were wondering about the wrestling show that was supposed to happen there.
“We've shown up to venues and people are like, ‘oh there's wrestling? What's that mean?’” Taylor Guariglia, who started SBCW with some friends in 2023.
