Blogaroni has moved!
Home > Bino's Blogaroni > Archives > 2007 > January > 10
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
A brief history of wedding proposals at football games
Altaring the game of football
It all began several years ago, way back in January of 2007, back in the days when college football bowl games were named after corn chips.
It was at the end of a particularly wild overtime game between Oklahoma and Boise State, with the winning score coming on an a trick play called The Statue of Liberty, which was named after a famous monument of some sort.
Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important was that after Boise State’s running back Ian Johnson scampered into the end zone on the game’s final play, he didn’t just celebrate the win on the field with his teammates, which had been the custom in those days.
Instead, Johnson headed straight for the sidelines. And little did anybody realize at the time, that he — and the game of football in America — was heading with him toward disaster.
Going long
Johnson, with a national TV audience in tow, knelt on the sidelines in front of his Boise State cheerleader girlfriend, Chrissy Popadics — and no, that is not a name invented by Charles Dickens — and proposed marriage to her.
Oh, if only she said ‘No.’ But who could blame a girl for being swept off her feet, literally this time, by the boy who just won the football game?
Bring on the copycats
Unfortunately, 
football is a game populated by players with little imagination. Once some player misbehaves (sack dance, trash talk, painting faces, hair too long to be contained in a helmet, end zone touchdown theatrics, etc.) those actions are more likely to be copied than scorned or ignored.
Before the marriage bug hit college and pro football, the most annoying copycat ritual was the dumping of an ice-filled drink container on the coach’s head in the waning moments of a victory, which by now has gotten so abused that 10-year-old rec league players do it to their coaches/dads.
Last year’s bad idea becomes next year’s style.
But no game-related stunt has grown as quickly and pervasively as the on-field wedding proposal, which has steadily escalated into a “Can-you-top-this?” atmosphere that culminated in the current calamity, as evidenced by today’s joint announcement by the NCAA and NFL to institute a series of escalating fines leading to suspension and/or annulment.
Recapping the history
Johnson’s stunt in 2007 was copied five times the following season, and seven more times during the 2009 season. College cheerleading squads were inundated with applications, and Las Vegas oddsmakers started taking bets on potential wedding combinations.
The practice also spread to the pros
And this is where it began to permutate. The most notorious stunt was by NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens, 
who after catching a touchdown pass on Monday Night Football, raced beyond the end zone, and proposed marriage to a woman he didn’t previously know who was sitting in the first row of seats behind the goal post.
Owens produced a prenuptial agreement from one sock and a pen from the other, handing it to his bride-to-be, later identified as Wanda Wannamaker, of Tonawanda, N.Y., who said “Yes”, streaking tears on her red-and-blue face paint, splattering on her skimpy halter top, which seemed to be a brave clothing choice on a 17-degree night in Buffalo. The marriage proposal (which drew a delay of game penatly) deeply annoyed the hometown Buffalo Bills fans, and Wannamaker later backed out of the deal, citing a high blood-alcohol level that night, hypothermia, and a mistaken notion that Owens was “that guy on the Campbell’s Chunky Soup commercials.”
Getting out of hand
By 2012, nearly one-quarter of all high school cheerleaders had been offered wedding proposals during the games, and in one much-reported case, a member of a high school bowling team, after rolling his first 300 game, proposed marriage to a 47-year-old alley snackbar attendant, who said “yes” despite already being married and the mother of five children, including another bowler on the team.
And while the practice started after a player made a game-winning score, eventually players were proposing marriage after accomplishing far less heroic actions on the field. Sometimes a good tackle, scooping up a fumble, or making a first down, was sufficient to draw a wedding proposal.
In one disputed incident, a Division 2A kick returner proposed while actually receiving an opening kickoff, creating confusion when his kneeling on the field was wrongly assumed by the kicking team to be his signal for a fair catch, rather than his proposal technique.
During the final debate of the 2016 presidential election, Democratic challenger Al Franken criticized President George P. Bush for not solving the football marriage problem in America, while Bush countered by saying his administration had kept the marriage insurgents from crossing the border to basketball.
The final straw
But it took that fateful game in the 2017 regular season. It was that division-deciding game between the New Mexico Cardinals and Los Angeles Rams. The Rams were trailing by four and it was fourth-and-goal on the Cardinals’ 5-yard line with a few ticks left on the clock. The Rams’ brilliant, child-prodigy rookie quarterback Triggerfish Manning had driven his team the length of the field, and it had come down to this final play.
Manning lined up over center, and began his snap count, but then he stopped, standing up and signaling time out. Fans assumed he was running to the sideline to confer with his coach on a change of play. But instead, he went right for the comely TV color commentator, Coriander Heffalumps-Izquierda, who was standing with a cameraman by the team’s bench.
“I need to know, Corie baby, before this play,” Manning said, his voice booming live over the public address system. “Will you marry me?”
But before she could answer, the middle linebacker of the New Mexico Cardinals, Brash Klezewski, sprinted toward them, straight-arming Triggerfish out of the proposal, and asking Heffalumps-Izquierda to marry him as he pounded on his own chest.
The hometown Cardinals’ crowd went wild. All eyes turned toward Coriander Heffalumps-Izquirda. Even the referees had forgotten to throw their delay-of-game flag. And then the newswoman shook her head sadly at both men before turning toward the Cardinals cheerleaders.
A second later, she dropped her microphone and started running, high-heels and all, into the arms of Cardinals cheerleader Bambi Cho, who we later learned was the incoming president of Lez Boom Bah, the NFL Lesbian Cheerleaders Association.
Triggerfish and Brash were crestfallen, neither of them able to return to the game that day, or for the rest of the season. They left football for good the next season, and are reportedly living in Bend, Oregon, where they’ve opened up a bed-and-breakfast together.
Facing a public outcry from sports talk radio listeners demanding a one-ring-and-you’re-out policy, the NFL and NCAA agreed to the current schedule of fines and suspensions.
And that’s why you don’t see football game wedding proposals anymore.
