The
house Santa Claus, who had been throwing T-shirts into the crowd
and promoting some toys for tots programme, came limping up the
stairs to my row. He asked me to stand up. Then I heard announcer say "Jim DeLaHunt, your girlfriend wants to know if you will marry her!". I remember being surprised
at
how long it took to realise that he was talking about me, and
that he was really talking about marraige, and that my marital-phobic
girlfriend was in fact behind it. Wow! I never even noticed the
proposal message on the scoreboard.
I was delighted. I'd known for a long while that Ducky was a keeper, but she was awfully skittish. She didn't even want to talk about the indefinite future until after we'd passed our six-month anniversary. So I was figuring I'd wait until, say, the one-year anniversary next April and try then. But no, she aced me!
The crowd was going wild.
Santa, it turns out, had a ring box for
me. I was ignoring Santa, since I had my heart full with Ducky.
But lo, there was a really pretty silver bracelet in lieu of a
ring. I showed it to the crowds. And after a while I even remembered
to say "Yes"!I don't remember a lot of the rest of the game. My heart was still very full.
In place of a ring, Ducky gave me a beautiful silver bracelet,
accompanied by a poem. In part this was because she didn't know
my ring size, in part it was because she already know I liked
that bracelet. I had had a similar one earlier in the year, and
had given it away to a friend. The poem was a series
of haikus.If you ever get engaged, be sure to have an answer to the question, "when is the wedding?". Everyone asks you that. We plan to have a nice long engagement, at least a year, so the wedding won't be until 1998 at the earliest. In fact, the kind of wedding to have is one of the issues we have yet to decide.
Everyone loves a good engagement. I guess it represents happiness and hope. The TV crews picked it up. And the reactions are great -- in one of the pictures, if you look carefully behind the cameraman, you can see a delighted audience member pointing at us! A month later, a radio show audience that heard the story was moved to applaud.
So there you have it -- the first marriage proposal in the history of the San Jose Lasers, and quite possibly in the history of the American Basketball League!
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