BATON ROUGE, La. (WVLA) — Saturday was a sad night at Tiger Stadium. But it was the happiest night in the lives of two Tigers fans.
DeRon Talley and Patience Phillips got engaged on the field before kickoff, and more than 100,000 people have shared their joy.
“Once I saw the LSU football schedule, I said, wow, Alabama’s going to be the last home game? I knew that would be Senior Night,” Talley explained. “So I said, man, if I can pull that off, I think that’d be pretty legit.”
Talley pulled it off in grand style. Before the game against Alabama, he proposed to his girlfriend, Phillips, who is an LSU cheerleader. And the girl who said nothing gets past her never saw it coming.
“I told him from the time we met. I was like, you cannot surprise me,” she stated. “On Valentine’s, I would get that he would be sending me flowers. Or on Christmas, he would tell me what I’m getting for Christmas because he just can’t surprise me with stuff. So all this time, I literally made up a word: I’m unsurpriseable.
“And I did not think that he would, and that’s why it caught me so off guard and I was so emotional, because he actually surprised me, he did a surprise proposal. And I was just so proud of him, and I was just so happy. It was just awesome! It was so great.”
Talley was on the sideline to photograph the game for the (Gonzales) Weekly Citizen. A fellow photographer filmed his proposal, with all of Phillips’ sqaudmates in the background cheering the couple on.
“That video didn’t catch all of the student section, the 10,000 students that were in the student section at the time, screaming,” Phillips added. “It was so great!” She said she instantly got congratulatory text messages from classmates in the stands.
Then the video hit Facebook. More than 130,000 people have seen it since it was posted Sunday night.
“It feels good to be able to let other people see our love,” Talley said. “Because it’s just love, that’s it. So it’s good to see that love can still spread.”
After she said yes, both Phillips and Talley started crying. But Phillips still had to perform in the biggest game of the year. A stunter, Phillips admits that she wasn’t at her best during the game. But a missed routine or an incomplete pass did not bother her as much as it normally would.
“I was rooting for (LSU) all week because I had no idea,” she recalled. “So I’m like, ‘I hope we win, I hope we win.’ But as the game went on, I was like, win or lose, this is the best night of my life.”
Talley started planning the proposal in January, and approached cheerleading coach Pauline Zernott with the idea a month ago. Zernott and LSU’s Sports Information department gave him the okay to pop the question an hour before the start of the game.
“And that’s all that I wanted, just put cheerleading, Alabama-LSU…she loves that, you know. And then me. I said, I think she loves me, let’s see how much she loves me,” Talley joked.
The couple met in her hometown of Monroe in the spring of 2012, and say they hope to get married after she graduates next year. Phillips said Tiger Stadium might have to be on the list of possible venues.