Bubba Wallace shares the sweet but 'nerve-wracking' story of his surprise proposal
Bubba Wallace proposed to his longtime girlfriend and now-fiancee, Amanda Carter, and shared the story of how it all happened.
When NASCAR paused for a couple weeks this summer during the Tokyo Olympics, drivers did everything from racing in other series to going on vacation or just relaxing with some time off.
Bubba Wallace got engaged.
The No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota driver and his longtime girlfriend and now-fiancee, Amanda Carter, got engaged in late July, and Wallace shared the story of how it all happened in a recent interview with The Athletic. He said he was “super nervous” about proposing because he wanted it to be a surprise and had been planning it for months.
During NASCAR’s break, the pair took a trip to Oregon, Wallace told The Athletic, and that’s where he planned to propose. But his nerves about the whole thing kicked in way earlier.
He said, via The Athletic:
“I was super nervous, because she had no idea and I worked on it for like three months. Trying to find the ring, the cut, clarity, color and carats — the four C’s of life. I got to study up on all of that. I was doing my research late at night while I was upstairs. Usually, I’m upstairs playing video games.”
But Wallace said he first got nervous about the proposal after he began researching rings when he started seeing ads on his phone for engagement rings. He worried Carter would start seeing the same ads because they’re on a shared network, but she never mentioned anything to him, he noted.
Wallace continued explaining his proposal process:
“I was doing a lot of deleting messages — very sketchy stuff — between her mom, her cousin, her sister, the people I was telling that this was going down. So I was super nervous then.
But fast forward to the week I got the ring. I was super excited. And I was like, ‘[Expletive], where am I going to hide this thing? The only place she will not go look for something is in my golf bag.’ So I put it in my golf bag underneath all the balls. Luckily, I’ve been playing pretty decent so I haven’t lost any balls when I’ve been playing. So that was a plus.
Then I was overthinking everything. I always leave my golf clubs in my car and as soon as I started taking them out, I hoped she wasn’t going to be like, ‘Why are you taking your golf clubs out? You never take them out.’ But I got by with that and got to the trip.”
Why I waited so long..we will never know. The wait is over!! Here’s to forever! Forever ever! pic.twitter.com/6dU1skeGA5
— Bubba Wallace (@BubbaWallace) July 30, 2021
However, Wallace said his nerves peaked when he arrived at his hotel in Oregon, and his golf bag took a while to get delivered to the room. He feared someone had stolen his bag because they knew it belonged to him — especially after a crowd of fans greeted him at the hotel because they knew Denny Hamlin’s plane landed in the area.
But after a lengthy delay, he got his bag, and everything worked out. Wallace added:
“They finally got there and I had to go through the golf bag while she was using the bathroom getting ready, just to make sure that it was all there. That was the most nerve-wracking.”
But between thinking people were spoiling the surprise and potentially losing the ring, “everything was shaping up to be a friggin’ nightmare,” Wallace told The Athletic. “And then (the proposal) happened. So it was good.”