Wilson Taylor has been employed with the Thunder for almost ten years, going from working as an intern into eventually becoming the team’s equipment manager. Over the years, since Taylor got to be around players like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Nick Collison every day for the better part of a decade, they naturally became friends, and when it came time for Taylor to propose to his girlfriend, he turned to his superstar buddies for some advice.
USA Today‘s Sam Amick tracked down how Taylor came up with the idea of a scavenger hunt marriage proposal that involved his girlfriend, Felicia, interacting with several OKC players along the way.
“Six or seven guys went to this steakhouse, and (Novak) had a private room for us, and KD and I were kind of off to the side,” Taylor remembers. “He was like, ‘I know this (proposal) is coming up. What are you thinking? Have you talked to Russ and Nick?’ So I told him I’d been thinking about this whole scavenger hunt thing.”
Durant approved.
“He’s like, ‘Let’s do this,’” Taylor said. “And Nick and Russ were the same way. Right from the jump, they were like, ‘Let’s do this together.’”
From there, Taylor, Durant, Westbrook, and Collison concocted a plan that would involve Felicia making six stops that all related to a special moment the couple had shared. Each stop would reveal a clue for the next location. After receiving the first three clues, the fourth brought Felicia to the Thunder practice facility where she had to make two free throws (supervised by Westbrook) before she was allowed to continue on.
The fifth clue brought them to Empire Slice House where they first kissed at Collison’s Halloween Party. There, the Thunder big man had to stall until the rest of the plan was in place.
“I was sitting at the bar by myself waiting for her, and (Taylor) texted me that she was going way faster than he thought so I had to stall for like 30 minutes,” Collison remembers. “So I just sat there and talked to her. We had a couple beers. I know her pretty well, but she was kind of like, ‘What’s going on?’ And I was like, ‘No, let’s just keep talking.’”
The final clue was at the Gaylord Pickens Oklahoma Hall of Fame Museum, and it was handed off to her by none other than the former league MVP, Durant.
In the end, with Durant providing the final assist while wearing a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses and 12 Thunder players there to celebrate, their execution was flawless. And the answer, thankfully, was ‘yes.’
“She was completely blown away – like completely blown away,” Taylor said.
Taylor was assuredly as bummed out as anyone that the Thunder lost Game 7 to the Warriors on Monday night, but if that is indeed the last time he saw his friend Kevin Durant wear an OKC uniform, at least he was able to have the memory of one of the NBA’s greatest players helping him get hitched before he left town.
(Via USA Today)
