She said yes! John Cena and Nikki Bella stopped by the Today show on Monday, April 3, just hours after he got down on bended knee during WrestleMania 33 and proposed to his longtime love. Watch the sweet proposal and a clip from Today in the video above!
The WWE star, 39, told Today cohost Al Roker that he had been planning to pop the question to his fellow pro wrestler, 33, for a long time. In fact, he joked that he was waiting for her to make the move.
“She’s been by my side through a lot of surgeries, and I make a joke ’cause I know when they put you under anesthesia, you got, like, 20 minutes where you’re out of it but you can talk and you don’t remember what’s going on,” Cena said. “So, I always ask her. I’m like, ‘You know they’re going to put me under. Ask me whatever you want and you’re going to get the answer.'”
A year and a half before the real proposal, Bella (born Stephanie Nicole Garcia-Colace) had to undergo a procedure on her neck, and Cena decided to tell her that he wanted to tie the knot. “I made sure to be the last one to wheel her into the OR. Right at the moment of no return, I stopped the doctors, I leaned down and I asked if [she] could hear me,” he explained. “She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, I have one question for you.’ She said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘So, you know someday I’m going to marry you?’ And she said, ‘Yes.'”
The official moment finally came on Sunday, April 2. After the couple defeated Michael “The Miz” Mizanin and his wife, Maryse Ouellet, in a tag-team match, Cena got down on one knee in the ring and asked Bella to marry him.
“This was a big match for Nicole and I,” the Ferdinand actor said on Today. “This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime thing, to fight alongside the woman that I love, so it was awesome.”
The model was shocked by her beau’s proposal. “I never actually would have thought that he would have proposed in front of all those people, but that’s home for us,” she said. “WWE is our home. It’s where we met, it’s our passion, it’s our life. Honestly, I could not ask for it to be any other way.”
Cena, who was previously married to Elizabeth Huberdeau from 2009 to 2012, added, “I found the absolute right person. I found a strong person [who] I consider an inspiration, an equal, somebody who when I’m feeling down picks me up. … It took a person that strong to change my view on life.”
