Bam Margera is sharing more insight into how his relationship with fiancée Dannii Marie came at the right time.
As Us Weekly exclusively revealed, the Viva La Bam alum — whose real name is Brandon Cole Margera — proposed to model Dannii Marie at pro skater Ed Duff’s property in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on October 27. Margera and Marie, both 44, first crossed paths in June — just weeks after the pro skateboarder was placed on a 5150 hold when he was found acting erratically outside Trejo’s Tacos in Los Angeles in June, according to TMZ.
(The 5150 hold came on the heels of several years’ worth of troubles for Margera, including hospitalizations, arrests, rehab stints, tension with his former Jackass costars and a custody battle over son Phoenix, 5, who he shares with ex Nicole Boyd.)
Following his release from the hospital in June, Margera checked into the Sunset Marquis hotel — and was in dire straits. “I didn’t plan on checking out. I bought a bunch of drugs and I didn’t want to wake up,” he tells Us. “I had so many lawsuits and lawyers taking my money, and not being on Jackass and having a lawsuit with them. Anytime I got a phone call, it was just an issue.”
Hitting rock bottom pushed Margera to do something he rarely did: pray. “I was like, ‘If I wake up from this amount of drugs and alcohol that I bought, then please show me the best eye candy in the world — and I need a tan pit bull,’” he shares.
“The next morning I woke up at the Sunset Marquis [and] I’m like, ‘S–t, I’m alive,’” he continues. “I went by the pool and overheard [Dannii] talking about how she’s 44, Sicilian and Irish. When I met her, she said, ‘I have to go home and walk my dog’ — a tan pit bull.”
“I was like, ‘Thank you, God,’” he says of the chance meeting.
Marie, who’s also a stretch coach, helped Margera get sober — she was by his side as he detoxed — and helped him get back in shape so that he could return to skateboarding.
“Stretching has everything to do with skateboarding,” he explains. “I would do it for five minutes and give up. [A] doctor said that in 2013, [my muscles] were so dehydrated from alcohol abuse. They were dry rotted rubber bands and they would never go back to normal.”
“Dannii said, ‘Don’t listen to that,’” he shares. “I’ve been skating better than ever — now, I skate every day.”
With more than 130 sober days under his belt, Margera is looking forward to what’s next (“Every sponsor that I used to have, they all want to do something again,” he explains) and he’s happiest to have returned to his roots. “I call the mom-and-pop skate shops, let them know that I’m coming that way, [and] all the locals that rip show me the good spots,” he says.
Most importantly, he’s focused on his relationship with Phoenix — with whom he recently reunited after winning monitored visitation — and his sobriety.
“I always woke up not knowing what to do with the day … I would just look across the street, see an Irish pub and be like, ‘That looks like fun,’” the former stunt performer tells Us. “Now I wake up, I walk the dogs, I stretch, I go to the gym, I go skateboarding. Everything’s a structured fun schedule.”
“And we do it together,” he adds of his fiancée. “It’s just a perfect thing.”
