First date at Fiesta Bowl. Proposed to at Rose Bowl.

John Morris '11 didn’t know what to say when his girlfriend, Nikki Garber ’08 (MS ’10) asked during the holiday break whether they might get married at some point.

“I felt so bad because I think I broke her heart,” Morris would say later. “But I had this whole thing already planned and didn’t want to ruin the surprise, so I told her it would be a few years.”

This “whole thing” was an unexpected marriage proposal at the Rose Bowl, which he announced by having the cheerleaders hoist signs saying "Nikki Will You Marry Me?"

Garber’s reaction?

“She started looking around and said, ‘Isn’t that nice, somebody else spells their name the same way I do,’ “ Morris recalls. “Then she turned toward me, and by then I was on my knee holding up the ring.”

Yes, she said yes.

“People around us freaked out,” Morris says. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the bunch, even the people who didn’t know who we were.”

Ironically, the couple that sat in front of them at the game also got engaged at a TCU football game about 30 years ago.

Morris and Garber met about a year ago through a mutual friend, and their first date was at the Fiesta Bowl, so Morris decided a proposal at the Rose Bowl was particularly fitting.

He asked her family for permission, arranged for the cheerleaders to hold up the signs and bought an engagement ring — crafted, appropriately, from rose gold, a pink-hued gold that has recently come in vogue.

The matching wedding band will circle her finger at Robert Carr Chapel next November, when they will marry.

Morris, a Fort Worth boot maker, will finished his bachelor’s degree at TCU in May, then move to Houston, where Garber is a geologist for Plains Exploration and Production, and hopes to being an MBA program at Rice University in the fall.

More photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetcumagazine/sets/72157625824842296/

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aZuY9UqGbU.

Check out more TCU stories at The TCU Magazine.