After a decade of marriage and nearly a full foursome of kids together, Jason Day and Ellie Day remain one of golf’s most visible couples. But golf fans are still learning details about how their relationship came to be. And boy, are those details entertaining.
The Days recently joined the PGA Tour’s Up & Down Podcast to discuss their life together – from having kids, to going out on tour as a family in their RV, to, yes, that scary courtside incident involving LeBron James. But our favourite parts of their 30-minute-plus conversation involved how Jason won his eventual wife over, first asking her out amid some unusual circumstances and then his proposal that involved… a scrapbook?
Let’s start at the beginning. The two initially met when Jason, 17, was in Ohio for a Korn Ferry Tour event and Ellie, 19, was a hostess at a pub. According to Ellie, Jason wore tight jeans and had a mullet, but she still thought he was “cute”. She didn’t think much else, though because he “didn’t pay attention to me at all”. But about a year later…
“I was sitting in my apartment and I got a text from a 330 area code and it said, ‘Hey, this is Jason from Australia. Do you remember me?’ I was really confused because I thought, Jason, why would he have a 330 area code because that’s my area code. I asked him how he got my number, and he ignored the question.”
“Did I ignore it?” Jason said.
“You totally ignored it.”
Jason never reveals the answer to that mystery, but however he got those digits, it worked. The two were eventually at a graduation party together and that’s where Jason officially asked Ellie out for the first time. By a pinball machine in a barn. Sounds like that was one heckuva graduation party. Here’s a sample clip from the podcast:
About three years later, the two were living together when Day popped the bigger question. But first, he had to prepare a scrapbook of their time together and the unlikely romance. Jason put the scrapbook together up in their loft. “He’d yell, ‘You can’t come up here!’” an amused Ellie recalls.
Eventually, Jason finished the project. Well, sort of. It ended with him writing, “Will the city boy get the country girl?” and two blank pages meant for their eventual wedding photos. What a romantic this guy is! Anyway, it obviously all worked out in the end and you can hear them tell their entire story on the podcast. You can also bet that Day is going to hear about that scrapbook from his peers.
