All-American Couple: Oklahoma P Michael Turk's Marriage Proposal to SS Grace Lyons Goes Viral
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NORMAN — Oklahoma senior Michael Turk woke up Saturday morning an All-America candidate.
He fell asleep engaged to the woman of his dreams.
Turk’s postgame marriage proposal to another All-American — Sooners shortstop Grace Lyons — was yet another episode in the video life of one of college football’s true showmen.
Turk has mastered the art of punting, setting the school record at 51.8 yards per kick last year. He’s also mastered life as a video blogger, with more than 194,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel.
But he topped even himself in the moments after OU beat Oklahoma State in another tense Bedlam game Saturday night at Memorial Stadium.
Turk got on his knee and asked Lyons if she’d marry him.
“Pretty cool,” said OU coach Brent Venables. “And she said yes.”
She did, amid endless smiles and a few tears and Turk’s teammates jumping up and down around them.
“I’m so thankful to know Grace and have met her at OU, and she's awesome,” Turk said in a postgame media interview. “So I got to marry the woman of my dreams and that's by the grace of God, for sure, so I'm happy.”
Turk asked John Lyons two weeks ago after the Baylor game for permission to marry his daughter. Permission granted, Turk set his plan in motion.
He bought a ring, then on gameday locked it in his locker.
When the game ended, he raced into the locker room, tucked the ring under his belt, then ran back out into the postgame pandemonium to find her.
“I sprinted in there to grab it and bring it back out because I didn't trust myself,” Turk said. “I was gonna put it in the kicker bag, and I thought that that was a bad idea.”
Before every game, Lyons gives him a card with a handwritten bible verse for encouragement. But this time, when the game was finished and the Sooners had beaten their Bedlam rivals, he gave her the card back.
It read, “I have a question to ask you, will you be my wife?”
Lyons read the card and smiled that 10-carat smile as Turk took the ring out of his belt and got on one knee.
“Then she looked up and I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ ” Turk said. “And so I think it went really good. Yeah, I'm just so grateful she said yes.”
If the note seems corny, there’s a reason behind it.
“When I asked her to be my girlfriend,” Turk said, “I actually made her a note and I said, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’ And then she looked up and said yes. So I didn't even verbally say it. So this time I made her.”
The joyous event concluded the busiest night of Turk’s OU career.
As the OU offense bogged down over and over during the final three quarters, Turk was called on repeatedly to get the Sooners out of trouble. He did it with a career-high 11 punts — the most by an OU punter since 2001.
“Turk’s been a monster, man,” Venables said. “Eleven punts, 49-yard average, you had a couple of just bombs. We down the one at the 4, you know, a 63-yarder. He had a 67-yarder. Tied for the second-most 60-yard punts in OU history. That’s a long time. That’s the genesis of OU football. That's pretty good.”
It was typical Turk, putting on a show.
Grace Lyons says yes to Michael Turk's proposal.
Screenshot via Twitter
The former high school safety from Missouri City, TX, who started his college career at Lafayette and then transferred to Arizona State, switched to punter because of injuries and followed in the footsteps of his famous uncle, 16-year NFL punter Matt Turk (another uncle, the late Dan Turk, was an NFL long-snapper for 15 years).
He spent three years at Arizona State and was a two-time first-team All-Pac-12 punter before transferring to OU in 2021 and earning first-team All-Big 12.
He started a YouTube channel that has gone viral and made him a proverbial YouTube sensation.
Of course, Saturday night’s postgame festivities will be No. 1 on Turk’s highlight reel now.
“It's fun, it's fun,” he said. “I think it's just the right amount (of publicity). Nothing too personal, but just enough. I think Grace are I are both grateful to be here at Oklahoma and get to know the community and hopefully be a good example, even though I'm obviously not perfect. But we enjoy being able to know people and, like I said, not be too private but public enough to get to know people and hopefully be a good example.”
Turk said it was also important to him to be surrounded by teammates.
“Pretty much only the specialists knew it was coming,” he said. “ … Originally, I wasn't even going to have teammates around, but I was like, ‘You know what, this might be better.’ So I started calling people around. I got David Ugwoegbu, Danny (Stutsman), and then they saw they saw (Drake) Stoops I said, ‘Stoops get over here.’ And so it wasn't the biggest crowd ever. but thankfully, there was big enough crowd to where it was kind of more exciting, I feel like.”
And yes, the moment was captured on video.
“Yeah, it'll be on my vlog on my YouTube channel. 'Hangtime.' Subscribe.”
