Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Hank Baskett recently married "Playboy" centerfold Kendra Wilkinson. The wedding took place at the Playboy Mansion, where the couple exchanged vows beside the infamous Wishing Well on the Mansion's front lawn.
Baskett secretly went shopping for an engagement ring for Kendra (who didn't even know that she was going to be proposed to) and he found it at Bernie Robbins Fine Jewelers, near his house in New Jersey. Hank had some difficulty buying the ring as whenever he was at Bernie Robbins', Kendra would call him.
"Kendra would just happen to call me then. Every time! I would be like, I'm getting my computer worked on, I'm at the shoe store. I made something up. I had to be sneaky about it because Kendra's a little inspector, always picking up clues," said Baskett.
Finally, Baskett was able to seal the deal and Wilkinson wound up with a ring featuring a 2-carat princess-cut diamond surrounded by 60 diamonds. The idea was to get a ring that the sparkle and fire of which could be seen "from all angles. I'd keep it in my safe. And I'd look at it every day before practice, then I'd clean it. I'd come home from practice and still clean it. No one else touched it, but I still cleaned it," Baskett said.
Baskett was nervous about how the proposal would go over. "I honestly felt this ring was the one. But there was still a lot of nerves. Like my god, I hope she likes this," Baskett says of his November, 2008 proposal. And Kendra said before the wedding, "I hope it turns out good. I'm nervous -- I don't like the 80's prom look. I like a simple look -- and it's hard to find it."
Despite the pre-wedding jitters, everything seemed to fall into place. "Everything looked so beautiful around me -- it was surreal," Kendra would later say of her wedding day.
It was a fairytale wedding, Mary Wilkinson, Kendra's grandmother, exclaimed. And Kendra's mother, Patty Wilkinson, added, "Watching [Kendra's brother] Colin walk Kendra down the aisle was really emotional and beautiful. She looked breathtaking."
"Holly cried like a faucet and I held back tears. I'm usually the emotional one. The ceremony was short and sweet and bombarded by helicopters. [Kendra looked] like a princess," said friend Bridgett Marquardt, who is another former Playboy model and another former Heffner blonde girlfriend.
Kendra should have looked like a princess with her ring and her $20,000 duchess-silk gown which was woven from 55 yards of fabric and covered by 1200 crystals; the dress was co-designed by Kendra and R-Mine Bridal's Armine Ohanessian.
