Player picks aisle over isle

He tried, without much conviction, to sell her on getting married via teleconference.

She wasn’t buying.

He suggested they postpone it a day.

She suggested he get real.

He said Puerto Rico would be the perfect place for a ceremony, to say nothing of a honeymoon. And to that she conceded, hey, you may have something there.

Problem was, the caterer and the photographer and the church already had something else: their money.

So on Aug. 26 – next Saturday – at the matinee hour of 4 p.m., Nicole Eager and Jerome Stevens will exchange wedding vows in Ocean Shores, Wash. The site will be St. Jerome’s Catholic Church – coincidental but appropriate, Nicole said, because her Jerome has been somewhat saintly about what holy matrimony may be getting in the way of next weekend.

“Oh, he tried a few things to get out of it,” she laughed, “but it was a little too late.”

This evening, the Spokane Shock will attempt to take one more step toward an arenafootball2 championship when they meet the Arkansas Twisters in the National Conference title game at the Spokane Arena. The joint will again be packed and deafening, and down there on the rug Stevens will be dancing his two-way tango on the line with some other 300-pounder from Arkansas.

And if the Shock win, off they go to San Juan for the ArenaCup, af2’s championship game at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico next Saturday.

But if they go, they’ll go without their big dog.

He’s due at the altar.

“What can you do?” asked coach Chris Siegfried, with a verbal shrug. “He’s getting married.”

Well, you can chip in for a present. Candlesticks always make a nice gift, and maybe you could find out where they’re registered. …

No one is operating on the assumption that Stevens will in fact miss anything. Heck, the Shock were 2 seconds from season’s end last week when Charles Frederick somehow crossed the goal line with the winning touchdown in the conference semifinals – and that’s only the latest time they’ve been on life support.

Then again, this unfolded early as a season of destiny, so you imagine Stevens might have tried to accommodate the ultimate destination.

Or not.

“I think his future wife would kill him,” Siegfried said. “Obviously, if he could have foreseen this, he’d probably have it on a different day. But we’ll be fine – if we get there.”

So when did the coach get the news?

“Back in March,” he said. “Of course, I forgot about it until he reminded me a couple of weeks ago.”

Eager and Stevens met as undergraduates at the University of Washington. When he went off last year to play for the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena Football League, she moved to Spokane to begin graduate school in Eastern Washington University’s physical therapy program. He joined her after the season and started work at Hutton Settlement Children’s Home.

“I was waiting on L.A. to give me a call (for this season), but I found a good job that I liked and so I had to go to Plan B,” Stevens said. “Then it turned out that Spokane was getting (an af2) team. So it was great that I could play again without leaving.

“Your heart’s always leaning toward football.”

Always leaning toward football? So he did try to find some wiggle room with his fiancee?

“Well, sure – I had a few ideas,” Stevens said. “I knew none of them were going to work, but it was worth a try.”

But in this case, Stevens and the Shock were up against a planning juggernaut. Both Eager, who is from Wishkah, Wash., and Stevens, who grew up in Oxnard, Calif., come from large families. They’re expecting about 200 guests next Saturday. Arrangements started last September and deposits were made for the church and the Ocean Shores Convention Center, where the reception is being held.

In the middle of all those arrangements, the Shock started winning … and winning … and winning.

So is the bride-to-be getting any grief from the groom’s teammates about the conflict of these two clambakes?

“Every time I see them,” she said. “I’m feeling that we may never live this one down. Twenty years after we’re married, it’s going to be, ‘We could have gone to that championship game.’ “

Not that she’s unwilling to make some accommodations. ArenaCup kickoff is about 3:30 p.m. PDT – or about an hour before the I-dos.

“I’m thinking every half hour he could go check on the score,” she said. “But no earpieces allowed during the ceremony.”

Again, there will be no trip to San Juan for the Shock if they don’t take care of business tonight – and even though this amounts to Stevens’ ArenaCup, he insists he’s not overamped for his last game, win or lose.

Just as he denies prewedding jitters.

“Nah,” he laughed. “That’ll be just another game day.”