The Challenge's Jordan Wiseley Breaks Down His Proposal to Tori Deal: The Ring, Who Knew, and More
It seems Tori Deal wasn’t the only person surprised when Jordan Wiseley popped the question on Wednesday night’s episode of The Challenge: War of the Worlds 2.
During a bonus “War Room” episode of the Challenge Mania podcast, Jordan, 29, revealed exactly who knew what and when — and that plans were set in motion months before the pair, who have been together since meeting on the show in 2017, left to compete on the latest season of the long-running MTV reality competition series.
“I got the idea just a month or two before leaving for the show,” Jordan tells hosts Scott Yager and Derrick Kosinski, a Challenge veteran as well. “I actually talked to her dad before we left and got the okay from him that I could ask her.”
Tori’s mom was also in on the plan — and supplied the engagement ring!
“It was the ring that her dad asked her mom with,” Jordan explains. “So it’s the original engagement ring from them.”
Once he had the ring, he tucked it away in his suitcase, and that’s where it stayed throughout the season until Jordan was getting ready to head to the Proving Ground in this week’s episode. In the interim, only one other person knew what Jordan had planned: castmate Nany Gonzalez.
“We get to the house and it’s a house where you have to kind of live out of your suitcase,” Jordan explains. “Johnny [Bananas] and I are rooming together and we’re putting our suitcases together. Nany comes in and she’s bored and she’s like, ‘I’ll fold your clothes for you.’ We’re like, ‘Alright, cool.’ So we go out to the pool and Nany folds our clothes. A couple hours later, I’m walking into the house and Nany’s like, ‘Jordan, I found something.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ And she goes, ‘Are you planning on doing something?’ And then I was like, ‘Oh my god, she was in my suitcase. OH MY GOD, SHE FOUND THE RING!’ “
“And then I was like, ‘Nany …’ She goes, ‘I hid it for you in the lining of your suitcase. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’ And she was. She was f—ing Fort Knox! It was Fort Nany! She was airtight.”
Before heading to the elimination, Jordan already had a sense that he was going to have to compete against Theo Campbell for his place in the house, so he put the ring in his pocket.
“As we’re getting off the bus, I slipped the ring to one of the PAs,” Jordan recalls. “She just kind of looked at me like, ‘Is this what I think it is?’ And I was like, ‘Ahhh, maybe. Just keep it a secret for now.’ After the elimination, I was getting my ring and necklace back from her and she goes, ‘Do you want the other one? And I was like, ‘Yeah, give it to me.’ So she gets on the radio: ‘He’s asking! He’s asking!’ And [production] kind of started to scramble and set the cameras up, all that. They had about a 10-minute notice.”
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Theo, whom Jordan battled on the Proving Ground, admitted on Thursday’s episode of PEOPLE TV’s Reality Check that he spotted Jordan slipping the ring to the production assistant. “I knew if we went against each other and if he won, what was going to go down,” Theo said, later adding, “If I was going to lose to anyone at any point in the game, that was the best way to go out.”
As for wedding plans, Jordan says he and Tori haven’t locked down a date yet so much as they are determined to wed in the fall — whether that be in 2020 or 2021 — on the East Coast.
“We’re really trying to figure it out with the show and Tori’s got her book that’s going to come out soon and then I have a movie that we’re editing right now that we’ll be finishing up here in the next couple months,” he tells Challenge Mania. “We’re just trying to figure out a good time for it that we’re not stressed. We’re really okay with being engaged for a while. We have the rest of our lives, so we want it to be as easy as it can be.”
And, yes, they’re open to inviting cameras to their big day.
“We would absolutely entertain it, but we have our wants and we’re only going to get married once, and we’re not going to sacrifice the wedding that she wants, especially for a show,” he says. “As long as we can get the wedding we want, where we want it, on our terms, we would really entertain selling the rights to shooting it.”
He adds, “And if it’s not a show, that’s fine too because we were going to throw the party anyway.”
The Challenge: War of the Worlds 2 airs Wednesdays (9 p.m. ET) on MTV.
