Carrie Underwood has been married to Mike Fisher since 2010. And she has the guy who plays bass in her band to thank for it.
Carrie is the country star who won “American Idol” in 2005, a small-town girl from Checotah, Oklahoma. Mark Childers is her bass player and musical director. And through a mutual friend, Childers knew a hockey player from Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
That was Mike Fisher. He played center in the NHL for the Ottawa Senators starting in 1999, and he really wanted to meet Carrie.
Childers wasn’t about to make it easy. “He wanted to meet Carrie behind stage at the Opry and I didn’t allow it, but, he kept trying for about a year and finally did at a meet and greet,” Childers said on “The Howard Stern Show” in 2023.
Carrie wasn’t sold at first, either. Mike lived in another country, and she had no interest in being set up on a date with a stranger.
“I mean, can I make dating more difficult? Let’s get a hockey guy who lives in another country. Awesome,” she joked to VH1’s “Behind the Music” in 2012.
So she came up with a safe plan. Childers could put Mike in her backstage meet-and-greet line with the fans, where she could slip away if things got awkward.
“We’re sticking him in a meet-and-greet, because if he’s weird, I don’t want to deal with him,” Carrie said.
They finally met in October 2008. Carrie told talk show host Kelly Clarkson in 2020 that Mike drove to Toronto to see the show and ended up standing at the end of the line among a bunch of young girl fans.
Once she found out he played hockey, Carrie had one very practical question. She shared it on “Ellen” in November 2009: “Does he have his own teeth?” The answer she got back was “No, but he’s got his really good dentist!”
Mike liked what he saw, too. “First time I saw her, she was more beautiful in person than on TV,” he has said.
And Carrie? Right after they met, she pulled out her phone and texted Childers. Carrie later revealed it was just three words: “hot, hot, hot.”
Carrie’s one-word answer for how it all happened is “Persistence.” She and Childers told the story side by side on his show, and you’ll want to hear Childers describe how long Mike kept at it.
Carrie and her bass player tell how she met Mike
After that first meeting, things moved at a careful pace. Carrie told Stern that “he moved slow, he moved very slow.”
They talked on the phone for almost three months. Then Carrie took matters into her own hands. Mike’s hockey team was having a New Year’s Eve party, and she asked him, “Do you need a date?”
“Then our first real date was on New Year’s Eve, and our first kiss was when the ball dropped,” Carrie told Glamour in 2012.
Mike proposed in December 2009. They married on July 10, 2010, at The Ritz-Carlton Reynolds in Georgia. He was traded to the Nashville Predators in 2011, became their captain in 2016 and retired for good in May 2018.
Today they live on their Tennessee farm with their sons, Isaiah, 11, and Jacob, 7. Mike hunts while Carrie raises animals and a garden. At home, she says, she’s just “mom.”