Jordyn Woods’s engagement ring reveals hidden symbolism, pink diamonds, and family tributes

Karl-Anthony Towns chose a proposal with as much emotional architecture as sparkle. On the rooftop of Overstory in Manhattan, just after the New York Knicks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 126-124 on Christmas Day 2025, the six-time NBA All-Star slipped Jordyn Woods an emerald-cut engagement ring that was built to read like a private family archive.

The designer behind the piece, Bernard James, is now known for a ring that goes well beyond surface glamour. His work for Towns and Woods centered on meaning, memory and connection, and the result is a custom setting that layers rare natural pink diamonds with symbolism only the couple can fully decode. The center stone’s crisp emerald shape gives the ring its clean, graphic frame, but the emotional weight lives in the details tucked into the band.

Those details are unusually intimate. Woods said her parents’ birthstones and her own are set on one side of the band, while Towns’s are placed on the other, turning the ring into a small, permanent map of two families becoming one. Inside the band, James engraved a handwritten note, the kind of concealed message that transforms fine jewelry from an announcement into a keepsake. It is the sort of hidden work that separates a beautiful ring from one that feels authored for a specific relationship.

That personalization fits the couple as much as the craftsmanship. Towns said he wanted a ring that reflected the bond he and Woods had built during five and a half years together. They began dating in 2020 after years of friendship, a relationship that deepened during COVID-19 and through the loss of Towns’s mother, Jacqueline, that same year. Woods later marked Towns’s 30th birthday with a restored black 1990s Isuzu Trooper, the same model his mother used to drive, another gesture that showed how much memory already lives inside their relationship.

Woods said she had no clue the proposal was coming, though she grew a little suspicious the night before when Towns asked about when she was getting her hair done. She also said the Christmas Eve timing felt especially meaningful because her own parents got engaged on Christmas Eve. The couple announced the engagement on Christmas Day with a joint Instagram post captioned "Marry Christmas," and Towns later said on Late Night With Seth Meyers that Woods was "ecstatic" about the ring and that Elizabeth Woods approved. In the end, Bernard James gave Towns exactly what a custom engagement ring should do: not just shine, but tell a family story in stone, metal and memory.