"Don’t worry, you’re cuter than Darren" - When Jrue Holiday's wife Lauren accidentally met the love of her life searching for his UCLA teammate

It is easy to categorize Jrue Holiday and his wife Lauren Holiday as a powerful athlete couple. However, even more impressive and beautiful is the story of their love, which grew from both happy and tough times that they lived and endured together.

Jrue and Lauren met in 2008 at a UCLA women’s basketball game. Holiday was plying for the men's team then. During the game, a young fan asked Holiday for an autograph, mistaking him for Darren Collison, a former NBA player and his teammate at UCLA.

Lauren, who was sitting in front of him during the game, turned around and said something that Jrue Holiday still remembers.

"Don’t worry, you’re cuter than Darren is," Jrue recalled in a 2015 interview with ESPN.

Jrue and Lauren started dating a few months after he was drafted in the 2009 NBA Draft. The Philadelphia 76ers selected him 17th overall.

The Boston Celtics star said that when they met each other, they were already seeing other people. Holiday also said that when he met his wife at UCLA, she was a junior and he was a freshman.

"She was older than me, which is cool,” Jrue said in the same interview with ESPN. "I was a freshman, and I think she was a junior. At the time we were both with other people, but we did become friends, and months later, after I got drafted, we started dating."

Lauren Holiday had a stellar career in soccer. She won two Olympic gold medals with Team USA and a FIFA Women’s World Cup. In 2014, she also won the U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year award.

However, a year later, Lauren decided to step away from soccer to start a family with the basketball star. She was inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2022.

"My wife comes before anything else," Jrue Holiday put aside basketball for his wife Lauren Holiday

After four years of dating, Jrue Holiday and Lauren got married in 2014 in Malibu, California. The wedding was attended by Holiday's 76ers teammates and his close friends. The Holidays welcomed their first child, their son, Jrue Tyler in 2016.

However, it was also one of the toughest times in the couple's lives. During her pregnancy, doctors discovered a benign tumor in Laren's brain. Devastated with the news, Jrue Holiday kept aside basketball to take care of his wife. He sat out the start of the 2016-17 season.

"My family comes before basketball," Jrue Holiday told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "I'm obviously blessed to play this game and be in the position I am in, but my wife is the most important thing in the world to me. She comes before anything else."

Despite the tough days, Jrue never lost faith in his wife, calling her a "fighter" and "the toughest woman" he knew. Lauren went through a successful surgery after delivering her first child. The couple had another son, Hendrix, in 2020.