There are many reasons Blake Shelton was chosen as People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, including being extremely good looking and charming, as well as a talented country star.
But when he phoned TODAY to talk to Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on Wednesday, he indicated there was one special ace up his sleeve.
"That's the power of Hoda!" he said, echoing a tweet he sent out when the announcement was made Tuesday evening:
As we all know, Hoda Kotb has been Shelton's biggest supporter for years. She even dressed up like him for Halloween this year! So it can't hurt to have her as his unofficial fan club organizer.
"I'm just over here wallowing in my sexiness," he told the ladies when they all got on the line, then discussed the elaborate ways he went about informing his fellow "Voice" coach Adam Levine (who was Sexiest Man 2013). There was a short video that aired on "The Voice" where Shelton took his blindfolded pal to a building featuring a giant poster of himself on the cover of People.
In all seriousness, Shelton said Levine tried to alert him that this is bigger than he realizes. "He pulled me aside ... and said, 'You don't even understand what a big of a deal this is.'"
"I said, 'I'm glad they asked me; it just proves that sucking [my gut] in for years works.'"
More importantly, how did Shelton's girlfriend Gwen Stefani feel about it? Clearly, she's known he's the Sexiest Man Alive since 2015, when they first started dating.
"She was like, 'Man, you know what? Just do it,'" he recalled. "You're going to be old soon and you're going to wish you'd done some of these things."
She also tweeted a nice congratulatory note on Wednesday:
And he's been delighting us all day with his tweets accompanied by the hashtag #DontHateMeBecauseImBeautiful:
We also learned that one of the results of being named Sexiest Man Alive in 2017 is getting your own emoji:
And getting well-wishes from other Sexiest Men Alive:
And all of this is thanks to the power of Hoda!
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