Sister Jean has swag for days, and other lessons learned writing a book with her

It was the teeth of college basketball season and I was feeling frazzled, but I didn’t want to keep Sister Jean waiting. We had agreed over email on a time to speak, and I knew she would be ready. As usual, when she saw my number come up on her caller ID, she answered, “Hi Seth.” We made some chit-chat, and I prepared to get down to business.

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Before we could start, however, Sister Jean interrupted me. “This time I get to ask the first question,” she said. “Am I keeping you from your family right now? I want them to like me, you know. I don’t want them to say, ‘I don’t like that Sister Jean. She’s taking our dad away from us.’ ”

The remark embodied all the wonderful qualities that are jam-packed into this spunky, sprightly centenarian – kindness, thoughtfulness, humility, love and a swaggy reference to herself in the third person. I thanked Sister Jean for her concern and assured her my family understood. Then we got to work.

That was one of dozens of conversations I had with Sister Jean over the last 20 months. The result of that dialogue is a memoir published this week by Harper Select entitled “Wake Up With Purpose! What I’ve Learned During My First Hundred Years.” This is my seventh book and my third collaboration. I’ve often described the act of writing a book as a joyful slog, but this one was pure joy. How could it have been otherwise when it allowed me to spend so many hours talking to a woman who has lived over a hundred years and never had a bad day?

So excited today is the publication day for the memoir I wrote with Sister Jean: “Wake Up with Purpose! What I’ve Learned During My First Hundred Years.” She is sweet, inspiring, funny with a little attitude thrown in. Get yourself a copy here:https://t.co/dSChLZfDOS pic.twitter.com/PKAN9RpZlp

— Seth Davis (@SethDavisHoops) February 28, 2023

I had only met Sister Jean briefly before we started working on this project. It was in 2018 at the Alamodome in San Antonio, where her beloved Loyola Ramblers were playing in the Final Four. She was sitting courtside during the games, and my CBS colleague Greg Gumbel and I went over to introduce ourselves. Greg grew up in Chicago, and he told Sister Jean that his sister, Rhonda, had been a student of hers at Mundelein College back in the 1960’s. “I know!” Sister Jean shouted above the din. “I think about her every time I see you on television.” Greg’s jaw just about hit the floor.

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As I watched the Sister Jean story evolve through the tournament, I thought about how lucky those players were to be around someone like her. What would it be like, I wondered, to sit with Sister Jean and ask her tons of questions about her life, her experiences, and her perspective on what’s going on in the world today? I imagined she had a great book in her, but I was not inclined to pursue it myself. People often ask authors where they get their ideas, but I have way more ideas for books than time to write them.

Something about this one, however, just wouldn’t let go of me. I’d see Sister Jean pop up here and there – including during the 2021 tournament, when the Ramblers reached the Sweet 16 – and think yet again, I’ll bet she’s got a great book in her. Porter Moser, Loyola’s coach for both March runs and now the head coach at Oklahoma, connected us. Sister Jean and I had a good first talk, but she was noncommittal about writing a book with me. She was a very busy woman and had politely rebuffed such offers before. When I laid out the benefits of putting her life on the printed page, she acknowledged what I was saying but added, “Why don’t you just go ahead and write it?” I told her it would require a little more of a time commitment on her behalf, but that all she had to do was talk, and then I would put her words to music. I also explained that in publishing, the author usually has to do a proposal first, so there was no guarantee this book would even get sold. “Why don’t we have a couple of conversations and produce a proposal, and you can see how you like it,” I said.

A couple of weeks later I hopped on a flight to Chicago to spend a day with her. We spoke for several hours in her office on the ground floor of the Damen Student Center. As we spoke, I could see through her window the traffic of students flowing through the building. We took a break for lunch, whereupon Sister Jean chatted up the students who surrounded her. She loved being around those young people. It was amazing to watch her in action.

Once we got to talking, it was not difficult to get Sister Jean to open up about her incredible life, from her early days growing up in the Bay Area to her education, her first few jobs teaching grade school and middle school in Chicago and California, to her star turn as the basketball team’s chaplain at Loyola. At one point during my visit, I asked Sister Jean if it was appropriate for her to pray for the Ramblers to win. “Of course it is,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with using the talents that God gives us. So yes, I pray for us to win, but if we don’t, we have to be good sports about it.”

We spoke another couple of times on the phone. I took those conversations, crafted a proposal in her voice, and sent it to her for edits. She was a stickler for details. For example, I had written that when she held her press conference at the Final Four, someone told her that the number of reporters there was as many as Tom Brady had for the Super Bowl. She instructed me to change “as many as” to “more than.” Hey, it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.

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The proposal was picked up by an editor at Harper Select named Matt Baugher whose daughter went to Loyola. Matt was present for the Ramblers’ NCAA Tournament wins, and he was one of the folks who had asked Sister Jean to write a book, only to be shooed away. It was another divine connection. Contract in hand, Sister Jean and I plowed ahead.

Sister Jean became a college basketball celebrity during Loyola Chicago’s run to the 2018 Final Four. (Brett Davis / USA Today)

We quickly developed a rhythm and routine. Every Sunday, she emailed me her schedule for the week. We agreed on slots where we would talk, usually at night when she was at The Clare, the assisted living facility where she lives in Chicago. We spoke two or three times per week for about 90 minutes. For all her initial reluctance, Sister Jean loved reminiscing about events and people that she hadn’t had the chance to talk about in so long. By the time our 90 minutes was up, I was pretty wiped, but she could have gone on for hours.

When we ended one of our first conversations, I surprised Sister Jean by asking her to say a closing prayer. “You mean right now?” she said. I told her yes, and she obliged. From that point on, that is how we ended every interview.

Sister Jean may be 103, but her memory is incredible. She can rattle off dates, names and details of events from long ago as if they happened yesterday. She told the story from her grandmother’s funeral when she was not quite 3 years old. She recounted the day she and her mother paid a nickel each so they could walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on the day it opened. She listed the names of her extended family members and said what each one did for a living. She remembered the exact means she used when she was 18 years old and left for the Mother House in Iowa where she studied to become a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Our basketball conversations were especially enjoyable. Make no mistake – this lady knows her hoops. Beyond her understanding the game, which she both played and coached many years ago, I was blown away by her knowledge of what was going on at that moment, especially with regard to Loyola’s season. Sister Jean spends a lot of time researching the Ramblers’ opponents using her iPad. She includes her analysis on the emails she sends to the team as well as in her pregame prayers. Her support of the team was unconditional, but her criticism of referees was unsparing. I tried to deflect her by pointing out how difficult reffing was, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t know what they’re looking at sometimes,” she said. “I think they need glasses. A lot of times they come up to me before the game and ask me to bless their hands. I think I should bless their eyes.”

I sent her the first draft of the manuscript and told her that she should read it not just to ensure it was accurate, but that she felt comfortable with the voice I was using. “This should sound like you,” I said. Most of the changes she made were technical. She may be an international celebrity with multiple bobbleheads in her likeness and a train station named after her in Chicago, but she is still an eighth-grade teacher at heart. There’s nothing Sister Jean loves more than to sit with a pile of pages and make corrections by hand.

We continued to visit on the phone after the manuscript was finished last summer, and she emailed me several times per month to check-in. Once in a while, I’d get a long voicemail from her just calling to say hi. As the holidays approached, she asked me to email her the first names of all my family members, including my parents and in-laws, as well as my home address, but she wouldn’t tell me why. Two weeks later, I received a package from the Hillel Chapter at Loyola, an international campus Jewish organization. It contained lovely keychains which were inscribed with the first names of my family members in Hebrew lettering. The letter from the Hillel director explained that she had the keychains made for me at Sister Jean’s request.

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Sister Jean and I have been talking more frequently the last month as we approached our publication date. She has been on a whirlwind media tour, and true to form, she has been loving every minute of it. The marketing folks at Harper Select were understandably concerned about overloading her schedule, but I kept telling them, “Trust me, you’re not going to wear her out. She’s going to wear you out.”

The most common question asked of Sister Jean is why she thinks she has lived so long and so well. Clearly, she has been blessed with great DNA (many of her family members lived into their nineties) and a lot of good luck, but I also believe her longevity and mental acuity is a testament to the life-giving power of work. Sister Jean technically retired from Loyola in the early 1990s, but she never stopped grinding. She rises each morning at 5 so she can meditate, recite her morning prayers, and prepare for a full day’s work. Besides regularly meeting with students in her office at the Damen Center, she attends many campus events, offering invocations, posing for pictures and altogether spreading good cheer. She spends her evenings at The Clare calling people, emailing, writing notes, and reading. And of course, she goes to all the basketball games. The last thing she does when her head hits the pillow is try to think of all the good things she has done that day, so when morning comes she will wake up with purpose once more. “Everyone needs to pat themselves on the back once in a while,” she likes to say.

Sister Jean is in good physical health for a woman her age. The only reason she’s in a wheelchair is because she broke her hip, and then developed shingles while she was rehabilitating. I asked her if it saddened her that she will be in a wheelchair the rest of her life. “Oh, I hope I’m not,” she replied.

Two weeks ago, I participated in an interview with Sister Jean for Dan LeBatard’s podcast. I called her afterward and told her that I thought she did great. An hour later I got an email that read, “Thanks, Seth, your call was like the icing on the cake. I did enjoy the interview and I did appreciate your kind words. See you on TV. Sr Jean. Go Ramblers.”

The book published on Tuesday, and so far the response has been wonderful. I’m glad people are getting a chance to feel the way I felt as I listened to this wonderful woman unspool her wisdom, her humor, her grace, and yes, her swag, for all those hours. I’m especially glad that Sister Jean enjoyed the process of writing the book and is now reveling in the renewed attention she is receiving. It gives her so much joy to interact with people and use her platform to serve God, just as she has all her life. I think we wrote a really good book, but for me, the best part is that I made a really good friend.

(Top photo: Courtesy Seth Davis)

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