Anyway, I Was Converted

Here is the conversion story of Monica who joins her friends Jan and Tom at the Pfister every Sunday after they all attend mass at St. Catherine’s.

 

“I hated it.

I was opposed to it on moral grounds.

Disgusting,

brutal,

a waste of time.

 

Then the Packers won the Superbowl with Brett Favre

and I started to realize the strategy, the artistry,

it’s like watching a ballet

with three hundred pound ballerinas!

They’re so in their bodies,

they’re so in control of their bodies,

so embodied those guys

that they can intuitively reach up and catch that ball

and get it, oh my god,

in a split second

and then together, the community of it,

the communication that hasta happen,

how they have to know what they’re doing…

anyway, I was converted.”

 

Were you into sports before you liked football?

 

“No,

not a sports person.

Didn’t grow up with it,

don’t have brothers,

nuthin,

nuthin,

no, no sense of it,

didn’t know that it was a thing of beauty,

didn’t know it had any merit.

 

We used to come here anyway,

then we wanted to watch the Packer game,

but this isn’t quite a Packer place—

like you wouldn’t normally think

the Pfister… Packers?

So they have the lovely lobby

with the little TV in the corner

and then we asked,

“Could we watch the Packer game?”

so then somebody gingerly opened up the TV doors

and put on the Packer game with no sound,

but then we got so excited

and of course people really wanted to watch the game

even Pfister people, like the staff,

they all came sneaking out,

“What’s the score? What’s the score?”

so like eventually over time it sorta became okay

to watch the Packer game here

and then we would have a lovely brunch

and then we would pull the tables together

and then like a community of people

began to join us on Sundays,

a lot of the staff,

95-year-old Mildred,

Caroline,

and the guy that we thought was a secret service agent.

And now people will gather out there

a lot of times there’s guests in the hotel from out of state

and they come down,

it’s a great place to watch the Packer game, the best.

 

We’ve met a ton of people,

Mike Sherman’s (the Packer’s coach) daughter!

I didn’t know who she was

I saw this girl sitting by herself watching the game,

this college girl,

but she’d go like this:

 

 

it was getting towards the end of the season

towards the playoffs, so this was a really important game

she went to Marquette but she didn’t want to watch it there

because all the kids knew her

so she came here to watch it by herself

and there was nobody else there that Sunday

it was just you and Mike Sherman’s daughter

watching this intense game.

 

I would have missed all that

if I still had my nose in the air

about the moral reprehensibility of football.”