One Friday morning in late November, Sister Jean Kenny sat in the attendance office at Von Steuben high school, phoning in her weekly segment on WLIT. “The Lions could pose a formidable challenge,” she said. “They have a lot of losses, but those were close losses. If the Bears win, it could be a tight game.” Her eyes flashed like emeralds beneath a pile of white curls, and a cross from her order, the Sisters of Providence, dangled from her neck over a Chicago Bears sweater. Chicago over Detroit, she predicted. Two days later the Bears beat the Lions in a nail-biter, 13-10.
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The 52-year-old Catholic nun is celebrated for her ability to prognosticate NFL game winners. In 1994, as a panelist on WGN Radio’s prediction segment, she compiled a 10-6 record forecasting Bears games, beating both Danny Sheridan of USA Today and Hub Arkush, host of the show and publisher of Pro Football Weekly. This year she’s 13-3. In the last five years she’s been on CNN three times, correctly predicting the winner of the Super Bowl, and she’s been a guest on The Tonight Show and Late Night With Conan O’Brien. For years she broadcast on WMAQ and Oldies 104, but now her three-minute spots air Fridays on WLIT, usually between 6:30 and 8 AM. During the regular season she nailed 159 games out of 248, for an average of .641.
Interviewers like Jay Leno joke about Kenny’s religious affiliation, suggesting that God may have something to do with her gift of prophecy, but she points out that it’s all in the homework. “I put a lot of time into it,” she says. “I study the handicaps, the injuries. If you want to be good at anything you have to work at it, put in the time. That’s what I tell the kids….Sometimes they ask me during the week what do I think, but I tell them I usually like to wait for the injury reports Thursdays in the Sun-Times and Tribune.”
Though Ditka is one of Kenny’s favorite people, her particular hero was Mother Teresa, whom she met once in Washington, D.C. And while she regularly attends Bears games with her brother Pat and watches the NFL on television with her friend Sister Marie Paul, she says she spends more time studying the Bible than she does poring over Pro Football Weekly: “I have my priorities straight.”
