Could you say Mass for me and we could go out to breakfast?” Then the coach from Carroll College, Mike Van Diest, called and said, “Father, I have a day off on Monday and I know you do, too. Then the head of SportsCenter on ESPN loved the article so much that we made it onto that show. Well, God has a great sense of humor, because we hit the Wall Street Journal on the front page. Not only that: I never was a businessman, I wasn’t that great in sports and I never had any opportunity to be involved in movies. You were, like, “What is wrong with this picture?” People don’t come to me for financial counseling - with good reason, frankly. And I wondered what a Journal reporter could possibly want from a pastor of a rural parish in Townsend, Montana.įather Sean Raftis: I know it didn’t quite register. But Father Raftis told me in a recent interview that, despite the film’s worldly elements, it contains a spiritual message that captures something of the joy of the real-life game.ĭawn Eden Goldstein: I remember calling you one evening in late 2012 and you apologized for not having been available to speak at the original time we had arranged, because you had an interview with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.

None of “Tag’s” characters is a priest - which is doubtless a good thing, as the film is rated R (for crude speech and behavior, and brief nudity). Now, five years after a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal brought worldwide notice to the “Tag Brothers,” the exploits of Father Raftis and his friends have been transformed by Hollywood into “Tag,” with an all-star cast that includes Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson and Hannibal Buress. The 10 friends have been doing it annually for 28 years, having bound themselves to a “Tag Participation Agreement” drawn up by a lawyer among them. Make no mistake, this isn’t mere playground tag but a grown-up version, with no tagbacks and no geographical boundaries.

On the surface, my longtime friend Father Sean Raftis appears to be a mild-mannered small-town Montana pastor.īut every February, he and nine of his former schoolmates from Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane, Washington, do something extraordinary - so extraordinary, in fact, that it has inspired a new major motion picture.

Tag game real life