Pope Leo XIV is a tennis player. Tsitsipas would be happy to hit some balls with him

ROME — It was fitting that when Pope Leo XIV was elected, the Italian Open tennis tournament was being played just up the road from the Vatican.

Because tennis is the sport that the first American pope likes to play.

“I consider myself quite the amateur tennis player,” Leo, the Chicago-born Augustinian missionary Robert Prevost, said in a 2023 interview with the Augustinian Order after taking over the Vatican’s powerful Dicastery for Bishops following years as a missionary in Peru.