VATICAN CITY: Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner had an audience on Wednesday with the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, himself a keen tennis player, the Vatican said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sinner was invited to the Vatican along with his parents and a delegation from the Italian Tennis Federation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leo joked earlier this week that he didn\u2019t want to meet the world number one, at least not behind the net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Asked by a journalist if he would take part in a charity match, Leo appeared up for it, but cautioned: \u201cJust don\u2019t bring Sinner,\u201d making a Catholic pun about the last name of the tennis star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pope, formerly known as US Cardinal Robert Prevost, described himself in a 2023 interview published by the website of his Augustinian religious order as \u201cquite the amateur tennis player\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sinner is taking part in the Italian Open tennis tournament, which is being staged a short distance from the Vatican, coming back from a three-month doping ban.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He blushed when asked during a news conference on Monday about the pope\u2019s comments and buried his head in his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhy do you have to put me in a difficult spot?\u201d he said, before adding: \u201cObviously I heard that he played as a kid. I think it\u2019s a good thing for us tennis players to have a pope who likes this sport that we\u2019re playing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VATICAN CITY: Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner had an audience on Wednesday with the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, himself a keen tennis player, the Vatican said. Sinner was invited to the Vatican along with his parents and a delegation from the Italian Tennis Federation. Leo joked earlier this week that he didn\u2019t want to meet the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","inline_featured_image":false,"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_3859443944190656_798604363342440":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5556,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions\/5556"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}