“I Asked Him for a Miracle” — Spike Lee Says Pope Leo XIV Is Pulling for the Knicks
Three Villanova Wildcats carried New York to its first NBA Finals since 1999 — and the most famous Wildcat of all is watching from Rome. The first American pope has quietly become the patron of American and European sport alike.
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Game 1 of the NBA Finals just finished last night, with the New York Knicks winning and now playing for a championship for the first time since 1999, chasing their first title since 1973.
Three of the men who carried them there learned the game at the same small Catholic university outside Philadelphia. Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges all wore Villanova blue before they pulled on Knicks orange, the heart of a roster New York has nicknamed the “Nova Knicks.”
The most famous Villanova graduate in the world is likely watching from Rome.
Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost in the Chicago suburb of Dolton and a member of the Villanova Class of 1977, is, according to Spike Lee, a Knicks fan.
Lee made the claim after meeting the pope at the Vatican on November 15, 2025, when Leo gathered the film world for an audience on the power of cinema alongside Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, and Viggo Mortensen.
The director handed Leo a custom jersey reading “Pope Leo” above the number 14, and said he asked the Holy Father for a miracle: a championship for New York.
Seven months later, with the Knicks three wins from the title, the request stopped sounding like a punch line.
Knicks supporters have found their own evidence.
A fan named Robbie DeLasho filmed himself at the Vatican shouting “Pope Leo! Go Knicks! Knicks in four!” as the popemobile rolled past, and the pope turned back, smiled, and flashed a double thumbs-up. The clip raced across the internet, and a city starved for a title decided it had its blessing.
The Villanova roots run deeper than the nickname. Prevost graduated in 1977 with a degree in mathematics, then entered the Order of Saint Augustine and left for decades of missionary work in Peru before Rome ever called. Brunson, Hart, and Bridges came up on the Main Line during the run that gave Villanova its 2016 and 2018 national championships, and the three of them reunited in New York to haul a long-suffering franchise back into June.
(I told the story of his college years in “Villanova Days: How College Shaped Pope Leo XIV,” part of the ongoing series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation.)
Leo’s place in American sport did not begin at center court, though. He is, before anything else, a White Sox fan.
The future pope was in the stands for Game 1 of the 2005 World Series — the night the South Siders opened the sweep that delivered their first championship in 88 years — and footage of a cheering Robert Prevost on the Fox broadcast surfaced within days of his election.
On June 14, 2025, roughly 30,000 people filled Rate Field, the South Side home of the White Sox, for a Mass celebrating his election. Cardinal Cupich presided, and the new pope addressed his hometown by video in his first recorded message to North America.
When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson came to the Vatican this May and offered him a Cubs cap, the lifelong South Sider would not put it on.
His love of sport reaches across the Atlantic, too. The Associated Press reported this month that Leo plays tennis nearly every week, slipping away to the papal retreat at Castel Gandolfo on Mondays and Tuesdays to hit with his secretary, swim, and ride horseback. He once called himself “quite the amateur tennis player,” and his Augustinian formation has never treated the body as the enemy of the soul.
Europe’s tennis world caught on quickly. In May 2025, world No. 1 Jannik Sinner arrived at the Vatican with his parents and a pair of rackets and offered the pope a quick rally. Leo eyed the antiques around the room and said, “Better not.”
Days earlier, when journalists at his first media audience offered to organize a charity match, he had joked, “but we can’t invite Sinner.”
None of this is a diversion from the office for Leo. At the Jubilee of Sport last June, he celebrated Mass for athletes in St. Peter’s Basilica and told them that sport teaches us how to lose, that it is a school of respect and fairness, and that players are called to be missionaries of hope. The man who plays on Mondays preaches what he practices.
Leo has dedicated his June prayer intention to sports, asking the faithful in a video message to pray that sports serve as “an instrument of peace, encounter, and dialogue among cultures and nations.” “In life, as in the game, no one is saved alone,” he said.
The fascination has crossed into sports media that rarely touches religion.
Pablo Torre, whose Webby-winning show “Pablo Torre Finds Out” counts among the most decorated podcasts in the country, has turned to Leo more than once, in one episode asking whether the pope is radical “or can decency levitate.” A pope has wandered into the sports section, and the sports section cannot stop talking about him.
In November, the pope’s alma mater will come to him. Villanova and Notre Dame will open the 2026-27 college basketball season with a men’s and women’s doubleheader in Rome, billed as the Eternal City Tip-Off, and both programs expect an audience with Leo and a shared Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica before tipoff. For the Notre Dame men, it will be the first season opener played outside the United States in the program’s history.
There is something worth noticing in all of it. The first American pope keeps a hometown team, a weekly tennis match, an alma mater chasing a banner, and a filmmaker in Brooklyn begging him for one.
For a country that agrees on almost nothing, a pope who roots for his teams and guards his weekly court time has become a rare patch of common ground, with the Chicago faithful, an Italian tennis star, Spike Lee at courtside, and Pablo Torre behind a microphone all reaching for the same man.
When a White Sox fan from Dolton can hold the affection of Knicks diehards, Roman tennis crowds, and an award-winning sportswriter at once, the shared delight points to something our politics keeps trying to bury: joy, like grace, was never meant to belong to one side.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of Americans and people of goodwill who have found in this pope something our public life almost never offers anymore, a reason to smile together.
A South Side kid who studied math at Villanova and still finds time to hit the court, Leo carries his ordinary loves into the highest office in the Church without pretending to be anything other than the man he is.
In a culture starved for shared joy, that gladness becomes its own quiet witness, and this is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for exactly that, something deeper than the rage and cynicism our politics feeds us.
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Thanks for the break from the heavy stuff of this world, it's sorely needed.
I’m happy to say that I pray the Holy Trinity will help the San Antonio Spurs win the Championship! ☺️
Go Spurs Go! 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼