“John, I’m the Pope” — Viral Nikes, Car Talk, and the Disarming Humanity of Leo XIV
Fr. Jim Sichko of Lexington just handed Leo XIV his second pair of custom Nikes, and a six-year-old in Barcelona got him to admit he played American football. The world is meeting Bob Prevost one delightful detail at a time.
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Father Jim Sichko came to see Pope Leo XIV on May 27 carrying a shoebox. Inside sat a pair of custom Nikes, hand-painted by Lexington artist Billy Hobbs of True Blue Customs, and the Kentucky priest presented them personally to the pope — the second pair he has put in this pope’s hands.
Sichko, one of the Church’s roving Missionaries of Mercy, has refined the art of the papal gift over years of Roman visits. Bourbon was long his calling card; in 2022 he commissioned Hobbs to paint a pair of Nike Blazers in the white and gold of the papal flag for Pope Francis.
His generosity reaches well past footwear. The Missionaries of Mercy added a $10,000 gift for Chiclayo, Leo’s old diocese in Peru; Delta, too, was generous — $100,000 for the Augustinians, his own order. Sichko brought Delta president Peter Carter along for the May visit, and through my own reporting, I can tell you Delta has agreed to fly the pope around the United States for free whenever he makes his papal trip home.
The arrangement already looks shrewd. This week the engine on Leo’s chartered Iberia jet failed on the tarmac in Tenerife, and King Felipe VI ended up flying the pope home to Rome on a Spanish royal Falcon.
This time, the sneakers answered a viral moment. In May, around the first anniversary of Leo’s election, the Vatican released the trailer for “Leone a Roma,” a documentary about the American pope — and eagle-eyed viewers spotted a 2008 photograph of a young Father Robert Prevost at World Youth Day in Sydney wearing white Nike Franchise Lows.
The internet responded with reverence and memes. “Forgive me, Father, for I have dripped,” ran one of the kinder posts, and within days a discontinued 1970s tennis shoe became the most discussed footwear in the Catholic world.
Many traditionalists had hoped that Leo — who restored the red papal mozzetta to the loggia on the night of his election — would also bring back the red papal shoes Benedict XVI made famous. He has stuck instead with the plain black workman shoes Francis favored. Where the new Nikes now live is a mystery the Vatican press office has not addressed.
Leo’s footwear had already started one argument this year. Back in February, when critics groused that an altar girl wore sneakers while serving his Mass in the Roman suburb of Ostia, I pointed out on X that the man at the altar seems fond of a good pair himself.
In mid-May, a group of kids pulled Leo into a meme. The Genoa priest and Catholic influencer Don Roberto Fiscer had brought a class of confirmation students to meet the pope at St. Peter’s, and when he asked them to show Leo what they do, they shouted “6-7” and bobbed their palms up and down in the hand sign that has swallowed middle-school cafeterias whole.
Leo paused for a beat, then bobbed his own hands and said it back: “6-7.” Fiscer’s clip crossed twenty million views, and a phrase Dictionary.com had just crowned its word of the year suddenly had a pontiff doing the bit. He did it again as recently as Friday in the Canary Islands, where a twenty-year-old at a Tenerife migrant center asked the pope to join in and Leo happily obliged with a smile.
The shoes belong to a growing file of small revelations the world keeps collecting about this pope, and his trip to Spain filled the file considerably.
On the June 9 Iberia hop from Madrid to Barcelona, the captain waved Leo into the cockpit for takeoff. Iberia’s footage shows the pope strapped into the jump seat with the grin of a boy who cannot believe his luck, peppering the crew with questions about the approach and the terrain below — his training in science and mathematics on full display. At one point he pulled on a headset to radio a blessing to the pilot of an escorting Spanish fighter jet.
Captain Pablo Martínez Núñez, twenty-six years at Iberia, called it the most significant flight of his career. Days later his co-pilot, Ángeles Hernández, was still processing it. “I’m still on cloud nine,” she said. “I do think he really enjoyed the flight.”
At the Church of St. Augustine in Barcelona this week, a six-year-old named Renzo landed the interview every Vatican correspondent wanted. His opening question: does the pope like soccer?
Leo’s answer amounted to a sports autobiography. Tennis is his game now, he said, but as a boy growing up outside Chicago he played American football, “which is a bit more violent.” Soccer came later, with his seminarians in Trujillo, Peru — and he played defense, “in case anyone wants to know,” because he “wasn’t a great goal scorer.”
He watched his first World Cup in 1982 as a student in Rome, the year Spain hosted the tournament. Forty-four years later he returned to that same country as pope, where reporters asked whether Madrid’s young people would choose him or Bad Bunny, who was in town the same week. “I think many will go to see Bad Bunny,” he conceded. “But I think there will also be a few there to see the pope. And that too says something.”
The New York Times opened another window this week with an interview with Armando Jesús Lovera, the pope’s close friend since 1992, when Lovera arrived at the Augustinian formation house Prevost ran in Trujillo. The two have logged decades of road trips and World Cup broadcasts together, and they still get on the phone to talk about their shared love of cars.
Lovera also told the Times about a recent phone call. John Prevost, the pope’s older brother, rang from Chicago with a computer problem — because Bob, as the family still calls him, has always been the one who fixes these things.
“John, I’m the pope,” Leo reminded him.
The reply came without a pause: “Oh, sorry pope. My computer is broken.”
If one image gathers all of this into a single frame, it emerged from Barcelona on Tuesday night. Before a prayer vigil at the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium, a security guard lifted a seven-year-old named Joaquim toward the popemobile, and AP chief photographer Emilio Morenatti pressed the shutter as the pope took both of the boy’s hands, the two locked in a smile.
The backstory deepens the picture. Joaquim’s parents, devotees of Antoni Gaudí who named their newborn son after the architect, had prayed for nine straight days before an image of Gaudí asking for tickets to see the pope. Morenatti posted the photo on X hoping to find the family and give them a print; more than half a million views later, the family found him first — with an assist from ChatGPT.
“He was so moved that he could only smile, he couldn’t speak,” Joaquim’s mother, Montse Martínez, said of her son’s few seconds with the pope.
There is a word for what all these stories are circling: incarnation. Catholics profess that God chose flesh — feet that need shoes, hands busy fixing a brother’s computer, a voice on the phone happily lost in car talk with an old friend.
Leo XIV is a human being, and we are seeing his humanity a bit more each and every day. None of it diminishes the office. The white cassock keeps its mystery precisely because the man inside it played defense in Trujillo, lost his heart to the 1982 World Cup, and still takes his brother’s tech-support calls.
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Wonderful article. I love Pope Leo.