Like this photo of John Paul II playing baseball during his visit to the US?

John Paul II really was a sportsman, and a keen one, but he did not play baseball, and that is not him in the photo.

The picture is genuine, but it shows Gene Greytak, an American estate agent who made his name on his resemblance to the pontiff and worked for decades as his lookalike. The shot was taken by Rick Silva for the Associated Press in 1996 at an amateur fantasy camp of the New York Mets baseball club, where Greytak, in full papal vestments, stepped up to bat.

Greytak died in 2010, and the photograph resurfaced in his obituary in the Los Angeles Times. In the summer of 2025 the image appeared online once more, this time captioned “the Pope plays baseball”.

In reality, Karol Wojtyła in his youth in Wadowice played football as a goalkeeper. He went on canoeing and mountain expeditions, went skiing, and swam in the pool at Castel Gandolfo, which he had built, quipping that a swimming pool was cheaper than a new conclave