It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday at the St. Regis hotel in Miami Beach, and (what else is new?) Mario Balotelli is drawing a crowd. In exactly one week Super Mario will meet Pope Francis, who will single out Balotelli for a private-audience from among a group that includes Lionel Messi and the Argentine and Italian national soccer teams. But here in this Balo-benighted swath of Florida the story is different. Posing for an SI photo shoot, the 23-year-old star forward of Italy and AC Milan is towering — 6′?2″, shirtless, Mohawked, arms extended wide — on a plexiglass platform that makes it look as though he’s walking on the liquid surface of a swimming pool.
Perhaps the pope would approve. Perhaps not.
Gawkers gather and snap cellphone photographs. One tourist, bare-chested and pot-bellied, takes a stab at the subject’s identity. “Shoot, is he a politician?” the man asks, his voice amply ‘Murcan. “My wife says I should know him.”
What exactly there is about the scene that causes him to think politician is left unsaid.
But the notion that anyone can be anything in America fascinates Balotelli, the most interesting man in the world (soccer edition), by turns a national hero and the target of national prejudice, who was born in Sicily to Ghanaian parents but (by law) couldn’t become an Italian citizen until he turned 18. On Balotelli’s rollicking Twitter feed (@FinallyMario), which includes photos with everyone from the Pope to his new pet piglet, he tagged President Obama with a happy birthday wish and invited him to Milan’s Aug. 7 game in Miami.
“I’ve never cared about politics, but I think he is a great man,” says Balotelli, holding court in English back in the hotel. He’s wearing diamond earrings the size of grapes, a trucker hat bearing an African lion and the word king, a scoop-neck T-shirt that shows off his rippling muscles and, this being Florida, jorts. “Obama can be like a new start for everybody,” Balotelli goes on. “Just the fact that he’s black and he’s the first one.
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