When Samuele Papi was young, he often went to the sports arena in Falconara, a small citiy on the Adriatic sea which is not far from Ancona, middle Italy. At that time, Zorzi and Renan and other champions were the idols he looked up to. He played volleyball from the early morning until the afternoon and assisted as ball retriever during A-1 matches. Since Samuele is not very tall, nobody ever imagined him becoming a world star one day. But a few years later, at the age of 21, Julio Velasco brought him to the senior’s national team, which was shortly after he had left the team of Falconara from the second Italian league.
Samuele Papi was only a ballboy during training sessions when he entered the junior national team in 1992. Nonetheless there was always something about “Samu” and one day when he arrived at the gym to train with the national team, somebody changed his nickname: O’fenomeno – following Italian-Brazilian Renen Dal Zotto (Parma) due to his height and his similar way of playing. In that year, O’fenomeno took a quantum leap and before the start of the World Championships in Greece he left the bench to take his position on the court next to his former idols Zorzi, Giani and Gardini. Italy found a new star, 21-year-old Samuele Papi.
Anytime somebody asks him his height, he only smiles and says: ‘1.91m.’ In reality he is only 1.89m, but as he is a star now, he jokes and laughs about it. Being 30 years of age, he has already won a lot of titles with the clubs he played for (currently Sisley TREVISO) and, of course, with the Italian national team, too. Now that he is a veteran in Montali’s band, he is no longer the only one the girls ask for anymore: “In Italy there are some guys who are more successful than me with young women. I have served my time.”
He prefers peace to noise, loves volleyball, fast cars and reading car magazines. However, he has also dark periods in his career. Playing in Cuneo, for example, he faced several serious injuries. Samuele Papi had already thought about quitting volleyball, but eventually he found his own way and came back even stronger than before. Being the number one in Italy, some people still think that he is lazy due to his slow actions. However, this is not true: he is a calm man – and a big champion.
