Papajohn was born and raised in Vestavia Hills, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, to a Greek American family.
[1] He graduated from Vestavia Hills High School in 1983 and went on to play for two years at Gulf Coast Community College in Panama City, Florida.
Nicknamed Poppy, Papajohn was an outfielder for Skip Bertman's LSU Tigers.
He was a member of the 1986 Southeastern Conference baseball tournament All-Tournament Team and he, along with teammates Mark Guthrie, Joey Belle, Jeff Reboulet, Jeff Yurtin, Jack Voigt and Barry Manuel, among others, helped LSU make its first College World Series appearance in 1986.
From there he moved on to being a stunt performer in films such as Money Talks and Starship Troopers and acting in films like Predator 2, For Love of the Game, where he plays New York Yankees slugger Sam Tuttle, and Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3, in which he plays Dennis Carradine, the robber that was thought to have killed Uncle Ben with a pistol; Papajohn also makes a cameo appearance as a different character in the film series' reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man.