Deschutes Public Library

Tropic of football, the long and perilous journey of Samoans to the NFL, Rob Ruck

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-295) and index

collective biography

illustrationsmaps

index present

non fiction

Tropic of football

bibliography

1004601203

Rob Ruck

the long and perilous journey of Samoans to the NFL

Everything thats rousing and distressing about block-and-tackle football is encompassed in Tropic of Football . . . illuminating.y Newsday How a tiny Pacific archipelago is producing more playersfrom Troy Polamalu to Marcus Mariotafor the NFL than anywhere else in the world, by an award-winning sports historian Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass rootshigh school and youth travel programare withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport. Jesse Sapolu, Junior Seau, Troy Polamalu, and Marcus Mariota are among the star players to emerge from the Samoan islands, and more of their brethren suit up every season. The very thing that makes them so good at footballtheir extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-imagemakes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries. Award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck travels to the South Seas to unravel American Samoas complex ties with the United States. He finds an island blighted by obesity, where boys train on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles wearing helmets that should have been discarded long ago, incurring far more neurological damage than their stateside counterparts and haunted by Junior Seau, who committed suicide after a vaunted twenty-year NFL career, unable to live with the demons that resulted from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Tropic of Football is a gripping, bittersweet history of what may be footballs last frontier

God's sweetest work -- The war and America come to Samoa -- Hawaiʻi : the North shore -- Al Lolotai, Charlie Ane, and Bob Apisa -- American Samoa in the 1960s -- Jesse Sapolu, Dick Tomey, and Faʻa Samoa -- Faʻa Kalifonia : Oceanside, California -- Kalifonia dreaming -- Back in Hawaiʻi : where football still matters -- David and Goliath -- The Samoan paradox