A new book that’s just been released looks at American Samoans and their journey into the NFL which ultimately is also forcing sports administrators to take another look at the sport itself, especially its safety aspects.
The book, Tropic of Football, is written by Rob Ruck, a history professor at the University of Pittsburg and follows books on the African American and Latino roots of baseball.
According to a review, football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity.
The review goes on to say that football grass roots—high school and youth travel programs—are withering, but Ruck writes that players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport.
The award-winning sports historian traveled to the South Seas to unravel American Samoa’s complex ties with the United States.
He writes about 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 trauma.
*Tropic of Football* has been described as a gripping, bittersweet history of what may be football’s last frontier.
Former 49er Jesse Sapolu said Rob Ruck has connected beautifully how he as a Samoan and a Polynesian football player—in college and in the NFL—represented his culture.
“God and family are first; respect and humility are how you represent your people and your culture. The new millennials through today’s culture of social media have lost that foundation of our identity.
This is a great read for them,” said winner of four Super Bowl rings and co-founder of the Polynesian Football Hall of Fame.
*Tropic of Football* has been described as a fascinating investigation into the role of football in American Samoan culture and the role of Samoans in American football.
The penetrating probe into one of the most intriguing and misunderstood sporting stories of our time should be available on island soon.
