Research Catalog

Tropic of football : the long and perilous journey of Samoans to the NFL

Title

Tropic of football : the long and perilous journey of Samoans to the NFL / Rob Ruck.

Author

Ruck, Rob, 1950-

Publication

New York : The New Press, 2018.
©2018

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Book/Text	Use in library	GV939.A1 R83 2018	Off-site

Details

Description

305 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps; 25 cm

Summary

"Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots-high school and youth travel program-are 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 football-their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image-makes 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 Samoa's 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 football's last frontier."--Amazon.com.

Subject

Genre/Form

Biography
Biographies.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-295) and index.

Contents

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.

ISBN

9781620973370
1620973375
9781620973387 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2017059415
40028430904

OCLC

on1004601203
1004601203
SCSB-9122351

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library