Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award
"Everything that's rousing and distressing about block-and-tackle
football is encompassed in Tropic of Football. . . illuminating."
--Newsday
How a tiny Pacific archipelago is producing more players--from Troy
Polamalu to Marcus Mariota--for 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 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.
