Rob Ruck - Made Local Author

In Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL, award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck explains how a tiny Pacific archipelago produces more players for the NFL than anywhere else and the struggles of their journey. Tropic of Football unravels American Samoa’s complex ties with the United States. It explores an island, where boys train on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles, wearing helmets that should have been discarded long ago and moves from the Samoan archipelago to Samoan outposts in Hawai’i and California where holding on to fa`a Samoa is an existential challenge.