Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game

When I tell people that my research focuses on American Sāmoa, I am usually met with one of three questions: “What?” “where?” or “you mean, the football players?” While American Sāmoa has been a US territory for more than a century, many (and perhaps most) Americans cannot locate it on a map, let alone articulate aspects of its history, culture, or sociopolitical relationship to the United States. However, many know the names of Troy Polamalu, Tua Tagovailoa, Manti Te'o, or other football players of Samoan ancestry.Lisa Uperesa's Gridiron Capital is founded upon this point. In her introduction, the author notes that “the islands [of American Sāmoa] enter the US national imaginary primarily through gridiron football,” and she argues that this “hypervisibility . . . obscures a century of US imperialism and the reality of asymmetrical integration in the global economy, as well as a clear view of migration pathways that brought [Samoan] players to American fields” (21). Illuminating these pathways within the broader historical and contemporary contexts of culture, migration, economics, and sport forms the core aim of Gridiron Capital. To meet this aim, Uperesa draws from theories and methodologies in ethnography, sociology, history, and critical Indigenous studies, along with her own personal experience, thereby illuminating the voices of football players, coaches, and others engaged with the sport in American Sāmoa and beyond.In her first chapter, the author shows how football provides a “field of opportunity” for young men in American Sāmoa, who view the sport as a vehicle to reaching “the good life” in the United States, either through success in the highly lucrative football business or through the education and connections that playing high school, college, and potentially professional football can bring (38). The chapter also explores how gridiron football serves as a representation of “the new and the modern” in American Sāmoa, and how this perception is shaped by the aforementioned asymmetrical relationship between the territory and the “mainland” (39).In her second chapter, Uperesa shows how football became adopted and adapted within the fa‘asāmoa, or “the Samoan way,” which encompasses familial and village relationships, obligations, duties, and expectations. Chief among these expectations is tautua, or service, whereby individuals are expected to serve their family or village. Early on in the book, Uperesa frames part of her argument with Bourdieu's concept of capital to show how playing and excelling in football can further one's social and economic capital (in the form of scholarships, salaries, and connections), which in turn enhance one's cultural capital (in the form of prestige). In this particular chapter, Uperesa takes the important step of applying this concept to a Samoan-specific context, underscoring how these accrued forms of capital are far less important on an individual level than they are on a familial or village level. Samoan football players, the author argues, primarily view football “as a pathway that [provides] an opportunity to serve the family” (65).This is why, Uperesa shows, Samoan football players are willing to take grueling and difficult pathways themselves, often leaving behind their home and family, adjusting to new locations and ways of life, and pushing their bodies to (and sometimes beyond) their limits. In her third chapter, Uperesa shows how these sacrifices are made in the face of stigma and prejudice shaped by centuries of depictions in popular media that portray Sāmoa as a remote paradise with the “‘perfect conditions to breed players,’” and Samoans themselves as “gifted with size, quick feet, and cultural conditioning to respect authority” (71). Uperesa explores the implications of these tropes, including how young Samoans internalize and act upon them. In one example, Uperesa shows how young Samoans who do not play football or other sports act upon the feeling that their education and economic opportunities are either limited or altogether nonexistent.Sport historians will likely gravitate toward Uperesa's archival and oral historical research tracing the origins of the “Polynesian Pipeline,” an “elaborate network . . . intended to connect Pacific communities to the college football system,” which began with “a trickle in the 1930s and 1940s” before contributing to the presence of “sixty-two NFL players of Pacific Islander heritage and nearly five-hundred in NCAA Division I programs” as of 2015, with Samoans comprising the majority (8, 31). Sport historians will also appreciate the author's treatment of the gradual expansion of the NFL, NCAA football, and sports media and the role of these institutions and industries in expanding the Polynesian Pipeline along with them as more and more Samoans were drawn to the gridiron game. But Uperesa's informed research and skillful writing allows Gridiron Capital to remain both relevant and accessible to a wide range of readers both within and outside of academia and sport studies, and will likely enable these readers to place the Samoan names they know so well, other names they may not, and perhaps even American Sāmoa itself into appropriate and nuanced historical and contemporary contexts.