SPORTS HISTORIAN ROB RUCK ON SAMOAN CULTURE AND FOOTBALL

How a tropical culture produces NFL superstars

For a century, the United States has exported baseball and basketball around the globe.

It’s had less success with American football, to which denizens of other nations have largely responded, “Erm, thanks, we’ll stick with the kind played with, you know, feet.”

But there’s a notable exception, one that University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck documents in his new book, “Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL.”

It’s the story, painstakingly researched, of how a tiny, remote island in the South Pacific became the world’s single biggest nonmainland source of college and pro-football talent, and that anomaly’s dark side.

Among the best-known players of Samoan descent, of course, is former Pittsburgh Steelers star Troy Polamalu, who retired in 2015. And Mr. Polamalu figures in “Tropic of Football” as leader of a group of Samoan athletes holding a football camp on the island, an account of which is woven throughout.

But Mr. Ruck digs to find the roots of this American territory’s football obsession.

Ironically, it concerns a traditional culture that provided conditions Petri-dish-perfect for fostering a modern sport. Until the mid-20th century, the islands were nearly untouchedby outside forces.

British sailors had brought rugby and cricket — games Samoans made their own — and a sickly Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his last days there.

But it took the U.S. military presence during World War II to introduce a wage economy into Samoa’s subsistence culture of farming, fishing and communally held land. And