Baseball in the Dominican Republic has equal with Football in Samoa

Any reader of The Dominican Baseball Guy and any fan of Major League Baseball undoubtedly knows that baseball rules in the Dominican Republic.  Baseball is the culture in the Dominican Republic.  Kids, adults, men, and women all play the game.  Men want to be professional baseball players and women want to date them.  In very few countries does one sport dominate the culture of the country as it does with baseball in the Dominican Republic.

But in one place there is a sport that influences the national culture just like baseball does in the Dominican Republic, and that is with American Football in American Samoa.  Noted sports historian Rob Ruck tackles the subject of Football in Samoa in his latest book, Fa’a Samoa: So close to God, so far from the United States: American Football in American Samoa and Among the Diaspora. And he will speak on the book this Wednesday at the University of West Virginia.

Ruck has written extensively on baseball in the Dominican Republic, so he knows how a sport can affect the culture of a country.  His book, The Tropic of Baseball, is one of the seminal works on baseball in the Dominican Republic.  The Dominican Baseball Guy has blogged on Rob Ruck and other Dominican baseball books several times previously.

Anyone interested in sports and culture should get this latest work on Samoan Football from Rob Ruck, as well as his previous work The Tropic of Baseball, or any of his work that focuses extensively on sports and cultural history.