Hail Mary Pass

The Washington Post has an interesting article on high school boys on American Samoa hoping to use football as their ticket off the island:

Ne'emia Vitale usually needs only a few minutes to walk home from football practice, following a one-lane street bordered by tin-roof huts and long trails of rotting litter. But today, he stalls.

He kicks up loose gravel with his size 13 flip-flops and shoos the wild dogs and chickens that rove near his feet. After sprinting and tackling for three hours on a field dotted by lava rocks, Ne'emia's Oakland Athletics T-shirt is sodden with sweat and streaks of blood. He chugs tap water out of a used plastic Gatorade bottle, which he picked out of a trash heap a few minutes earlier and rinsed because he had no other container from which to drink.

Ne'emia, 17, stops at a faded blue shack under a handwritten sign that reads "Convenience Mart." Doritos cost 50 cents, and Ne'emia fishes in his pocket. Damn. Only one quarter left from his $1 weekly allowance. Ne'emia buys a small bag of chicken-flavored Bongo chips instead.

Outside, he sits on the curb, shakes perspiration from his curly muddle of long black hair and leans back against a garbage can. From there, he can look to his left and see his family's rusted, two-room house, where six relatives are buried in the front yard. Or he can look right, toward the high school football field, where dozens of Samoan boys have played their way off this island and hundreds more dream of achieving the same.

It's a whole lot easier to escape a dying steel town than it is to get off of a rock in the Pacific, though I don't think we could relate much to All The Right Moves: American Samoa. Still, you have to admire the heart these kids show.