I watched In Football We Trust back when it was on PBS. It follows a number of teenage Pacific Islanders — Samoans and Tongans — in Utah, of all places, where they play football. According to the opening, Polynesians are 28 times as likely to play in the NFL as other ethnicities:
The boys are mistaken for “big Mexicans” by the locals. As teenagers, they simply look fairly big and fairly strong, but they’re also fast, tough, and aggressive. One (estranged) dad notes that he and his family have “no fuse” — which explains why all the uncles are in, or just out of, prison. And those uncles aren’t fairly big; they’re all stereotypically Samoan-big.
It looks like almost all the Polynesian boys have the physical attributes to play college football, but almost none of them can do their school work and stay out of trouble. A few minutes in, one of the boys recounts his coach’s warning that they have all the talent in the world, “but hardly any of us do good, because we’re more into helping out our family.”
By the end, one of the boys finds out he has powered through a ruptured MCL, then a damaged meniscus, and then a ruptured ACL, in his final season (ever).
There were once white races like this. The Polynesians rank among the last great warrior races.
Yep, lack of impulse control. Guaranteed failure.
“There were once white races like this. The Polynesians rank among the last great warrior races.”
lol. lmao, even.
The Polynesians were conquered relatively quickly wherever they were encountered, and the New Zealand Wars of the mid-19th century were as lopsided and as indolent as such things get.
The “great warrior races” label is one that the English habitually bestow upon races they’ve conquered and subjugated, as a sort of face-saving measure or consolation prize. (And in the hopes that it gets them on-side, see e.g. the Gurkhas.) It’s kayfabe; it’s not real; if anything those “warrior races” are the opposite: Losers, victims, the defeated, with nothing left but their wounded pride.
In truth, the warrior race of the region is the Papuan. You could have a chad Papuan vs. virgin Polynesian meme. The Papuans of the highlands were usually considered too dangerous, and too numerous, to bother with — and whereas the Polynesians have all submitted to modern life, Papuans still live barefoot in the world’s wildest jungle.