IF NOT FOR the Olympic Mountains shimmering in the distance, it might be hard to place the scene that unfolds on a grassy field at Seattle’s Jefferson Park most Saturdays in spring and summer.
It could almost be the British countryside, with dozens of people engaged in a sport that looks a lot like cricket. But there’s a distinctly Polynesian flair to the proceedings.
The players are dressed in colorful wraparounds, not prim British whites. Food booths offer boiled green bananas, Spam sushi and poi drinks. Pounding music blasts from speakers while an emcee narrates the action with the fervor of a World Cup telecaster.
Welcome to kirikiti, Samoa’s version of England’s quintessential sport.
Like many nations that fell under the thumb of colonial powers, Samoa embraced some aspects of the interlopers’ culture — cricket among them. But the islanders put a spin on the game that’s uniquely their own. A pastime that Victorian-era missionaries hoped would instill British discipline and decorum was transformed into a joyous celebration and embodiment of fa’a Samoa — the Samoan Way.
“It’s a little piece of home,” says Roshina Wilson Kerisiano, watching from the sidelines on a cool Saturday morning before the sun burned through the clouds. Kerisiano and her extended family have been involved in the Seattle cricket league for almost 20 years, and she recently joined the leadership of the nonprofit United Samoan Organization, which sponsors the matches.
For the far-flung Samoan diaspora in the United States — which outnumbers the population of American Samoa — the game provides a link to their heritage, a way to school American-born youth in traditional values and a sense of connection, Kerisiano explains. “It’s the one sport we have here that brings the community together.”
About 22,000 people of Samoan descent live in Washington, the third-highest number in the country after California and Hawaii. Teams from Olympia, Puyallup, Federal Way and other Puget Sound-area communities compete in Seattle’s league from May to mid-August.
For many Samoans, the passion for kirikiti burns as hot as the football fever (meaning soccer, of course) that grips much of the world. The game is played in New Zealand, Australia, California — anywhere large concentrations of Samoans are found. One local player lives in Alaska but flies to Seattle every Friday for the matches.
“In Samoa, it’s: ‘After God, cricket,’ ” says Milton Ofoia, waiting for his team to take the field. He laughs, but he’s only half-joking. Ofoia’s father was a famous cricketer back home, and Ofoia and his wife both play in a Tacoma league as well as Seattle’s. The local matches might be lively by U.S. standards, but they’re tame compared to those back in the islands, he says.
“The whole village comes out and watches the games. From six in the morning, it’s entirely packed so you can’t even see the ball.”
The crowds at Jefferson Park aren’t that dense, but hundreds of people gather for the games, including members of the five men’s teams and two women’s teams and their families and friends. A group of adults shepherds the little kids, sometimes keeping them busy with crafts or cricket lessons. Families and team boosters set up lawn chairs and canopies or simply lounge on blankets. Others come early to erect tents, assemble outdoor kitchens and churn out heaping plates of food for sale.
With four games every Saturday, each lasting two hours or more, it’s like a daylong picnic or family reunion.
“We come in the morning, and we leave when it’s dark,” says Viliamu Manusavii Pini. “It’s crazy.”
Bats are unique, too. Made from lightweight tropical wood, they’re longer and have three sides, with a curved hitting surface that makes it tough to predict in which direction the ball will fly. Players embellish their bats with lightning bolts, flames or team colors and wrap the grips with twine-like fiber.
All ages are welcome. One of Seattle’s youngest players is 10; the oldest is 70-year-old Tafiau Sio, who plays on the same team as her daughter and keeps an eye on her granddaughter between games.
“This is the sport that most people from Samoa grew up with,” Pini says. “Basically, the rules we set up for Samoan cricket reflect our traditional way of life.”
THAT’S NOT WHAT missionaries had in mind when they encouraged Samoans to embrace England’s “Imperial Game” starting in the late 1800s, says Benjamin Sacks, a historian at the University of Western Australia. An avid cricket fan, Sacks was so intrigued by the way the islanders turned the colonists’ game on its head that he made it the subject of his doctoral dissertation.
The British viewed cricket as a “rational” sport that fostered English values like order and discipline and “manly moral ideals,” Sacks writes. They hoped cricket would supplant traditional Samoan recreations, like wild, weekslong javelin-throwing contests accompanied by revelry and sensual dancing that sent 19th-century Evangelicals scrambling for the smelling salts. But Samoans, famed for what one official called their “peculiar genius for modification,” had other ideas.
“ … [T]he quiet and serious English style did not suit them long,” wrote William Churchwald, British consul to the islands from 1882 to 1885. “One by one, innovations of their own and Tongan manufacture crept into the game, until soon nothing remained of cricket, pur et simple, but the practice of one man bowling a ball to another man trying to hit it.”
It could almost be the British countryside, with dozens of people engaged in a sport that looks a lot like cricket. But there’s a distinctly Polynesian flair to the proceedings.
The players are dressed in colorful wraparounds, not prim British whites. Food booths offer boiled green bananas, Spam sushi and poi drinks. Pounding music blasts from speakers while an emcee narrates the action with the fervor of a World Cup telecaster.
Welcome to kirikiti, Samoa’s version of England’s quintessential sport.
Like many nations that fell under the thumb of colonial powers, Samoa embraced some aspects of the interlopers’ culture — cricket among them. But the islanders put a spin on the game that’s uniquely their own. A pastime that Victorian-era missionaries hoped would instill British discipline and decorum was transformed into a joyous celebration and embodiment of fa’a Samoa — the Samoan Way.
“It’s a little piece of home,” says Roshina Wilson Kerisiano, watching from the sidelines on a cool Saturday morning before the sun burned through the clouds. Kerisiano and her extended family have been involved in the Seattle cricket league for almost 20 years, and she recently joined the leadership of the nonprofit United Samoan Organization, which sponsors the matches.
For the far-flung Samoan diaspora in the United States — which outnumbers the population of American Samoa — the game provides a link to their heritage, a way to school American-born youth in traditional values and a sense of connection, Kerisiano explains. “It’s the one sport we have here that brings the community together.”