Destiny Vaeao: A Warrior By Birth
By
Josh Paunil, Philly Magazine
Destiny Vaeao doesn’t remember much. He was little when it happened, just 9-years-old, so he doesn’t offer many words during a conversation in a corner office inside the NovaCare Complex after a recent training camp practice. His voice is so quiet the words barely make it out of his mouth.
He’s asked about his father, Tepatasi, and what happened on October 24, 2003 in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Tepatasi was known for being a quiet giant, who, at 6-3, 320 pounds, was an inch shorter and 30 pounds heavier than his youngest son on this day. Tepatasi not only kept his words to himself, but his pain as well, which he had much of.
When Tepatasi was in the seventh grade, he was working on a plantation one day with his father to provide food for his family. They liked to grow taros, bananas, and grapefruit, and they had to maneuver across varying terrain as they worked on the land. That’s how Tepatasi found himself atop a tall palm tree, before tumbling down dozens of feet to the ground. He survived, but the incident prompted a decades-long battle against seizures, which sometimes occurred as frequently as every 30 minutes.
Still, three decades later, Tepatasi was back on the plantation, doing what he always did to feed his wife and five children. But on this one Friday 13 years ago, he went out to the plantation and worked by himself. Suddenly, he suffered a seizure and died with no one around to help him.
He was 41-years-old.
WHEN DESTINY WAS IN SCHOOL as a boy, others sometimes mocked his name. His middle name, Lalotoa, or “Toa” as his family calls him, means warrior, and classmates sometimes took aim at that.
“What kind of name is Destiny Toa? Like Destiny Warrior?” Moana, Destiny’s sister, recalls. “But it’s ironic now.”
It’s ironic because Toa evolved from a name to an expectation to a reality. A couple of years after his father’s death, Destiny, before he even became a teenager, had to become the man of the house as his brothers graduated from high school and were no longer around.
Destiny, the youngest of the five siblings, had the least amount of time with his father, but he somehow ended up being the most like his Dad. The two are described in similar terms: humble, even-keeled people who speak with their actions, not their words.
Destiny still proudly tells his family how he looks — and eats — just like his father. The one difference? Tepatasi never came back empty-handed when he went fishing, but Deansol, the second-oldest sibling, jokes now that Destiny never catches anything.
“It was pretty bad. He always hung out with my dad, so it was tough for him when he passed away. He had no father figure,” Deansol says. “The thing about him, nobody was there with him. He just likes to be alone. He likes to do stuff by himself. He doesn’t like to be surrounded by people. He’s just a quiet kid. That’s why he’s like that.”
Destiny’s life was already consumed by doing chores around the plantation, going to school and going to church. But then he had to take on more responsibility, such as looking after buses for his uncle’s transportation company.
Life in American Samoa is tough enough as it currently is. The unemployment rate has hovered around 30 percent, and the average per capita income is just $8,000. About 54,000 people live in the United States territory, which is so far away from America that the capital, Pago Pago, is twice as close to Sydney, Australia than it is to Los Angeles.
“Most families look to find ways to get out of there,” says Desmond, the middle child. “Just growing up, it was rough. It’s very limited for opportunities. There’s stuff that surrounds you that’s tempting that you can easily get involved in. With not very much as a child, you could do a lot of dumb things. If you don’t have much, you’re going to go out and look for other people’s stuff. There are a lot of kids out there that just steal from other families.”
But when you’re competing with tens of thousands of other people to find a way out while few opportunities exist, most people find themselves stuck. Many work on plantations at home, enlist in the military or are employed by StarKist.
Destiny, meanwhile, turned to the most popular alternative: football.
DESTINY SAT IN THE GYMNASIUM at Tafuna High School as a former NFL player from the islands discussed his journey from American Samoa to the league. While he talked, one thought looped in Destiny’s head: This is how I can help my family.
According to a 60 Minutes report, a boy born to Samoan parents is 56 times more likely to reach the NFL than any other kid in America, so football was always on Destiny’s radar. He started playing soccer when he was 3-years-old, and later added rugby, volleyball and football, the sport each of his three brothers played at the same high school, to the mix.
But when he saw these successful professional football players first hand and what the NFL did for them, it lit a fire under him even more.
“Football is your meal ticket,” Deansol says. “It’s something that can get them away. If there’s no football back home, there’s nothing they can do. You can’t come out to the United States just to come out here and live here thinking you can get a job and live with other people. That was something we could look for: ‘Okay, when we graduate from high school, we got something. At least we can play football and get a scholarship.’”
Because the economy is so weak, the resources — even for football — are extremely limited. Destiny’s siblings made it a point to buy their youngest brother equipment when they could so he didn’t encounter the same challenges they did. Still, early in Destiny’s high school career, he recalls having to search for shoe laces to tie his shoulder pads together.
Desmond remembers how his team shared helmets because they didn’t have enough (“We would run off the field and toss our helmet to somebody else,” he says), while Deansol can still picture how the football fields were often a mix of grass, gravel and even broken glass.
“When you were done with practice, your parents were like, ‘What the hell? What happened to you?’ You’re all beat up,” Deansol says.
“To tell you the truth, it’s frightening,” said Joe Salave’a, a former NFL player from American Samoa who now recruits the islands as Washington State’s defensive line coach. “If I was a high school official sporting event manager, it’d probably be one of those unhealthy, unsafe places to practice on, but they still do. That’s all the kids have down there, but I think those are things that work toward shaping the outlook of a kid like Destiny.”
The Samoa News crew made sure the happy couple celebrated with a ‘taualuga’ — to bring good luck and prosperity to their life’s journey.
