Kaufusi family starting to resemble a small football army

Petelo and Eveline Kaufusi never knew how they'd afford to pay for college and advance the lives of their children when they migrated from the tiny island of Tonga to Salt Lake City in 1972.

The Kaufusis had just finished selling their pigs and chickens and served a two-year mission for the LDS Church in Tonga, and their two oldest sons, Steve and Rich, were growing into their big bodies.

Eveline's sister, Makalita, immigrated to the U.S. and lived with an LDS family in Utah, where she graduated from the University of Utah and worked at U.S. Immigration. With Makalita's help with papers, Petelo and Eveline brought their family to Utah.

To make the challenge more daunting, Eveline's mother, Losaline, died, and rather than give her four remaining children up for adoption, Eveline decided to take them and raise them, too, and they joined in the trek to the Beehive State.

Steve, who never played much high school football, ended up playing at Dixie College and his first offer, from UNLV, opened his eyes. He could get a college degree by playing football. He called home and told his parents "this is the way — get all those kids playing football right now."

They did.

Today, Steve's oldest son, Bronson, is a 6-foot-8, 240 pound defensive end and tight end at Timpview High, who is ranked among the top three high school players in Scout.com's Northwest Fab 50 for the class of 2010.

At the high school level, Bronson is easily the most-hyped Kaufusi in two generations, a lineage that includes a bevy of outstanding football players from BYU, Utah, Michigan State, Oregon and Ball State.

It's a remarkable story of a family and football, a game Petelo had never seen before he arrived in the United States, packing a family that, in time, would resemble a small army.

His oldest, Steve, redshirted on that 1985 team and was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1988 before coaching at Utah and his current position as the defensive line coach at BYU.

Rich Kaufusi followed Steve to Dixie, then to BYU where he played defensive end on that team that beat defending national champion Miami in Provo and wrote a book about it after signing as a free agent with San Diego.

Brothers Jason, Jeff, Doug and Henry all played at Utah under Ron McBride, where they were a foundation for Utah's return as conference title contender. Pasa Tuku'afu, one of the boys taken in by the Kaufusis, also played for the Utes.