The Palestinian territories’ first professional basketball player has travelled the world during his career – and wants to bring hope to his homeland

Outside of a gym on the edge of the glowing city, the Palestine’s first professional basketball player is talking about about a dream.



“I am trying to prove to people in my country that I am trying to build something from nothing,” Sani Sakakini says.

That Sakakini has come from Ramallah on the West Bank to play basketball for a living is remarkable. That he’s been able to do it for three seasons in China or fund a trip to the United States to impress European and hopefully NBA scouts is almost unfathomable. He is 26 and really has made this life from nothing.

His homeland is a place torn by decades of conflict. Much of the western world does not recognize Palestine as a state. Hope is a rare commodity. Few children dare to imagine lives in sports. There are few decent gyms or places to train and little support. Those players who do show skill see little future as an athlete. They have no reason to try.

Sakakini could have left, as other local sports stars have, accepting citizenship elsewhere in exchange for an easier path to a professional career. He chose to stay, returning to his family in the four-story home in which he grew up. He kept his citizenship because he wants to show others they can have their dreams too.

He wants to do this not just through his own career but with the Palestinian territories’ basketball team which he has helped to rebuild, recruiting players, pushing for improvements and begging for change. In three years, Palestine have gone from losing by 40 points to neighboring Middle Eastern countries to qualifying for next month’s Asian Championship for the first time in their history.

“He is interested in doing what is the best for everyone,” Palestine’s basketball coach Jerry Steele, a former American college coach will later say. “He hasn’t run off and left his people. He knows where he’s from. He’s been trying to help the people of Palestine and teach them the game. He’s trying to change a culture.”

Sakakini is excited about the Asian Championship. The qualification, which included victories over Syria and Iraq and a narrow loss to regional power Lebanon, is a sign his desire is making an impact on others. At 6ft 9in and 220lbs, he’s a center trapped in a forward’s body, but he has stretched his game to achieve his goals of pulling Palestine into basketball prominence, transforming himself into a shooter, a rebounder, a ball-handler – anything in order to win.

“I love my country,” he says.

He stretches in a chair outside the gymnasium. The gym is located at a high school and is the site of the Korean Basketball League’s tryout and draft. He is at the tryout only because he was invited based on his performance in China where he was the league’s third-leading rebounder two years ago. Since he was already in Las Vegas to take part in camps for European scouts he came to the Korean tryouts, figuring the games would provide good competition and increase his exposure (he played professionally in Lebanon this past season). But he will not stay for the draft. He has a flight home, he wants to prepare for the Asian Championship.

What happens in Vegas ... the strange world of the Korean Basketball League draft Read more

“It’s all been self-made with him,” former University of Minnesota guard Jamal Abu-Shamala, a player Sakakini talked into playing on the Palestine team, will say. “It’s not like he’s had someone saying to him: ‘This is what you are to do.’ He’s very charismatic. When he talks the players listen. I think they see how he’s become.”

****

Sakakini lights up when talking about his basketball life. He describes his transformation from a post player to someone who can drive the lane and dunk. He loves to tell the story of how he hired a trainer last summer in Los Angeles and that trainer put him together with Pau Gasol for a workout. He says he played well against Gasol that day even as the Bulls center towered over him at 7ft.

“He is soooooo tall,” Sakakini says.

But Sakakini is more reticent when it comes to his world away from basketball. He doesn’t talk a great deal about his family or childhood other than to say his father was a basketball coach and that he fell in love with the game while watching the NBA on television, promising to himself that someday he was going to be one of those players on the screen. He played in the Palestinian territories’ club conference, considered by outsiders to be as sophisticated as a YMCA league and got a break as a teenager when a chance came to go to Applied Science University in Jordan and play professionally for Riyadi Aramex in the country’s top division.

Attempts to ask about what it was like growing up surrounded by conflict do not draw a detailed response. Answers to such questions are brief and usually don’t go into more detail beyond: “It was hard.”

“I’m sure his work-ethic is from what he dealt with growing up, but he doesn’t say much about it,” Abu-Shamala says. “It struck me that Sani has found an opportunity in basketball and run with it.”

As Sakakini sits outside the gym in Las Vegas, he chuckles at the irony of living in a part of the West Bank just 30 minutes from Israel’s legendary basketball power, Maccabi Tel Aviv. He would be one of the best players on that team, maybe in the whole Israeli professional league, but neither Maccabi nor any other team in Israel will sign a Palestinian. Geographically, he lives on the borders of Tel Aviv. In reality, he lives in another world.

“It’s funny,” he says.

Then he shrugs.

He does not sound angry. His voice is flat and emotionless. It’s simply recognition of how things are. Had he been born 20 miles away with the same basketball dream he would have had access to good coaches and trainers. He might have played at an American college and maybe been seen by the NBA, instead he was born on the wrong side of the line for opportunity. The endless conflict rages on. Walls keep going up. Basketball can’t break them down.

“I can’t talk for everyone, I can only talk for me, I want to live in peace,” Sakakini says, his one political thought in a half-hour conversation. “This conflict, this fight it’s not for us. I mean if we keep like this we are going to all die. No one’s going to live in 1,000 years, so if you are going to live 60, 70, 80, 90 years just live in peace and go wherever you want and enjoy the life. I’m a peace guy. I’m peaceful, I want everybody to be happy, I want everybody to be OK.”

If only it could be so simple. A few months ago, he says, a sports writer in Israel wrote a column about him. The writer expressed dismay that a player so good was on the West Bank and not in Israel where he could play for the Israeli national team.

“I mean our situation is tough, it’s really tough,” Sakakini says. “I hope we have an open country where we can go and people can come to us. That would make it easier for me – make it easier for everyone. Because sports not only [just] sports. Sports is bigger. People come to watch, people they come and spend money on the players. It’s like a big thing, it’s a business now.”

****

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two teams face off during a basketball match in Bethlehem – the sport is growing in the Palestinian territories. Photograph: Mahmoud illean/Demotix/Corbis

Jerry Steele never meant to coach Palestine. Based in Phoenix, he uses sports to help children in urban neighborhoods through his Christian ministry Make A Difference. A few years ago, he was asked to run clinics in Palestine. While there, a sports official wondered if he would coach Palestine in an upcoming tournament. Steele asked when the tournament started. The man said “next week”.

Steele tried to explain that he couldn’t possibly walk cold onto a team of players he had never met and coach against teams he had never seen. The official didn’t understand. Steele was a basketball coach wasn’t he? They had a team and they needed a coach. Steele refused. The next year, the Palestinian officials asked again. Realizing the team had no leadership and would accomplish nothing if he didn’t accept, Steele said yes.

In many ways, the job was thankless. The team was a mess, with no structure, no organization, ant not even an understanding among most of the players that they needed to practice before they played games. Among the first things Steele demanded upon taking the job was a gym for workouts. After much pleading, he was promised a government gymnasium and given times it would be available for the team’s use. When Steele and the players arrived at the prescribed time, the gym was locked and no one was there.

The Palestinian territories’ basketball program had been stifled by an “Eastern honor-shame” mentality, Steele says. Rather than try and fail, people feel it is better to simply not try. The one player he inherited who rebelled against such thinking was the bearded center who wanted desperately to win. Together they set out to create a real basketball team with Sakakini absorbing the first real coaching he had in his country and Steele leaning on his best player to bring in more talent.

Salakini came hard at Abu-Shamala whose father had been born in Gaza. Having grown up in Minnesota, Abu-Shamala didn’t even know the Palestinian territories had a national team until he played against them during a brief stint with the Jordan team. All he remembered from that game was winning by 50 points.

“Sani said: ‘We will have me and you and we can go from there,’” says Abu-Shamala.

A few more players with Palestinian heritage were found in Canada and slowly Steele has been able to build a team. But change is slow. Facilities are a mess. The local league, where Sakakini has to play point guard, does not challenge good players. Few young people believe basketball can make a difference when they have so little to look forward to.

“It’s not much different than we see with urban kids [in the US],” Steele says. “Something that is taught to kids [in American cities] is that they are victims and since they are victims they are limited in what they are able to achieve. And because they are victims and are limited in what they can achieve they are entitled to have someone help them because they are victimized.

“The Palestinians see themselves as victims, they point the finger at Israel.”

Steele describes himself as “apolitical”. He said he coaches youth football in Israel along with basketball in the Palestinian territories, meaning he is the rare outsider who works on both sides of the wall. He says he wants the Palestinian players to understand they don’t need to feel downtrodden, that they can make something great from the rubble.

“When I got there I said: ‘Let’s not focus on who we hate, what are we going to do with what we have?’”

They did this in May’s Asian Championship qualifier. Before the tournament Steele asked his center to focus on rebounding. Sakakini scored 34 points and had 17 rebounds against Syria and then 35 and 21 in the win over Iraq.

“He carried us,” Abu-Shamala says.

And yet even with this success, with a star player finally drawing international attention, Steele finds change so hard. He has been trying for weeks to convince the sports federation officials to meet for a series of practices before the Asian Championships. The tournament starts on 23 September. So far the officials don’t understand why Palestine needs to practice before a huge competition where the winner gets an Olympic bid.

“I’m telling you this is what Sani is up against,” Steele says. “He’s banging his head against the wall.”

****

Given what existed in the West Bank as Sakakini was growing up – the dysfunction and the lack of a sports ambition – he is an anomaly. How did he do this? How did he turn himself into a professional basketball player, travelling the world, working to make Palestine’s national team respectable? How did he even know what to do?

“I say: [it’s] just pure determination and enough intelligence to know that it wasn’t going to happen if he stayed in Palestine,” Steele says.

As a child, Sakakini used to tell people he was going to become a basketball player. He remembers the response was always the same. Smirks and eye-rolls.

“Everyone was like: ‘Oh yeah, OK,’ because no one played professional basketball in our country so they don’t get too excited about that,” Sakakini says. “I just put it in my mind [to] just keep pushing hard from when I was young.”

He still hopes for the NBA even as his age and the fact he is what Steele and other basketball people call “a tweener” (too short to be a center, too slow to be a forward) make the NBA seem unlikely. His plan is to keep building his basketball credibility in the Asian Championship and whatever professional league he plays in this winter, then return here to Las Vegas next July and play in the NBA’s summer league. He is sure that if he gets into the summer league someone in the NBA will want him.

He’s made it this far, why not?

“I think this is what makes him want to come back,” Steele says, believing that Sakakini understands he can be an inspiration in a place with few role models. “He says to the others: ‘You can be better. This can be done. You can better yourself.’”

Over the phone, the coach sighs.

“That’s a tough nut to crack,” he continues.

Outside the gym in Las Vegas, Sani Sakakini stands up. The Korean tryouts are over for him. He has a flight. It is time to go home now. He has found a personal trainer in the West Bank, someone who lived on the outside who has come back, like him. The trainer is helping him in ways no one ever could in Palestine before. The workouts are intense. He likes that.

“For me I play for fun and I play to win,” he says. “I mean it’s a motivation for myself that I have to accomplish something and I’m not going to be done until I do this.”

Those who know Sakakini will probably smile at these words.

He’s already done more than a boy in Ramallah with a basketball dream could ever hope to achieve.



• This article was amended on 4 August to correct that Jerry Steele did not coach at Guilford and High Point.