Sani Sakakini (left) comes from Ramallah on the West Bank and plays basketball for a living.

By Les Carpenter, The Guardian/Las Vegas

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 recognise 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 neighbouring 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.

Self-made
“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.
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.”
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.