Ratana Sak | Basketball as a lifeline

It is said that sport has the power to save lives. Ratana Sak had a dark adolescence: he can’t remember a day in his high school years when he didn’t carry a weapon with him for protection. “If it wasn’t for basketball, I can’t say where I would be today,” he says. Story.

Katherine Harvey Pinard
The Press

There are stories that seem implausible as they are both improbable and filled with hope. That of Ratana Sak does not leave its place. The 39-year-old man, who is currently working on setting up the new basketball program at Cégep de Saint-Laurent, took part of his afternoon on December 31 to tell us about it in detail.

This story begins with a necessary introduction to her parents, who fled Cambodia in 1981, after the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. “They lived in slavery for two and a half years,” said Mr. Sak, who was not yet in this world at the time.

His mother and father walked for two days and two nights from Baat Dambang, a town in northern Cambodia, to the Thai border to take refuge there.

“There were so many anti-personnel bombs planted in strategic places,” says Sak. They saw people losing a leg or an arm, children running and exploding. They didn’t have it easy before coming to Canada. »

In Thailand, they were put on a plane that took them to their new life, in Quebec. In the November cold.

“The story they told me was that they looked outside the plane and they wondered why the trees had no leaves,” Mr. Sak recalls smiling. .

A year later, in 1982, our protagonist was born. Ratana grew up in a cramped four-and-a-half-room apartment in Saint-Laurent. He lived there with his three brothers, his parents and his grandmother for 15 years. You read correctly.

“At the time, I couldn’t even tell you that it wasn’t normal to live like this,” he said. But now, when I think about it, I think to myself: oh, my God, there were five of us in one room. I slept with my brother in the same bed for years! »

Getting out of street gangs

On the school benches, it was laborious for little Ratana and his brothers. “We didn’t really have any help from our parents because they didn’t finish school. They almost never went there. »

Basketball came into his life when he was 5 years old. He played there in primary school, then in secondary school. But as a teenager, his focus wasn’t quite on sports. It was because he and his brothers were immersed, “without necessarily wanting to”, in the midst of street gangs, drugs and fights. It was the “ghetto,” says Mr. Sak.

“Want, don’t want, you have to protect yourself. […] I wonder how I managed to survive in all this. I just remember that there were several battles. At one point, at a party we went to, there were several battles and my friend was murdered in front of everyone. »

It was there, at this precise moment, that Ratana Sak realized that he had to “find a way” to get out of this environment.

Basketball was his lifeline. He made new friends among his teammates, went to college and university games. It took him time, and a lot of courage, before he managed to completely leave the dangerous and toxic environment in which he had been evolving for several years.

“At first it was hard to ignore,” he says. […] For some people, coming home unbeaten is normal. But for me, it wasn’t. There was a time when I decided not to take the bus anymore and to walk from home to school because I knew that there were people who didn’t like me because I decided to leave the gang. »

Several people helped him forget about street gangs and everything that happened outside of school and basketball. Of the lot, Akram Sleiman, his coach from high school. “He really helped me find the right path,” recalls Mr. Sak.

The “good way”, the ex-athlete mentions it several times during our interview.

“At one point, I looked at the people who were around me before, and some really didn’t take the right path. One bad decision and I’ll be with them [aujourd’hui]… »

From the “ghetto” to the Cambodian national team

When Ratana Sak entered CEGEP, at Collège Montmorency, street gangs were a thing of the past. He then played for the Citadins of UQAM, before joining the defunct Montreal Sasquatch in the Premier Basketball League.

At the age of 30, in 2013, the Cambodia national team coach offered him to join the club. “I didn’t say no, or yes,” he recalls. I said, ‘OK, tell me where I have to go and I’ll be there.’ »

There, he had the opportunity to visit his parents’ country of origin for the first time and to meet several members of his extended family there. For seven years, he went back and forth between Cambodia, where he was “treated like a king”, and Canada to live from his passion: basketball.

” The first one game that I played [avec l’équipe nationale], I had tears in my eyes,” he recalls.

Today, Ratana Sak lives in L’Île-Perrot. He has three children; two girls and a boy. He shows them where he grew up, tells them about his career and his choices.

“I definitely would like them to play basketball, or just play a sport, whatever it is,” he said. The important thing is that they do something. »

You won’t be surprised to learn that basketball is still a big part of his life to this day. He has been a referee for seven years. He also launched his company in order to set up a software which makes it possible to replace the game sheet by an application and which he plans to implement throughout Quebec.

And, as we said at the beginning of this text, he was recently given the mandate to set up the brand new basketball program at Cégep de Saint-Laurent.

Thanks to basketball and this decision he made seven years ago, Ratana Sak has found the right path. Today, he wants to help young people who could experience situations similar to the one he experienced.

“My goal is really to make young people realize that even if you don’t go to the NBA or to a high level, basketball will take you on a good path. »