The Hong Kong Sevens is the city-state’s biggest annual sporting party that showcases world class rugby, creative and entertaining atmosphere in the stands, that have become an ever- growing tourist magnet, attracting tourists from all over the world – even non-rugby playing countries — who just come to partake in the festive atmosphere and have fun.
Sadly, the same cannot be said about the “professional” entertainment that is provided during the Sevens.
Part of the humorous fun at this years’ Reinventville Sevens, was the amateurish entertainment provided by reinvented David Hasselhoff. To his credit, he picked the right place to reinvent himself. Also to his credit are the TV series Knight Rider and Bay Watch, otherwise known as Babe Watch – the most viewed TV series in the world to date — in which he played starring roles.
For a city that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on Harbour Fest in 2004, after SARS, in its effort to promote, re-invent and re-energize Hong Kong — to “Start Me Up” — in the words of Mike Jagger and the Strolling Bones that pocketed the lion’s share of the money, the amateurish entertainment is scandalous.
Harbour Fest, like the Sevens entertainment, was managed by amateurs. The Hong Kong Government and the American Chamber of Commerce. What do either know about staging, managing or promoting world class events? Nothing. Likewise, what does the Hong Kong Rugby Union know about staging world class professional entertainment?
The promotion of Hong Kong by government bureaucrats, chambers of commerce and sporting clubs – all amateurs when it comes to managing and promoting world class entertainment — is a relic of British colonialism that continuous to be presumptively usurped.
Hong Kong has some of the best performing artists, agents, managers and promoters in Asia, that know and work with their world renowned counterparts.
Why then does the Hong Kong Government and its traditional colonial clubs, business elites, sponsors and “wannabe” entertainment promoters insist on – and continue to – impose their amateurish knowledge and experience at the expense of the immense wasted local talent – and worldwide guffaws?
Back to David Hasselhoff. He is to be praised and complimented for repeatedly re-inventing himself – something Hong Kong and Hongkongers do repeatedly – and hopefully will continue to. But headline entertainer with opening act Bjorn singing cover songs? C’mon, surely Reinventville can do better.
For a city that is part of China, a country that puts on spectacular entertainment during world and regional sporting events – the 2008 Olympic opening and closing ceremonies being a prime example — I am at a loss to understand the extreme schism, yet totally get why as a result, Hongkongers prefer Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese music genres, tastes and styles, instead of their own traditional Canto Pop-Rock.
Hong Kong has lost its cutting edge entertainment mojo when it comes to music, movies and entertainment in general. Asia’s World Entertainment City that gave the world Canto Pop extravaganzas, Bruce Lee and the pioneering free-to-air TV station ATV, appear to have died a slow death and easily given up their rightful place as Asia’s media capital to amateurs and other regional capitals.
The amateur staging, lighting, sound and emptiness of the vast vacant and abandoned football pitch around a stage smaller than can be found in many nightclubs in Hong Kong, fronted by dancing stewardesses, muffled and drowned out by the boisterous rugby fans, is a world-class embarrassment.
Surely the HKRU and its sponsors can afford to stage world class entertainment alongside the world class rugby, like other sporting clubs that put on annual world class sporting-parties do. The Super Bowl in America and World Cup Soccer wherever it is played in the world being the Gold Standards!
As a Sevens fan who has been going to the annual festivity since the early 80’s, and having written about the spectacle in one of my books, I commend the HKRU for the ever-increasing number of tries it has scored each year on the rugby pitch and the stands since 1976 when the event was launched, making the 7s the world class sporting event it is.
Isn’t it time the Club and the 7s sponsors now focus on the entertainment the same way they do with rugby?
A Canto-Rock extravaganza ala Coachella Music Festival in California, and Austin City Limits in Texas, that is the opening act of the Sevens, with Hong Kong’s own home grown talent with some big name foreign acts that are also staged and choreographed as part of the Sevens across the entire football pitch. A show that enhances the value of the Hong Kong Sevens and is sold to all media worldwide – just like the Super Bowl and World Cup are.
A show that can be staged in Hong Kong and promoted worldwide, that can go on the road on China’s new Silk Roads marketing Reinventville.
The author is a strategic consultant, co-founder of the Pets Central network of veterinary hospitals and author of the Custom Maid series of books.