I hereby declare this Discovery Bay golf buggy key party open
He may be stand five foot nothing in his tartan socks, but Brian Stevenson has been a major player in the realm of highly liquid sport-related institutions in Hong Kong since the turn of the millennium.
Since retiring from his day job as a partner at accounting giant Ernst and Young in 1999, the Wee Yin has kept himself busy with his presidency of the Hong Kong Rugby Union (formerly Hong Kong Rugby Football Union: are they finally trying to distance themselves from the yobbos' game?) - where he celebrates 15 years at the helm this year.
More or less concurrently, he put in a decade and a half on the Board of the gambling monopoly cum tail-that-wags-the-government-dog that calls itself the Hong Kong Jockey Club, rounding that stint off with a four-year term as chairman, taking over the reins from the equally diminutive John Chan Cho Chak.
The Little Yin's replacement as Chairman is Simon Ip Sik On, who was from 1996 until 2004 senior partner of combative legal outfit Johnson Stokes & Master - former stomping ground of Ken Lim and his protegé Mary Jean Reimer.
Given the urbane solicitor's finely-honed networking skills and powerful blend of patriotism and pragmatism, we await developments in respect of the Jockey Club's joint venture on the Mainland with bated breath. The giant equine complex (boasting a racecourse and massive stabling facilities) located north of Guangzhou is till awaiting the green light two years after its scheduled opening, as the PRC Government ums and ahs over just what slice of the gambling pie it will take.
In the meantime, the scourge of organisations with light-aversion disorders, David Webb, has some interesting things to say about both outfits, one article hot off the press in the wake of the alcohol-fuelled Hong Kong Sevens, and the other of more relevance than ever with the value of Jockey Club membership increasing exponentially each year with the steady influx of moneyed Mainlanders and set to go through the roof with the imminent opening of the Conghua centre. Well worth a read.
