The Beatles were playing at the Princess Theatre in Tsim Sha Tsui on June 9, 1964. It didn't matter to Sarinder Dillon, who had already been through a hard day's night filling the buckets in his parents' flat in North Point, so there would be water to have a wash when he returned from another strenuous training session with the Hong Kong hockey team.
Hong Kong was in the grip of a severe drought. The reservoirs were dry and, for the lucky ones, pipe-borne water was available for only four hours a day on alternate days. Things got so bad the water cut sometimes lasted two whole days, or even three or four. But Dillon didn't mind.
Only a few days before, he and his teammates in the national squad had been told they were going to the Olympics in Tokyo. It was raining joy as the players wildly celebrated.
Since Hong Kong made its Olympics debut in 1952, no team had ever represented the city at the Games, and no other team since 1964 have competed at the quadrennial sporting extravaganza.
'We were the first team sport from Hong Kong to go to the Olympics, and we still are the only ones,' said Dillon, who today is the president of the Hong Kong Hockey Association. While proud on the one hand, he is also sad that no other team sport has been able to travel the Olympian road in the past 48 years. And as far as hockey is concerned, he thinks it will never happen again.
In 1964, Hong Kong were lucky. It all began two years before when they were in the limelight after defeating South Korea at the Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Koreans, who were bronze medallists at the 1958 regional showpiece, had been expected to win.