Hong Kong failing to fly with the Kai Tak stadium dream

This is the place where imagination takes a joy ride and where dreams are spawned: four rows back of home plate on a ridiculously beautiful afternoon in San Francisco's harbour-front Pacific Bell Park where I'm closer to the batter than Giants third baseman Edgardo Alfonzo.

But while Alfonzo has a glove in his hand, I have a cold beer in mine, not to mention a warm memory in my soul. It was no more than a few months back when Hong Kong's sporting czar Timothy Fok admitted during an interview that it would be a great idea to build a new multi-purpose stadium on the deserted runway of Kai Tak airport.

'I was at a baseball game in San Francisco at Pac Bell Park,' he said, 'and when they hit a ball into the harbour, I thought what a great way of selling this town. You get to showcase the stunning harbour views to the world. Well, we certainly have a harbour worth showcasing, why can't Hong Kong have something like this?'

Why not, indeed. Wouldn't it be sweet if we could uproot this building en masse and put it on fast boat to China? Sure, and since we're particularly ambitious this morning let's kidnap all the wineries and restaurants of the Napa valley and dump them out by Sai Kung before the San Francisco Bay Area wakes up and notices they're gone. Because, frankly, we have a more realistic chance of that happening than we do of seeing a desperately needed stadium built on the shores of Hong Kong harbour.

While Fok's enthusiasm for the project is admirable, his ability to get it done is barely negligible. It's not really his fault; he wants to make things happen for sports in Hong Kong but the government he works for is somewhat distracted right now. For the first time in six years, they are spending almost all of their time trying to save their jobs.

Now don't get me wrong. The sight of all these feckless government sycophants dancing sideways to stay off the chopping block when Beijing starts swinging the axe is endlessly entertaining. In fact, it's probably the best sport we get around here. It just doesn't make for particularly effective governance in Hong Kong.

If Fok was to try and ring up Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa to propose the stadium idea, he would likely get a busy signal for the next millennium or two. Never mind the fact that this is just the type of project that may keep Mr Tung in office, bringing logic to places it has never been before is a useless endeavour.