It seems like an all too familiar pattern. Make a fair bit of money in Hong Kong and then feel compelled to get into some sort of vanity investment. Maybe a nightclub, a wine bar, a restaurant or even a boutique selling kinky lingerie. Most end up being bottomless money pits that are lucky to celebrate a one-year anniversary. And you, so business savvy, shake your head and ask; how the hell did that happen?
Philip Morais is not shaking his head these days. Born and raised in Hong Kong of Macanese ancestry, Morais is a successful property developer who is the chairman of Chi Residences. As a youngster in the mid-1950s he remembers having an interest in the New York Yankees dynasty of that day. 'They were not on TV here but I used to read about them in the Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper,' he said. He would play little league baseball with mostly Japanese kids in the shadow of the old Military Hospital at King's Park and the Tin Kwong Road field in Mong Kok.
'Eventually I switched to softball, which was quite popular in Hong Kong,' he says. When his grandmother migrated to San Francisco in 1965 he would often visit and no trip to the city by the bay was complete without a visit to windswept Candlestick Park. 'The first game I ever saw was a Giants game,' he says. 'Those teams had some of the greatest players ever - Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal.'
As more of his family moved to the area he developed an affinity for the Giants and began brokering real estate in Hong Kong with an emphasis on foreign properties, in particular San Francisco. Over the years he would do a few deals with Walter Shorenstein, a billionaire real estate developer renowned as the man who built San Francisco.
'In the early '90s I was selling a building of Walter's to a Taiwanese investor,' Morais said. 'I went to San Francisco to negotiate the deal.' A few days earlier Shorenstein had been recruited by the mayor of San Francisco to keep the Giants in town. Despite having a roster of perennial all-stars, attendance at inhospitable Candlestick Park was abysmal and in 1992, after years of losses, owner Bob Lurie sold the team to a group that was planning to move them to Tampa, Florida.
'I happened to be in his office the day he was putting the Giants deal together to save the team,' said Morais. 'He knew I was a baseball fan and when he asked if I was interested I told him I was in before he could finish the question.' And just like that a real estate broker from Hong Kong now owned 5 per cent of the San Francisco Giants. Well, maybe not quite just like that.
'Had Walter known I was not American he probably would not have made the offer,' said Morais. At the time there were no owners in Major League Baseball (MLB), other than the group with the Toronto Blue Jays, from outside the US. 'MLB did a background check on me and so did the FBI and finally after a year I got clearance to be involved and became the first non-American owner in baseball,' he said. 'I still am today.'