To the rest of the world he may be a superstar but by all accounts Boris Becker is just another foreign face in Hong Kong.
Here for the Marlboro tennis championship, Becker checked into The Excelsior Hotel, Causeway Bay. After whooping it up with a bottle of mineral water at Top of the Town nightclub, he decided to get in some practice on the tennis courts.
On previous visits, management had photographed him and proudly hung his picture on the walls.
But when the player went to the desk this time to book his court the young man in charge asked him to spell his name. He tried valiantly and repeatedly: 'B-E-C-K-E-R'.
After several attempts to make himself understood in an atmosphere of rising tension, the star gave up and pointed to one of the photos beside the desk. 'That is me there!' he declared and stomped away.
A wrong step If you arrived at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for lunch and found a queue for the lifts consisting of maybe 200 people and stretching through the long entrance hall to the door on Chater Road, would anyone really consider you fanatical if you thought of using the stairs? The staff would.
