The Standing Appointment

Fifty actors. One night a week. No cameras.

The first thing members mention is the noise. Not the thwock of ball on strings — though that is there, a steady percussion beneath everything — but the talking. The laughing. The insults, delivered with the particular affection that exists only between people who have known each other far too long to be polite.

A TEAM practises on Tuesday nights at the Kowloon Tsai Tennis Centre. There are, by some counts, more than fifty of them now. Actors, mostly. A few behind-the-scenes types who can actually play. They arrive in waves, some still in the clothes they wore to set, carrying racket bags like briefcases. They greet each other the way people do when the greeting isn't for show: a nod, a joke, a hand on the shoulder.

And then there is Cindy Lee.

Members describe her standing at the net, clipboard in one hand, a whistle around her neck that she almost never uses. She is not always playing. Often she is watching — not in the way a coach watches, though she is that too, but in the way a host watches a party she has spent years assembling. She sees who is tired. She sees who is pretending not to be.

"She's not teaching us how to play tennis," one member says. "She's teaching us how to play together."

It is, on its face, an absurd thing to build. A tennis league for actors. In Hong Kong. A city where everyone is busy, where time is the only currency that matters, where the idea of fifty performers carving out a weekly slot for anything — let alone a sport most of them are mediocre at — sounds less like a hobby than a logistical fever dream.

And yet they keep turning up. Tuesday after Tuesday. Swinging and missing and laughing about it.The origin story, as these things often are, is a series of accidents that only look inevitable in retrospect.

Hugo Wong tells it like this: he and Tony Hung had played tennis together years ago, back in the 2000s, with a rotating cast of industry friends. Then life happened. Work happened. Hung put down his racket for so long it might as well have been lost. The group scattered.

Then: a charity exhibition match. Wong and Hung were invited. They started hitting again. And at some larger tournament, somewhere in the city, they ran into Cindy Lee. They hadn't played together in years. Someone said the thing that people always say: we should do this more often.This time, they meant it.

Four of them turned up for the first practice — Wong, Hung, Lee, Cheng Chi-sing — and the heat was not merciful. Hong Kong in summer does not negotiate. It simply presses, and you either play through it or you don't. They played.

"We didn't have a first member," Wong says, "because we were four founders." He pauses. "But we had a lot of friends who played. When they heard we were organising something, they were — " he searches for the phrase " — one call, a hundred answers."

"A" for Artist. "A" for the highest rank in competitive tennis. One letter, two meanings. The name was settled quickly, and nobody has argued about it since.

What no one says out loud — because it doesn't need saying — is that the tennis is the easy part. The hard part, the thing that keeps fifty people coming back on a Tuesday night when they should be sleeping, happens afterwards. In Kowloon City. Over food.

The president of A TEAM is Roger Kwok. He is, by any measure, one of the most recognisable actors in Hong Kong — a man who has been on television screens for decades, who has won the awards, who has the kind of face that makes people stop on the street.

He is also, it turns out, a man who has been thinking about what it means to be an actor in a city that consumes them.

"There's a kind of distance," he says, when I ask him about the group's mission — the one about bridging artists and society. "People see you on screen and they think they know you. But they don't. They know a character. They know a performance."

Tennis, he suggests, is the opposite of performance. You can't fake a serve. You can't act your way through a rally. You either hit the ball or you don't. "When we go somewhere — when we went to Jiangmen, for example — we're not there as actors. We're there as people who play tennis. And the people we meet, they're not meeting a celebrity. They're meeting someone who is just as bad at this as they are." He laughs. "Or just as good."

The Jiangmen trip, he says, surprised him. He had expected a certain kind of charity event — the kind with a ribbon-cutting, a photo op, a polite exchange of gifts. What he found was something else.

"We were communicating," he says. "Really communicating. About culture, about how we live, about what we enjoy. The distance between us — it just disappeared."

He pauses. "I didn't expect that. I didn't expect to go that far."

On the question of charity — the question that every celebrity organisation faces, the one that hovers over every photo op and every press release — Kwok is uncharacteristically blunt.

"Everyone in A TEAM has a price," he says. "When we do commercial events, we charge. That's work. But when we do charity — " He shakes his head. "We don't charge. We don't care what other people are charging. We just do it."

He knows what people assume: that charity is a transaction, that the famous trade their time for goodwill and call it generosity. He doesn't bother arguing. "There's nothing material in it for us," he says. "What we get is — " a pause " — satisfaction. The feeling of being part of something. The happiness of the group." It is not, he admits, a very glamorous answer. But it is the true one.

What A TEAM has, more than anything, is logistics. Fifty members. A weekly practice. Two or three courts, two or three hours, in the evening, when everyone is tired and the city is finally slowing down. Finding that much court time in Hong Kong is not a small thing. Court usage is high. Prime evening slots are gold.

They started with nothing — members booking private courts wherever they could, trading favours, making do. Then the Hong Kong Tennis Association stepped in. Now they have a home base: the Kowloon Tsai Tennis Centre, with coaches who volunteer their time to teach the beginners.

"We were lucky," Wong says. He says this more than once. "We were very lucky."

But luck, in this case, is another word for persistence. For the willingness to keep asking, to keep organising, to keep showing up even when the schedule is impossible and the weather is terrible and the whole thing feels like a hobby that got out of hand.

All of that — the courts, the schedules, the favours, the persistence — is only the machinery. What the members actually talk about, when they talk about A TEAM, happens after the tennis is over. It begins the same way every time. Past ten, and the hunger arrives — not the polite kind that waits to be acknowledged, but the kind that simply sits down at the table and expects to be fed.

A few of them drive to Kowloon City, where the shutters are still up and the tables are still crowded, and they order too much food and stay longer than they intended. "Everyone could speak from the heart," Kwok says. He says it plainly, without embellishment. "Say whatever they wanted."

Not work, notably. Not the industry, not the schedules, not the auditions. They talk about sports, about learning, about nothing in particular. Kwok compares it to filming, where even the company is a form of labour — everyone focused, everyone aware of the clock, everyone still, in some sense, on.

"This was different," he says. "When you're filming, you're always aware of the clock. Someone's always watching. Even when it's fun, it's still work." He stops. "This wasn't. This was just — being together. I remember it very clearly." On the court they are still actors. At the table, past eleven, with too much food and no cameras, they are just people who are tired and happy and in no hurry to go home.

The future, according to Kwok, is not something he thinks about much.

"I never thought about where it would go," he says. "Too many ideas can get in the way of the team."

What he believes in, instead, is the people around him. He names them: Cindy Lee, Tony Hung, Hugo Wong, Cheng Chi-sing. "They're all very capable," he says. "They've put so much into this." With them, he believes A TEAM will keep moving.

The immediate goal is a charity licence. It's a bureaucratic hurdle, but it matters — it would allow them to do more, to reach more, to formalise what they've been doing on instinct. And beyond that? More sports. Pickleball already has an elite team, with regular practices and professional coaching. There's talk of expanding further — of bringing in actors who are serious athletes in other disciplines. Chan Chin-pang, for example, who used to play table tennis for Hong Kong. Ng Fu-kiu, also a table tennis player. And Lee, of course, who has won at tennis, golf, pickleball — a kind of quiet dominance that she never talks about.

"We have the ability to grow," Wong says. "To bring in more people, more sports, more skills." He notes that the world is becoming more sports-minded. "People want to be healthy. They want to move. We can help with that."

It's a modest ambition, dressed up as a big one. Which is, perhaps, the most Hong Kong thing about it.

There is one last question, and it is the softest of the set: is there anything he has never said to his teammates — anything he would say now, if given the room? Kwok does not treat it as a soft question. "I'm a very honest person," he says. "Whatever I have to say, I say." The answer arrives without hesitation, and it has the flatness of a man who has never seen the point in dressing things up.

What he wants for A TEAM is the same thing he wants from himself: a room without polite fictions. He reaches for three words, and he offers them in a particular order —

Open. Honest. Happy.

The reasoning behind it is less warm than it first appears. "We're artists," he says. "We're in the entertainment business. If we can't entertain ourselves, how can we bring joy to the people who need it?"

It sounds like a defence of the charity work. It is actually a defence of the whole enterprise — the courts, the suppers, the fifty people who rearrange their lives to spend a Tuesday night hitting balls badly. The charity is what they do with the happiness. The happiness is what they make first.

A TEAM is not a charity, not a sports club, not a networking exercise, though it is sometimes mistaken for all three. It is a standing appointment. Fifty people, one night, no cameras. In a city that measures everything, they have built something that measures nothing at all.

This SCAA Opens Off Court series is brought to you by 御藥堂, Shun Hing Group, HEAD, Set Win Group, Coffee Academic, March & Rally, Linkers CPA Limited, POI Corporation Limited, Titoni, SmartShots, Watson's, Gym Aesthetics GA, 奇華餅家, Carlsberg, 甘棠燒鹅,儲存易迷你倉, Next Gen, TennisAsia, TNCL Total Nutrition Center Ltd, Little Apple Education Group Limited, Check Check Sin, ESG School HK, Wonder Mami, Eventist, Pones, 蒲昌酒庄. Wondermami.