Tag: FIVEFOOTWAY

April 25, 2012

Bill-ing a united Hougang

Bill Ng is building a community by making sure the bills are paid at his football club, Hougang United

Let’s get this out of the way: Bill Ng may have pulled out his bid for Scottish football giants Glasgow Rangers, but the businessman says he has not given up hope on buying it. The man, who has been making the news with a bid for the financially troubled club and suddenly dropping out of the race when he was the only contender left, says he is bidding his time to see how the club would respond to the latest developments.

Meanwhile, it is business as usual at Hougang United, the football club in Singapore that he took over as its chairman in the middle of 2009. Once perennial cellar-dwellers in the S-League for over a decade, the club’s fortunes have transformed since Bill took over. It is now a mid-table club that reached the Singapore League Cup final last year, and more than once during our interview, he declares Hougang will fight for top honours next season. Currently, the team is 8th out of 13 teams in the league.

The improved performance on the pitch has also been matched by what’s happening around it. Hougang United’s home is in Hougang Stadium, which sits inside a public housing estate. On most days, the stadium’s stands are empty while residents fill the tracks, jogging and walking to keep fit. This is reversed on match days, as residents turn up in orange and black, the club’s official colours, all ready to support their team, The Cheetahs.

Hougang’s residents didn’t always have a football team to rally around. When the stadium was set up in 1987, it was simply a sports facility for the neighbourhood. It was only two years after Singapore formed its own professional soccer league in 1996, the S-League, that a team was assigned to adopt Hougang as its home, Marine Castle United Football Club. Over the next decade, Hougang’s residents found little to cheer about for a club that struggled to climb out of the bottom of the league and changed its identity to Sengkang Marine then Sengkang Punggol Football Club.

By the time Bill took over as chairman in 2009, the club had a reported debt of $1.3 million dollars. But Bill had come in with a reputation of buying over another financially-troubled football club Tiong Bahru United and successfully bringing it from the third division of the nation’s semi-professional league to the first. Although, some were also wary of Bill’s of his motivations. “I came into football because I was influenced by the love my two sons have for the sport and I have to admit I’m not a football man,” he said during an interview with Singapore newspaper TODAY in December 2010. “When I came in, I didn’t even know what the offside rule was and my sons had to teach me.”

Throughout our interview, it was clear that Bill took up the job as yet another opportunity to successfully restructure another company — it’s what he does for a living in his private equity firm Financial Frontiers. He talks at length at how he has tried to get rid of excesses in the club and find new forms of revenue. To make sure the club would be self-sustaining, he also hired people whom not necessarily were football fans, but knew how to run it like a financial institution. At one point, he even throws out his sales pitch: “All businesses are good businesses. It only fails because of the human element.”

Despite speaking at length about finances, Bill says it is not enough to turnaround a club. Rather, Hougang United is enjoying a revival because it has gotten people involved in it. “Money is of course the necessary condition for running the club, but it doesn’t mean pumping in fresh money is sufficient, you need the people and the passion,” he says.

This he found in a batch of young players and a new coach, ex-national team footballer Aide Iskandar. As changes were made on the pitch, Bill also worked hard to reach out to the wider community. Last year, the club was rebranded Hougang United, giving the new owner an opportunity to start afresh. It also allowed the club to forge an identity with its stadium and its surrounding neighbourhood of the same name. The club also began working with the neighbouring town councils to promote the club’s matches to the residents, and the schedule of upcoming games started appearing on the lift lobbies of the nearby public housing estates. For its games, Hougang United also began inviting orphanages and nearby schools to attend their games to watch Hougang United play. This year, in June, the club is also holding its first-ever Junior Challenge Trophy soccer tournament for students under-10 and under-12, a way for the club to spot new talent and introduce itself to young children.

Perhaps the most significant outreach program for the club is establishing an official fan club, the “Hougang HOOLs” (Hougang Only One Love). It started as a grassroots initiative by friends of then coach Aide, but Hougang United soon recognised it as its official satellite organisation, giving it resources to organise events and promote the club. It is crucial to tap on the people’s passion to keep the resource-strapped club alive, says Bill. “We are only good at certain things. By giving these fans rewards and resources, they help to promote the club and they are the experts, helping us manage our websites,” he says. “Suddenly, all these guys are empowered over night.”

Over the last two seasons, the Hougang HOOLs have built up a noisy reputation, standing and singing throughout the game — a rare sight for a league that struggles to get supporters despite being a football-crazy city. Most Singaporeans would rather stay up late to watch their dose of European football games on television rather than turn up at their neighbourhood stadium to catch a live S-League game.

In a way, Bill wanted to acquire a European club so that he could bridge this disparity, and “fast forward” Hougang United and the Singapore footballing community to Western standards. He imagines exchanges of players and staff and even access to Rangers 5.5 million fans, slightly more than the population of Singapore. This dream of uniting communities of people via football all started with the now oft-heard story of how the man in his 50s fell in love with the game after watching Rangers win the 1972 European Cup Winners’ Cup. “It was really gorgeous, seeing the crowd cheer, the ‘wow’ factor really registered for years,” he says. “Football can bring people from all walks of life together, it’s a sports for the masses.”

At this point, Hougang United has yet to convince people in its community to fill even the 2,500 seater stadium during its matches. However, Bill is convinced all he needs is time. The original plan when he took over the club was to be an interim chairman to get it back in the black again, he reveals, but watching it grow and seeing the community’s response over his close to three years with it has convinced him to stay for the long-term. For a very brief moment during the interview, Bill shows a glimpse of how Hougang United means more than just a financial restructuring challenge to him. Now, he just needs to convince the rest of the community to united around his football club too.

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A feature written for FIVEFOOTWAY magazine’s issue on PLAY

April 18, 2012

The rides of their lives

Once a common sight outside stores in Singapore, kiddy rides have lost their space in the city

They come in all shapes and designs, but whether it is a swan, a horse, an elephant, a car, a boat, a scooter, or a spaceship, these machines offer children a ride of their lives. For a few minutes and a small fee, a child would be taken on a journey full of ups and downs (or lefts and rights) and cheerful music music as they made their way to… nowhere. This was the promise of a kiddy ride, a toy that brought joy to children, and relief for parents, as they went about the city.

For over three decades, Woo Hock Trading Co. has been supplying such kiddy rides to businesses in Singapore and the region. Mr Lee Kim Leng, started the business in 1980 after taking over six machines from a previous owner. Starting from a space outside a shop in Toa Payoh, he built up a fleet of over one thousand kiddy rides all across Singapore. Mr Lee’s daughter, Catherine, began helping her father when she turned 20, and over the last two decades, has witnessed the family business ride through the good times and the bad.

“During the golden age, each machine could make a 4-digit sum a month. Now one whole year, maybe I’ll only get fifty dollars,” says Catherine, who is certain the business will end with her.

The iconic round-headed swans on the top right were designed by Woo Hock, according to its owner.

According to Catherine, the first half of the ‘90s was the heydays for kiddy rides. Before the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Woo Hock’s rides were commonly seen outside neighbourhood stores and supermarkets such as NTUC FairPrice, Sheng Siong, and Oriental Emporium. Many also found their way to Indonesia, Hong Kong and even Mauritius. Businesses either bought these rides for a few thousand dollars or let Woo Hock place one outside their storefronts and shared the profits.

As the industry was very competitive then, Woo Hock started designing its own rides to stand out from those usually imported from Britain, Germany, Taiwan and Japan. One signature Woo Hock design is the duckling, which still appears on the company’s name card and its fading shop signage. However, this design was later copied by competitors who bought the mould from the manufacturer without their permission. Other rides designed by Woo Hock include models resembling a Vespa scooter and a boat, both which have been very popular with children.

Besides appealing to children, the rides also have to be designed to be safe. Woo Hock only supplies rides made of fibreglass, which last longer and are safer than those made of PVC. Catherine is proud to say that no accidents have happened on Woo Hock’s rides after all these years. Their designs have failed in other ways, however. Inside its shop, where the rides are serviced and stored, sits several rejected models. There is a race car so shallow a child may fall off, and there is a rabbit whose height is such that a child might hit its head on it during a ride. As we pass by another animal-shaped ride, Catherine asks if I could guess what it was.

A Merlion-shaped ride that looked more like a pig, turning away Muslim children especially.

“A Cow? A Pig?”

“Aiyoh, you cannot tell?” she said as she giggled embarrassingly. “It’s a Merlion! Don’t look like meh?”

This is one of Woo Hock’s design that failed. After investing S$30,000 to create the mould for manufacturing this ride, they found that nobody dared to ride it, especially the Muslim children, who thought it resembled a pig, an animal considered taboo in their religion.

While Woo Hock kept on designing new rides to appeal to children, it did not stop its business from declining post-1997. Children had more alternatives for play, and clients also preferred rides featuring global cartoon stars like Mickey Mouse instead of Woo Hock’s designs. But what really killed the business was after an incident in 2007 when two siblings were killed in a fire at their public housing home in Hougang, says Catherine. When the brother and sister tried to escape, they were trapped by the stockpiles the businesses downstairs had left outside their shopfront overnight. The tragic incident led the authorities to clamp down on shopfront clutter, and as businesses found less space, kiddy rides no longer had a place in the neighbourhood.

Today, Woo Hock’s shop along Lichfield Road is a forgotten abode for its remaining kiddy rides. Once bustling with 6 workers and three vans, the shop floor has become the extended home of Mr Lee and his family who live upstairs this shophouse. A single van is now parked outside. While they used to work from morning to night with no holidays and off days, they struggle to find something to do now. Recently, Catherine even had to throw out some 300 pieces because there was not enough space for these rides, which used to call the city outside their home.

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A feature written for FIVEFOOTWAY magazine’s issue on PLAY

August 22, 2011

Fivefootway: Everyone Please Join Us!

You may have heard by now, I’m currently involved in the revamp of Fivefootway, an online journal about asian architecture that was founded in 2007 by architectural students Adib Jalal and Yeo Jia-Jun. This year, Adib decided to develop Fivefootway into a full-fledge online magazine about asian cities and roped me in to help him out. We hope to bring the discussion of architecture and urbanism in Asia beyond just architects, and include everyone else whose daily lives make up the city.

The inaugural issue is set to launch 09/10/11 where we bring you a bumper two-month long issue that looks at EVERYONE and the idea of the inclusive asian city. We’ll still on the lookout for contributors — writers, illustrators, videographers, etc — to explore this topic. So do drop Adib or I a line to talk!

As for now, we’ve started a daily Fivefootway Broadcast and you can also follow us on Twitter at @fivefootway.

Welcome!