Canadian basketball star Steve Nash (C) plays a pickup basketball game at the Dongdan courts in central Beijing on August 30, 2009. (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP)

BEIJING, August 30, 2009 (AFP) - NBA star Steve Nash showed up in disguise at a Beijing pick-up game on Sunday, hoping to shoot some hoops incognito.

But before he even palmed the ball, the city's basketball-crazed fans had spotted the two-time NBA most valuable player.

"I had on a Chinese opera bandana and I had on some protective goggles," he said, laughing.

"As soon as I walked on they recognised me. It didn't really work."

It was not the first time that the 35-year-old Canadian playmaker has made a surprise appearance at a public court. When he dropped in to play pick-up in Lower Manhattan a few years ago, the story spread like wildfire.

"I went one day just to shoot and somebody took a picture -- it kind of got blown out of proportion," he said.

Although he plays soccer in New York City's Chinatown, where he also hosts an annual charity soccer tournament, he shies away from pick-up basketball "because it turns into a camera phone opportunity and it's all over the web".

"But to do it in China is really something because it's so far from home. To play people that you'd have a hard time communicating with but you communicate with basketball... I love that," he told AFP in an interview.

After an hour of hoops, he went to the other side of the fence and kicked a ball around with some soccer players for 40 minutes. "The perfect Sunday," he concluded.

Nash is in China for a week with a handful of NBA players to appear on the finale of a Chinese basketball reality show and for a coaching clinic at a rural school where NBA players are helping build a new basketball court.

It is the Phoenix Suns' guard's first time in China in two years and he said he was amazed at the pace of change in the basketball-mad country.

"The development's incredible. That CCTV building is one of my favourite buildings in the world," he said, referring to the new China Central Television building, a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical glass sections.

It was driving through the city that he spotted the sprawling pick-up courts and knew how he wanted to spend his day off.

"The other basketball players, it seems like they're really influenced by the West," he said of the Beijing court. "It's a really cool amalgamation of Chinese culture and Western culture. The opening up of China is fascinating."