Just before this story was due to be shipped to the eagle-eyed BPL editors, the little matter of widespread, systematic deception and salary cap rorting at the Melbourne Storm rugby league club poured from every Australian media orifice.

It forced a bit of a re-think because this yarn was about sports executives and administrators crossing codes, from Australian football to rugby league to rugby union etc. And the prime model of that trend? Brian Waldron.

Waldron had refloated the ailing AFL ship at St Kilda (as pictured, above, with then coach Malcolm Blight in 2001) before doing the impossible by making the Storm a relevant Melbourne rugby league operation. Then, at the beginning of the year, the Melbourne Rebels scored a coup, securing his services to run Australia's fifth Super rugby franchise.

At the time Waldron spoke to BPL, a few days before he was placed at the centre of one of the biggest scandals to erupt in Australian sport, the only worry he seemed to have was an annoying sty in his eye; "the second one in a month". After a brief visit to the doctor, he generously contributed his thoughts about moving from code to code.

Something striking about the conversation was the frequency with which Waldron referred to being "successful". It was clear that his, is a pretty singular focus -- whatever the sport, whatever the business.

"I want to bring professionalism to a club," he said. "I've always been of the opinion that ego and emotion are the two things that get in the road of a successful sporting club."

Much of what he had to offer was insightful, but it's difficult, in light of the allegations crudely dumped in Waldron's lap by the owners of the Storm to listen back to much of what he said about "professionalism" and "ethical" behaviour without flinching.

"My leadership and the determination of how successful we are will judged by the product we have on the field and my ability to leverage that success off the field," he said.

And significantly: "You're there to run a business. We're really no different to any other business in the world."

Winning at all costs is an ugly maxim associated with on field performance in elite sport, but anyone with half a foot in the business world will tell you the pressure hatched behind the doors of corporate boardrooms to ‘succeed' sometimes makes the competitive streak of our sporting heroes and villains look subdued by comparison.

In Australia's cluttered professional sports market, just keeping one's head above water is a tough ask. To be a bone-fide success, the temptation to step over the line of legal, ethical and moral propriety would be ever-present for some ambitious individuals.

Waldron, it would seem, has tumbled into the abyss, in part, because of an inability to put aside his zeal to succeed and take a step back to look at the bigger picture. His blinkered approach reflected somewhat by his reported explanation of why he did what he allegedly did -- because everyone does it.

No doubt, he believed it was imperative for him to do it ‘better' than the competition.

Indeed, it's not hard to imagine there's quite a few Nervous Nellies calling in favours and cleaning up a few loose ends in the rugby league community (and other codes), with Waldron making noises about exposing the rorts he was aware of at others clubs.

Regardless, the Storm implosion has left a horrible scar on league and Australian sport. To be sure, the vast majority of sports execs are seeking to work in the best interests of the sport and athletes they represent, but they are operating in a contemporary culture that seems to embrace a kind of fiscal fudging and mild lunacy that is more suited to hedge fund maneuvering than footy club consolidation, celebration and advancement.

Which brings us to another sports administrator interviewed for this piece.

Bill Palmer isn't controlling the corporate future of a sport anymore, but the last time he did, about 12 years ago, it was his decision to act with a degree of circumspection rather than ill-considered ambition that redefined his future.

Since Palmer was squeezed out of running the National Basketball League, the game as a professional entity in Australia has been in freefall, going from a competition that filled 15,000 seat stadia to one that, in its last season, could not attract enough interest to sustain teams in Sydney or Brisbane.

This is not the place to debate whether the NBL would have encountered a different fate had Palmer remained at the helm, though it's hard to imagine things could have been worse.

What's fairly clear is Palmer was pretty much chewed up and spat out by the sport he loved and served loyally because he opted against acting in a way he considered reckless. Ironically, the comfortable new home he has found for his considerable talents is rugby league.

American born & bred, Palmer came to Australia in 1971. He was a leading player in the first NBL in 1979 went on to run basketball in Victoria and later took over as the NBL general manager.

Inducted in to the NBL Hall of Fame in 1998 he'd overseen basketball's boom period in the early to mid ‘90s, as the national league attracted full houses around the country -- a mixture of innovative game night entertainment and high quality play between evenly balanced teams building a profile for basketball that was the envy of other more entrenched sports.

But by the late ‘90s the NBL was battling to maintain its prominent place in the Australian sports landscape and Palmer was feeling the heat from club owners who had become more powerful as the league grew.

"The owners were going in a way that I disagreed with. They were looking to become more market driven when they really didn't have any money in the bank," he says.

There were numerous skirmishes, but Palmer recalls one disagreement as being the final straw.

The club owners wanted to spend $400,000 producing a television advertisement, rather than investing $100,000 in a direct marketing campaign that Palmer advocated, aimed at refreshing or sparking interest in the NBL amongst the tens of thousands of Australians who played in social and other basketball leagues around the country.

"I said, it's not going to work, because we don't have enough control on television to make it effective even if it's any good and secondly we don't have enough money in the bank to buy the time.

"They went ahead and made the ad and of course nobody ever saw it."

Palmer, knowing his time was up, chased down an unusual offer from the rugby league community still hurting from the game's other big black eye in the last 15 years -- the Super League debacle when News Limited attempted to take over the game and ran its own national competition in 1997.

"At the end of the Super League war when the ARL (Australian Rugby League) and News Ltd. got together they said look, ‘this war there's been a lot of damage to the base of the sport in particular' and so they decided they'd set up a semi-autonomous company to simply look at the grassroots development of the sport and education and training, as the clubs had lost their way," Palmer says.

Overseeing the Australian Rugby League's (ARL) development program wasn't going to give Palmer the opportunity to mix it with the business types again but it did provide him with a shot at constructing a plan to benefit and grow a game that was, at the time, badly bruised.

But a basketballing American, from Victoria?

"Nobody's told me this, but I suspect they'd looked around and the candidates from within the sport were from on one side or the other," Palmer says.

Palmer couldn't even pretend to take sides. He'd been in Melbourne for 27 years and all he knew of Sydney was the CBD and the less than attractive stretches of road to basketball stadia in the city's west or the then-creepy streets of Alexandria where the Kings used to train.

As for rugby league, he "just thought it was a bunch of guys running against each other and getting up again."

But bringing fresh eyes to the game, he methodically set about identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the sport at its grassroots.

Things had been done pretty much the same way for decades -- ex-players given a few bob to get in and coach the little blokes and maybe help identify a few rising stars.

"But fans were leeching away from the game," Palmer says. "I think I was able to have a view that was outside of the box."

Junior clubs had long been the strength of rugby league in NSW and Queensland, but Palmer saw spending development dollars there as being akin to "preaching to the converted". Instead he concentrated on getting the sport back en masse into primary schools. Drawing on his extensive development experience in basketball he made the game easier to coach and referee at the junior school level and used people with non-footballing backgrounds to spread the gospel.

"It was sort of a radical philosophy." he says. "I went out and hired school teachers and professional people and paid them more than the traditional ex-football player/development officer.

"It caused ripples ... more than half the original hires were girls. I mean 80-85 percent of primary school teachers are females.

"The idea was to create a groundswell of interest. Our job isn't to create the $400,000 NRL player (though) if we create a wide enough interest in the game those players will still pop out. It's more to spread interest in the game amongst different people. They might be mothers who let their children play or go to a game or watch it on TV.

"Even if they didn't play the sport they might become fans of the sport."

Palmer says in his ten years as ARL Development Officer his team has nearly doubled the number of junior registrations and seen the number of kids playing in school competitions increase four-fold, reversing six straight years of declining numbers.

Along the way he has developed a genuine passion for rugby league and discovered there's more to Sydney than Parramatta Road.

At 61, with a couple of kids in high school, he's happily entrenched with the ARL, his basketball days, sadly, behind him.

"Frankly I don't watch basketball anymore. It was like I was inoculated against it."

However Palmer feels for those in the sport who have endured more than a decade of decline, after so much excellent groundwork was done in the early ‘90s.

"Back then, the clubs worked really hard at that grassroots level," he says. "The Sydney Kings were legends. You couldn't go into a school were the Kings hadn't been.

"But around the time I left, the owners were deciding they didn't like having independent people on the NBL board and it was their money.

"And so the next thing you know they write out of the standard contract that they have to do community work.

"Now you go out (in Sydney) where we have 70 people in the field -- the kids are still playing basketball, but they just don't talk about high profile players."

Palmer operates fairly autonomously at the ARL and is relieved he doesn't have to deal with the shenanigans at the top end of town anymore. His experience with basketball made him leery about handing administrative power over to the individuals controlling the purse strings.

"The idea of the owners trying to run everything -- that's flawed," he says. "You sort of need a strong central government that has a degree of independence, which we had in the original participants agreement."

The world is getting smaller and the reach of sport has never been so extensive. You've got rugby league executives playing a role in developing AFL in western Sydney and a track and field administrator working to build rugby union in Melbourne. Rugby officials jump to soccer and back again and there's even a former prime minister wanting to play a major role in running international cricket.

Professional entertainment organisations need a wide range of expertise, especially financial nouse and cunning, but now, more than ever, Australian sport should be thankful there are still administrators in the system whose primary ambition is to build the game not expand business empires.