KEY POINTS:
There's some people in sport who make people stop and listen whenever they open their mouths - but that's not always a good thing.
With Steven Price, Warriors captain and officially the world's most pleasant Australian, it is.
He spoke at the Silver Ferns' world championship breakfast on Tuesday and was everything you want from a sporting star: humble, honest, inspiring and occasionally humorous (put it this way, it takes a lot to make a father of two laugh about vasectomies).
Initially it seemed strange that they'd invite an Ocker to shower a New Zealand team with words but it didn't take long to see they'd made the right choice.
But not all leaguies have the gift of the gab.
New Zealand Rugby League boss Andrew Chalmers, by contrast, has the curse of the gob.
He's made every step a loser during his short tenure as NZRL chairman and nobody should now be at any loss to explain why his Orcas didn't receive an invitation to the NRL - or, insert belly-laugh here, is it the UK's Super League they're headed to?
Chalmers has quickly established himself as the most lampooned sporting figure in the country. When he speaks publicly on consecutive days, which he too often does, he's creating his own version of Dumb and Dumber.
A simple solution would be not to listen to Chalmers but that is hard when his every sentence is reported breathlessly to the public via radio or print. The media finds itself locked in an unholy pas de deux with Chalmers: he needs us to give him the oxygen of publicity he so obviously craves, while a quotes-driven media latches on with glee to anything resembling colourful copy.
The sad thing is that league badly needed some credibility after years of administrative cock-ups and the business-savvy Chalmers was meant to provide it. But he's reverted to type and gone further, even making predecessor Sel Bennett look like the last of the polymaths.
There he was calling Adrian Morley a "maniac", like Great Britain needed any further motivation (though that, apparently, was a premeditated attempt to drive ticket sales and media coverage).
Then, to show he could recite a practiced one-liner with the best of them, Chalmers said he and Malcolm Boyle "were carved up faster than a pork roast at a hangi" when they attended a disciplinary hearing for Sam Burgess.
And let's not get started on the ham-fisted ending to Bluey McClennan's reign. Or his constant undermining of Gary Kemble - read Michael Brown's tour coverage in these pages for exhibits A through G - as this tour has lurched from bad to ghastly.
The crazy thing was Chalmers had valid points, if only he had the discipline to make them in a way which reflected well on the body he is supposed to be representing.
Chalmers said the result of the Burgess hearing left him "gobsmacked". If only that were quite literally true.
New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive-in-waiting Steve Tew seems to be another who has read How to Lose Friends and Alienate People cover to cover and applied its principles.
Teflon Tew, as he is now uncharitably referred to, has an uncanny ability to make everybody but the blameless NZRU sound hopelessly incompetent every time he opens his mouth.
If his idea of diplomacy is to get most of his stakeholders offside before he officially steps into Chris Moller's shoes, then he is doing a terrific job.
You can't help but think, however, that more subtle diplomacy skills might be required to stop the image of New Zealand rugby sliding further than the All Blacks' World Cup fortunes.
This might be the one occasion to reverse this time-honoured advice: you've got to walk the walk before you talk the talk.
