Surrey Kent was an advertising man, the former managing director of Ilott Advertising. He had retired early at 52, took a year off to spend time in his Khandallah house and garden, and then spotted the Wellington Rugby Union advertisement for its first chief executive.
Kent says his role was "ill-defined" when he started, "although Graham Atkin was very supportive. He had more-or-less been acting at CEO anyway, and he gave me a bit of rope, primarily in the business-related aspects of the job," Kent said.
When Ken started, there was no office for a CEO when Kent started, and he had to sit in the union's meeting room while one was virtually built around him. But if his job had only been loosely defined in its early days, he soon came to have one major job.
"My role became dominated by one basic issue, Athletic Park. What to do with it, where to go if we didn't stay there? It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and I don't think the union had realised just how bad the situation was."
At the same time the union was short of cash.
"The first brief I was given was to go out and raise some money. In those years we didn't have a great side - and raising money for a side that's not attracting crowds was not easy," Kent says.
He visited every hotel in the Wellington area in the first two months looking for sponsorship.
"It soon became obvious that we weren't going to improve the situation financially until we did something about the performance of the team."
But Kent says the union was handicapped at the time by its philosophy on player acquisition - ie, it was all left to clubs, and longtime Wellington players and administrators were happy with that.
"We saw Auckland scooping up people from all around the place, Canterbury and Otago doing the same. And one of the problems that I saw was that administrators who themselves were not top players tended to hold the opinions of those who had been top players far too highly - and there was an opinion around amongst those former top players that Wellington had never had to buy players, so why should we now?
"That completely ignored the fact that everyone else was doing it."
Kent says one casualty of that attitude was Carlos Spencer, at that stage a youngster revealing sheer brilliance at Horowhenua. He was snapped up by Auckland without hesitation.
"The union was very timid in its approach to business."
But Athletic Park was taking more and more of his time. Kent remains to this day an advocate of the redevelopment of the park, and hasn't changed his mind that the circular Railways Stadium has play too far away from the crowd to be an ideal venue.
So he pressed hard for the park to be rebuilt, and his office of the time was strewn with plans and project aiming at that very purpose.
He says the cost of the Fletchers redevelopment project was low for what it promised.
"I think the redevelopment would have evolved nicely. I still think it was probably the right solution. Rugby should be played on a rectangular ground, not a circle."
But just when things looked to be coming along, the Wellington City Council sought opinions on a joint development at the Basin Reserve. That took the focus off Athletic Park, and when the Basin development was seen as too expensive and small, then the Railways land became a focus, and remained so.
So Kent left Wellington Rugby in 1994 with Athletic Park's future drifting away, and the Railways land the likely centre of a Wellington Rugby Union move - as indeed it became.
He remains, as said, not a great fan of the stadium.
But there were a couple of other things he will be remembered for - trying to introduce a Harlequins-type representative jersey which failed to break down the traditionalists, for introducing the sale of liquor to Athletic Park, and for setting the party for future CEOs in the way they should work.