Can one of our most memorable TV shows be successfully resurrected for a new generation of fans? Three familiar faces are giving it a crack.
Ric Salizzo is a 20-something at heart.
“Everyone thinks they’re 25. I’ve got three skateboards, seven surfboards, and an Xbox,” he says, sporting white sneakers and a New York Yankees jumper underneath a dark blazer.
At 61 and first glance, he might not seem the sort of character to lead the revival of a brand synonymous with slightly younger blokes and - perhaps in Sports Cafe vernacular – “bloke-esses”.
But there is no one more perfectly placed.
After all, Salizzo was the brains behind the rise, pause, and brief rise again of the Sports Cafe on Sky TV and then TVNZ through the late 1990s and into the new millennium.
It’s back, in a modern-day format – as a podcast and online video show, under the slightly rejigged and thoroughly on-brand title Sports Cafe-ish.
Behind Salizzo’s youth-adjacent personality is a sharp business mind. Someone deeply interested in the economics of sport and audience behaviour, and someone with time again – following a hectic four-year stint working in the United States – to round up as many of the former Sports Cafe crew as possible.
On board already are former All Black Marc Ellis and former “That Guy” (and now beer and potato chip baron) Leigh Hart – both equally astute businessmen, well aware of the power of humour in building brands.
“They’re just great people,” Salizzo says.
“I just enjoy talking to them, catching up with them, spending time with them. It’s a lot of fun. We’re all good friends.”
They’ve broadcast two episodes of the light-hearted sports talk show already – familiar faces with a familiar look.
Salizzo and Hart were already rocking bald-ish heads in the noughties; Ellis is a little greyer, but no less mischievous.
Not on board – yet, at least – are three other original stars, Lana Coc-Kroft, Eva “The Bulgarian” Evguenievaor and Graeme Hill.
Coc-Kroft keeps hanging up, jokes Salizzo. “Lana is a good friend but she’s been flat out – I’m still working on her.”
Evguenievaor is now a mum with a Master’s in investigative journalism and Hill is now growing avocados but Salizzo hopes they’ll make an appearance at some stage.
The show does now have a ‘PCA’ (political correctness adviser) on board, in the form of Aaron Ryan, a freelance actor, journalist and MC.
Ryan will have his hands full.
In the opening scene of the second episode, he and Ellis appear half-naked, covered in glitter, cereal and feathers, as part of a “team-building” exercise. You get the drift.
At one stage of the podcast, Ellis opines that the English rugby team – the “Poms” – are now the team the All Blacks love to beat, ahead of the Springboks and Wallabies.
“I’m not sure Poms is such a good word these days,” Ryan says.
“Shut up,” responds Ellis.
“Oh, yep, okay.”Ellis offers Ryan a swig of tequila to soothe any hurt feelings.
Beyond the laughter, the possibly questionable jokes and the definitely questionable jokes, is a serious business.
The Alternative Commentary Collective, led by NZME’s Mike Lane, has led the charge in this arena in the past decade – a far less serious but still well-informed approach to sport, for fans looking beyond the serious commentary and analysis.
The likes of Sky and other mainstream media such as TVNZ and the NZ Herald have this market well covered - ACC and Sports Cafe tap into a lucrative market of knowledgeable fans who also enjoy a laugh. Social media plays a huge role in engagement.
The ACC has almost 300,000 followers on Facebook, almost 100,000 on Instagram, and an impressive roster of sponsors.
Sky’s regular sports news show, The Crowd Goes Wild – which Salizzo developed almost 20 years ago – is another example. It has almost 400,000 followers on Facebook, and 21,000 on Instagram.
The Sports Cafe-ish feels like an extension of these – a new platform based on a beloved legacy, humour, and some big interviews. After just two episodes, it has more than 24,000 YouTube subscribers.
Former All Blacks captain Sam Cane, for example, appears on the second episode and seems more relaxed than he’s ever been on camera. Some of that might be the easing of pressure from no longer being captain, but the podcast environment and the slightly crazy interrogators certainly help.
The Sports Cafe - which started in 1996 - was always renowned as being a vehicle that gave more insight into personalities. Until then, many athletes might have been considered somewhat dry.
Salizzo developed a documentary seven years earlier which also broke the mould.
“I reckon it goes back to 1989 when I did The Good, the Bad and the Rugby,” says Salizzo, referring to the full-length, fly-on-the-wall film he directed of the All Blacks’ tour of Ireland and Wales.
“I was playing club rugby at the time and so I knew a lot of the Auckland guys. I was like, ‘Man, these are just normal people in extraordinary circumstances’.
“We did it as a VHS but there was no VHS sell-through market.
“They were selling it in garages and dairies and whatever. But it sold a lot – over 100,000.
“It’s funny because everyone keeps going, ‘Oh, you know what rugby needs is a Drive to Survive [the hugely popular behind-the-scenes F1 series]’.
“I’m like, ‘Yeah, we did one in 1989′.”
In the early 1990s, Salizzo was appointed the first official media liaison officer for the All Blacks – he says he came to be known as the media prevention officer by some journalists.
He admits he may have laid a foundation that has seen All Blacks tend to give some fairly predictable answers at media conferences.
“All sports people become very message-focused and very much about controlling everything. Control normally comes from fear – ‘I’m scared of getting it wrong. So I need to control it’.
“I’d like to go on record as saying sorry because it’s my fault,” he laughs.
Salizzo returned to New Zealand late last year, after a stint in the United States, firstly in Austin, Texas, and then in New York for three years with the professional rugby team there, the New York Ironworkers.
He came home via the Rugby World Cup in France.
“Being a rugby supporter for them is like a badge of courage because it’s different,” says Salizzo of the US fans.
“They’re so passionate and I probably learned more in three years in New York about sports than I have in 30 years here.
“They’re just so good at connecting their fans to their teams. All our fans were [also] New York Jets [football] fans or Yankees [baseball] fans or whatever. They had sort of expectations of certain deliverables.
“We had to connect them. We had to have a good fan experience – we had to have food trucks, we had to have tailgating [car-boot parties in the carparks].”
Salizzo says he loved his time there.
“It was probably one of the most enjoyable gigs I’ve ever had and really challenging. The thing about New York is it’s a tough city.
“You’ve got to bring your A-game every day or someone’s just going to move over the top of you.”
The Ironworkers were attracting a couple of thousand people to their games, says Salizzo.
“A couple of thousand New Yorkers sound like 50,000 Kiwis,” he says.
“They are passionate – like, they boo the opposition from the moment they get off the bus.
“I said, ‘Look, how about after the game, you give them some applause?’
“So that was the deal. They booed them when they came on the field for the warm-up, when they came off the field for the warm-up, when they came on the field at the beginning of the game, when they came off at halftime, when they went back on at halftime.
“And then at the end, they would applaud.”
Unfortunately, the Ironworkers club disbanded in December last year, after Salizzo had already left.
New York had been a full-on experience.
“It was nice to come back and spend the summer at Tairua and catch my breath, and I needed to get a knee replacement.”
He says he’s always fascinated by emerging audience trends – and now being able to hear directly from listeners and viewers for the new weekly format.
“I’m thinking about how I can keep evolving it.
“It’s just so much fun because the cost of putting on a TV show is a lot of money.
“The cost of putting on a podcast/YouTube show is not a lot of money in comparison.
“You can go direct to the audience – I don’t have layers and layers of people between me and the audience.
“Quite often when you’re making a show, the producer can get caught up making it for the person they’re reporting to as opposed to the audience, I’ve made that mistake myself.”
LISTEN HERE TO THE FIRST EPISODES
He hopes the new podcast might help some Kiwis.
“I did notice when I got back there was... I don’t know if fear is the right word but just cautiousness. We’re just focused on having fun.
“People have said to me that they’ve enjoyed [the first shows]. We’re just having a laugh, you know?”
He still doesn’t know how he got away with some of the shows that used to screen on Sky – for example, an infamous episode featuring a clearly drunk Ellis.
“I got into so much trouble for that; I got hauled over the coals.
“That’s the one episode that everyone loves the most and talks about the most.
“It gave me the most grief. After that show, I took him upstairs and ripped shreds out of him and he just giggled the whole time.”
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.
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