SportCafe’s Ric Salizzo on how NZ has changed: ‘People are scared to try stuff’

Ric Salizzo has come home to New Zealand and revived Sports Cafe as a podcast. Photo / Ben Dickens
One of 2024′s hottest new local podcasts has resurrected one of the country’s most iconic sporting shows.
Ric Salizzo has reunited his former SportsCafe co-hosts Marc Ellis, Leigh Hart and Lana Coc-Kroft for SportsCafe-ish, an outing together for the first time in over a decade with the same comedic look at the world of sport.
The show premiered in 1996 in the early days of Sky Sport and grew in popularity as it eventually moved on to TVNZ 2. It ran until 2005 before they ended the show by destroying the set, but eventually returned for another season in 2008 and bonus episodes for the Rugby World Cup in 2011.
Speaking to Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast Ask Me Anything, Salizzo said he had not expected to bring the series back.
“I caught up with Mark during the Rugby World Cup in Paris,” he said. ”I hadn’t been home for a while. And I really enjoyed talking to him. We had a lot of fun, we were in hysterics.
“And then when I got back to New Zealand, I caught up with Leigh Hart, same thing. And I just really enjoyed the company and I said, well, why don’t we do something?
“Originally, it was going to be called The Has-been Cafe, but then we thought, why don’t we just use our old name, because that will help us get an audience and it’s just fun. For us, it’s just an opportunity to get together and have fun, and that’s what we miss.”
Salizzo has spent the past few years in America, originally in Texas before working in New York with a professional rugby team, the Ironworkers.
Returning home to New Zealand and launching the podcast, Salizzo feels like the country has changed.
“It’s almost like people are scared to try stuff or push the boundaries or whatever, just in case everyone jumps on them. So I know when we were starting this, the overwhelming reaction I got from everyone was, Oh man, how’s that going to survive? You’re going to get cancelled within the first week, etcetera, and I was like, ‘So, like, why is that a reason not to do something?’
“I hear that a lot, that sort of, ‘Oh man, you can’t do that because what if it goes wrong?’, which is the opposite to what I was experiencing when I was in the US cause in the US everyone thinks they’re a star – well, everyone thinks they’re going to be massively successful.”
Salizzo doesn’t believe people have changed, but the world has.
“There’s a layer above them that’s changed, a layer of rule setters. Someone wrote a piece, I can’t even remember what it was, when we came back saying the last thing we need is this sort of blokey crap back again. And I was like, that’s cool, if you don’t like it, don’t watch it.
“I don’t know why people get offended by stuff that they watch. Because if they don’t like it they shouldn’t watch it or listen to it.”
He said they don’t moderate the conversation – and that Ellis in particular has fun making him squirm with what he says – but that all of them have an awareness of pushing the boundaries while still being good people.
“What I really enjoy about the show is when, say, two people are going off into a direction and, and I might feel uncomfortable and then I get sucked into it and then I start going with them into that direction cause I get, I start getting amused by where they’re going and then Lana will pull me back or, or Lana might get sucked into the conversation and I pull her back.
“So that’s the fun. That’s when it’s fun.”
Listen to the full episode for more from Ric Salizzo about his life in America, why he came home, the changing face of sport and journalism, and more on resurrecting SportsCafe.
Ask Me Anything is an NZ Herald podcast hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett. New episodes are available every Sunday.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.