The TVNZ sports commentator and writer looks back on his life in TV.

When The Spinoff reaches Scotty Stevenson he’s in a reflective mood, caught in between calling an intriguing test cricket series, and a second round of deep staffing cuts at TVNZ. Asked how he’s going, and he immediately goes to his colleagues. “You’re surrounded by a lot of carnage, because we’re obviously in an industry under some significant threats, commercial threats,” he says. “It’s really hard when people have been going about what they do for a very long time, and suddenly the numbers don’t add up anymore.”

This is, to put it mildly, not what you’re meant to say at the start of an interview to promote TAB Chasing the Fox, a new event which “features New Zealand golf legend Ryan Fox as he competes against a diverse field of challengers… including sports stars, media personalities, politicians, and YouTube golfers”. But that’s why Stevenson remains such a singular presence in sports and television – his intellect, his laconic humour, and his rare combination of passion for sports and an acerbic eye for its excesses.

He understands what the show is for – some fun and frivolity at the end of a very hard year in his business. “We’re going to be pretty focused on the party hole, which sounds like something that the royal Auckland Golf Club has never seen before, and that’s probably going to be half the fun… there’s music, there’s noise, and golfers are going to have to go and play.”

Chasing the Fox is the flipside of The Upside, a series of searching longform interviews on the subject of mental wellbeing he made for TVNZ earlier this year. “I loved interviewing people for a decent chunk of time in a really intimate space about some really personal experiences. Reflecting on that series afterwards, it was both uplifting and at the same time, exhausting… You could just focus on that person sitting in the seat opposite you, and delve into their life in some really profound ways.”

The absurd and the profound can both be found on television, particularly in sports, the place Stevenson has worked in for more than 20 years. Here is the commentator, writer and giant-hearted human’s life in television.

My earliest TV memory is… Growing up in the north, we’d play Saturday morning sport then go to my grandparents, who lived in Whangārei. We’d stay for lunch, and we would stay for dinner, and then we’d invariably stay the night. Then I remember my brother and I literally turning on the TV and watching the test pattern. I laugh about it now, when you look at everyone staring at a phone – we literally watched the test pattern waiting for the cartoons to start.

A TV moment that haunts me is… I’ve been falconed [rugby league slang for being hit on the head with a ball] in the middle of a live broadcast. It was before a Super Rugby game in Wellington, during the pre-match on the sideline, and it damn near knocked me out. I think it was Jackson Garden-Bachop. He was warming up with his kicks and it sconed me right on the head. I remember afterwards feeling pretty dazed, but I guess that’s the thing about live TV, and especially live sports, surrounded by crowds and with the ball in play – there’s always this element of jeopardy.

The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… I think Lotto does a really good job in the cliffhanger. There are a couple that stand out, particularly the woman who has an accident in Thailand. And they find the cast, and they find the ticket under a cast. That’s one of the greats.

I know everyone fantasises about winning a lottery, but I think the way that the creative teams on those commercials set up the proposition that it could be a win, and leave you wanting more. They play on the emotion, and it’s just really good storytelling.

My earliest television crush… Fenella Bathfield, who used to do 3.45 Live, which came on after school. I was a young teenage boy, and she was super confident and cool. It was the name too, Fenella. It just sounded cool. She was in The Other Side of Paradise, and she worked on the Bugs Bunny Show as well. She had some serious hair. 

My TV guilty pleasure is… I have to be honest, I just don’t watch a lot of television, outside of sports. But I would confess that if mum’s visiting and she’s watching Coronation Street, which, invariably she will, I just get dragged into it. I feel like the success of Coronation Street is they have just run the same storyline for 50, 60, 70 years, and nothing really changes. The storylines sometimes get a bit more ridiculous, and sometimes we’re back to normal. My youngest son, Joe, he loves to tune in as well. If Granny’s watching Coro, then Joe will tune in and literally say, “Granny, this is the same story”. I love that.

My favourite TV moment is… Dennis Connor on Holmes. It was the shock of it more than anything else. It revealed something about everyone involved. Holmes being dogged and adversarial – while pretending not to be – but knowing full well that he had a volatile guest and he was going to needle. Connor just being an abject prick. I think there was something shocking yet unsurprising about how that entire thing unfolded. And then just walking out – you didn’t expect to ever see it happen, and it reinforced New Zealand’s opinion of Americans, and I guess it reinforced Holmes’s position as, you know, the best in the business at what he did. 

My favourite TV character of all time is… Hawkeye, from M*A*S*H. He was a man dealing with a shit sandwich by trying to be funny all the time, and losing his mind. I liked Hawkeye. I forget the character arc, but it was a beautifully acted character, and a beautifully written character. The show was of its time, but there are a lot of moments in that show where you sort of understood the unraveling of human beings and how much pressure they can withstand.

The most stylish person on television was… Anthony Bourdain. He was just fucking cool constantly. There was a guy who just gave zero fucks. And could pull it off – the heroin physique, the love of punk and rock. I don’t think it was an affectation – he looked like a man who was born to be on the road. He looked like a man on the run from both himself and everyone else. And he dressed that way. He was a vagabond, sort of a modern day pirate. A simple pair of denim jeans and a loose fitting linen shirt and fucking off you go. How good.

The sport which leaves me cold is… Netball. I’ve never commentated netball, and I appreciate the athletes, but I find it’s a sport that’s never really been able to get its hooks into me. That’s not to criticise the sport itself. It’s merely to say that it hasn’t captured me in the way it’s captured so many others. I get why people play it. I kind of get why people like watching it. There’s just something about the game – it’s almost like it avoids the contest too much.

The funniest TV show of all time is… Curb Your Enthusiasm – because it’s just the most painful watch you could ever put yourself through. I love comedies that centre on really unlikable people. Larry David – there’s just not a situation that he can’t make worse. I think there’s genius in terms of the writing, but then the performing of it as well. There have been times where I’ve had to pause the television and just go, “actually, I don’t know if I can keep going here”.

The greatest moment of commentary I’ve ever heard is… It’s an Australian commentator, Dennis Cometti. He had a line in an AFL game. He had many lines, to be honest, but I believe he had a line when a player went to grab the ball or go into a pick, and came out and had blood gushing around the eye. His line was, “you could say he went into the pick optimistically and came out misty optically”. I think that’s probably one of the greatest lines I’ve ever heard. He may well have had it on his mind for some time. But even so, the moment’s got to arrive, and that delivery has got to be there. That is just such a great line.

A controversial TV opinion is… We’ve been slow to adjust. I think newsrooms have been slow to adjust to a new reality. The old ways of doing things, while they might still pull good audiences, I think we probably should have been looking at different ways to operate a long time before now. There’s a lot of resource that goes into making a news bulletin, obviously, and in the case of 1News it is a really important news bulletin too. But the way that that comes together is still very traditional, and whether that was the optimal form of operation over the last wee while, I don’t know. 

It’s certainly one that could have done with a little bit more foresight, and maybe looking at how that came together, and what the end result of the day’s labours was – whether that should have all been focused in on one hour of news, or whether that had potential to be spread far and wide across the daily landscape.

A show I’ll never watch… Love Island. Or anything on an island. Unless it’s Attenborough on an island, talking about something mating. 

The last thing I watched on television was… I’m still working my way through Yellowstone. It’s appointment viewing for my partner [White Fern Suzie Bates] and I, and she’s away a lot. Yellowstone is brutal, it’s beautiful. Rip’s got to be one of the greatest characters in the history of television. Costner’s outstanding in that series. I think it’s a fucking achievement. Yellowstone as a series, both visually and artistically, and from a story point of view as well. 

There is an appeal to seeing an America that Americans, in some way, idealised. People want to see Montanans and Texans and hats and cows and frontiers and valleys and people with guns taking care of business. You can’t escape that in American life. You can’t escape that in American history. We’re seeing in American politics that there’s been a repudiation of the liberal elite, and you’re going to see that in forms of art and media as well.

TAB Chasing the Fox begins on Friday December 13 on TVNZ1 and TVNZ+.