Mark Richardson takes himself to the far end of Remuera Golf Club's driving range, past the official hitting bays, so he can smash foraged golf balls and avoid talking to people.

Or he drives his jetski way into the Gulf, until he can see neither land nor people, and fishes, but doesn't care if he catches anything.

His third major hobby is sleeping. He happily admits to having just a handful of mates.

Like Greta Garbo, he just wants to be alone.

READ MORE:

* Family pays price for Mark Richardson's baby spat with Jacinda Ardern

* The AM Show: Sub-zero temperatures, Winston snubs and Belgian comebacks all in a morning's work

* The wrath of social media descends on Mark Richardson

* Jacinda Ardern and Mark Richardson clash over questions about her baby plans

Mark Richardson the broadcaster said everyone should give Donald Trump a chance, that our kids should all just harden up, and - infamously - that women should tell prospective employers if they're intending to have children.

"He's an enigma," says one television executive who has worked with him.

"You wonder how much is the persona. He can just sit there quietly all day, but ask him something provocative, and he's got an opinion."

The word 'brand' and the phrase 'arrogant twat' are mentioned several times when we meet (by him, not by me). So where does brand Richardson end, and the man begin? And is either of them arrogant?

ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/STUFF Is Mark Richardson just misunderstood? Probably not.

Mark Richardson the cricketer was an Auckland and Otago off-spin bowler who lost the knack so badly that in 1992 he had the second-worst bowling average in New Zealand provincial cricket.

Famously, he went away and reinvented himself as a dour opening bat who accumulated enough runs to force himself into the New Zealand test team at the age of 29.

We can deduce from that, he says, that he was driven, willing to find whatever way he could to achieve what he wanted. His dad had played cricket for Hawke's Bay; being a Black Cap was "the driving force of my life". In a North & South profile from his playing days, he says "everything I've achieved I've worked really hard at".

A former cricket colleague, asked for a description of Richardson in those days, opts for "intense, nervous, paranoid". Yes, that's fair, says Richardson unflinchingly. He never actually enjoyed playing cricket, he explains; instead, he fixated on all the ways he might fail.

As a coping strategy, he boiled it down to a mantra that he saved as his phone screensaver ("STILL. HEAD FORWARD. WATCH THE BALL") and wrote in the brim of his cap. He tells me there's a clip of him facing the Australian quick Jason Gillespie and, even as he plays his stroke, he's mouthing those words to himself.

That level of introspection didn't help Richardson on his final tour of Australia, playing those infamous amateur psychologists in baggy green caps.

He'd just scored a century against England at Lord's, his "personal Everest", but then lost the desire. He was just 33 and had played 38 tests.

"I didn't want to be there, and I got chewed up, really chewed up. I will be bitter about my performance against Australia until the day I die, because I undersold myself there. I had the ability to do better than I did."

The Australians, he says, "knew how to disintegrate, they knew exactly where you would struggle mentally".

He met captain Stephen Fleming in the hotel bar after a test in Adelaide and told him it was over.

He'd not yet told his new wife, Mary ("she was pissed off I didn't consult her .. she'd been swanning in a box at Lord's with Mick Jagger and I had to tell her she was no longer a WAG").

But he knew it was the right decision when he took an easy contract playing exhibition games for a celebrity team in England. He recalls drinking a beer in the bar of a luxury hotel in Newquay, Cornwall in the UK, surrounded by cricketing legends, trying to convince himself he was having a great time and realising he wasn't. It's years since he's picked up a bat.

But the other side to this story is that Richardson was already forging a plan.

He wanted to become a television cricket commentator, and he knew leaving on his own terms was the only way to guarantee that: "I had to go when my stocks were high."

Sure enough, on retirement Richardson duly got a start on Sky's cricket commentary team.

Similarly, he'd been renowned as a useless and glacially-slow fielder (thus his nickname 'Rigor', as in Rigor Mortis) and so, at the end of a series, Richardson would don an all-in-one lycra suit and, with a deadly serious look on his face, challenge the opposition's slowest player to a race.

It was an early demonstration of a rare ability to laugh at himself - and the start of creating his off-field persona or - as he puts it - "massaging his brand to a certain extent".

Batting against Zimbabwe in a test match in 2000, Richardson's first year as a Black Cap.

Richardson did well at the commentary, worked hard, learned at the feet of Martin Crowe, but it wasn't a full-time earn.

Then a skit for Sky's cricket magazine show, in which Fleming pretended to become enraged at his line of questioning during an interview, won the attention of TV producer Ric Salizzo, who was casting for a new sports magazine show.

Again, that self-deprecation helped, and Richardson was hired alongside Andrew Mulligan to host the Crowd Goes Wild. "Our rugby culture delivers a lot of players who can goof off and be clowns, but can't really take the mickey out of themselves, and stay in character, quite like Mark Richardson," says Mulligan. "Now I think about it, that made him pretty different."

Richardson's role on the show, an uneven but often hilarious half-hour, was as the curmudgeonly old bugger who didn't really want to be there.

"It was everything I wanted to be, but couldn't be … it wasn't acting, but it was a chance to see what would that be like, to be this arrogant twat," he says. "It was fun."

The hosts would deliberately sabotage each other's lines: Richardson's favoured long-running trick was to deliberately cut across Mulligan, a serious hoops fan, whenever he tried to make a point after a basketball story.

On screen, they loathed each other; off screen, they got on rather well.

And yet, while they were colleagues for 11 years, Mulligan only once visited Richardson's house.

Other work colleagues tell me similar tales. "I'd say 'see you later' at the end of the show and see him next day at work and that was it," says Mulligan.

"But I never thought we would be mates outside work, just because he's like that, he's Mark. I firmly believe he is on the spectrum. When we were on Radio Sport, he wouldn't say boo to anyone until the red light went on, then when the red light went on, he was away."

Yes, says Richardson, he's always kept a distance between work and home. Similarly, he never really became mates with his cricket teammates. Of all of them, only opening bowler Chris Martin - another who was quite clearly a rather different individual - has remained a friend.

"On the show I would say 'look, don't listen to him, he hates people, that's fine'," says Mulligan. "He doesn't hate people - but he is bemused when people come up and say g'day to him. I think they take it a bit personally if he's not a warm, gregarious guy. He's certainly not Jason Gunn."

Richardson tells me his best mate lives in Vancouver, and can come home for a visit and depart again without them catching up.

Otherwise, his social circle is mainly fellow St Heliers Primary School parents (he and Mary have 11-year-old twins, a boy and a girl) and his hobbies are, as discussed, hitting golf balls, driving jetskis and napping. He's had half an hour's kip in the car before meeting me to be interviewed over brunch.

While his twins got some stick at school when Richardson famously argued with prime minister Jacinda Ardern over whether women should reveal their pregnancy plans in job interviews (he eventually, of course, told them to harden up, he says with a smile), he mainly gets left alone.

He does, though, have a prepared speech in case that changes - all about how if someone has a problem with him, to raise it with his bosses, rather than upbraid him when he's not at work.

Because, he says, if people really think he's arrogant off camera, it's actually that he's quite shy.

For example, he says, he refuses public speaking engagements because it stresses him out for weeks.

"I think the biggest misconception about Mark is that he has an ego," says Mulligan. "He doesn't have an ego, I really want to stress that. People think he's an arrogant twat. He's not, that's the crazy thing."

For years, Richardson worked both ends of the day. He was on Radio Sport's breakfast show, in several guises, without any of them quite working. "I would say I failed at Radio Sport."

A combination with the station's drivetime host, D'Arcy Waldegrave (whom he liked), produced, he says, "a very dysfunctional unit".

The last attempt was putting him and Mulligan on under the Crowd Goes Wild brand, to head in the sports-entertainment direction: "We were essentially just pouring Roundup on the traditional Radio Sport audience - they really hated it."

STACY SQUIRES/STUFF Richardson announcing his retirement from cricket in 2004.

Mulligan says Richardson was actually a good radio broadcaster, but circumstances were not in his favour.

So he jumped before he was pushed, heading to music station The Sound. Having already been personally selected by reality TV's grand dame, Julie Christie, to front The Block, newly-imported from Australia, it was a calculated move to snuggle closer to the Mediaworks bosom.

It worked. In 2016, he traded up from The Crowd Goes Wild, becoming the sports jock on Three's re-worked breakfast show alongside host Duncan Garner and newsreader Amanda Gillies. Reading the sports news quickly became just a small part of the brief; left to roam off-leash, Richardson fires up on whatever issue he fancies.

Often it becomes news - particularly on Three's own website, Newshub.

The irony is that the AM Show Mark Richardson is a much paler version of The Crowd Goes Wild Mark Richardson. He was saying all this a decade ago, says Mulligan, only nobody was watching.

"He's Paul Henry Lite," he laughs. "Paul Henry has the same opinions, essentially, but probably just crafted them a little bit better and was more refined with his delivery ... I think it's quite fitting he is now in that old slot Paul Henry occupied."

Richardson has said some fairly outlandish things, but I test him on his declaration that we should give US President Donald Trump "a chance".

And sure enough, he doesn't back down. "I do believe Trump is a complete utter buffoon. You could throw every label at him - narcissist, sexist, racist - he is probably all of them.

"But I tend to think America is dividing itself, I am not sure Trump is dividing them. Just get on with it, and if you don't like it, just vote him out at the next election, that's democracy. But, right now, I believe just give him a shot."

CRAIG SIMCOX/STUFF Richardson's beige bodysuit and slowest-runner challenges were a part of building his brand.

He maintains he believes everything he says, and he won't recant any of it. It's just he doesn't necessarily believe it quite as virulently as he lets on. "That's one of my theories … if you are normal on TV, it comes across as flat," says Richardson. "I think you have to be a slight magnification, and what that often comes across as is a slight magnification of what I believe."

But he defends what he said to Jacinda Ardern.

Richardson asked Ardern - pre-baby Neve - whether she would take maternity leave while in Parliament and argued employers should have the right to ask interview candidates if they intended to get or were indeed pregnant.

Ardern told Richardson his view was "unacceptable". Richardson regards it as a good debate, says Ardern was fine with him afterwards and since, and he thinks the prime minister is an "amazing lady" (though he wouldn't vote for her).

The reaction, however, was different.

Columnist Rachel Stewart wrote that she'd seen Richardson's "rage, his sexism, his lack of self-awareness". He says it all got twisted to suit an agenda, and he's no "sexist pig".

"I learned a lesson that … certain topics if you don't want to cause a s...storm, you don't say it," says Richardson. "Sometimes, you are going to say it [anyway] because you believe it. I stand up for what I said and I believe what I said.

"I learned a lesson in that every time you touch the iron, you get burned. There's no point trying to explain yourself and you've just got to wear it."

GRAHAME COX Richardson shifted straight from cricketer to commentator. This picture is from 2004, his first season in the commentary box.

Richardson's position is odd: he says he was guilty of idealism and naivete. If he was an employer, he would ask the pregnancy question if he was allowed to. But he would also hire that candidate if they were the best, and "I would then make sure I made it work and got her back into my organisation as fast as I possibly could".

The Ardern incident then was, perhaps, the only time Richardson wasn't ready for the reaction.

"He honestly knows when he says something the effect it is going to have - he's very astute," says his big boss, Mediaworks' chief content officer Andrew Szusterman.

"[Opinions are good] as long as they [broadcasters] realise the effect they have, positive and negative, on themselves and on the show they are on - as opposed to sitting on the fence. And the one thing you can say about Mark is he's not a fence-sitter."

ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/STUFF Richardson never looks stressed when he's at work.

Midday beneath blue skies in a small park in Hobsonville Point, a new-build west Auckland suburb full of construction workers.

Richardson is trying to eat a panini and drink a flat white between filming a scene for The Block, the reality TV home-reno show he's hosted for seven years.

His day began at 4am.

He was on air from 6am till 9am on Three's The AM Show, went to production house Warner Bros to record some voiceovers for The Block, took a nap, came here, will now proceed to shoot an almost word-perfect scene, then carry on to spend his afternoon and evening at the live magazine show The Project, which airs at 7pm.

His shirt is creaseless, his smile genuine, he doesn't look tired, stressed or unhappy.

In summer, The Block simply gets exchanged for Sky's cricket commentary box.

Is anyone on our screens more than Richardson, a former test cricketer with no formal broadcast or journalism training?

Mediaworks, his main employer, say his appeal is his versatility and his professionalism. Szusterman chooses the description "chameleon-like", to describe Richardson's adaptability.

"As a broadcaster," says Szusterman, "I think he is just so underestimated."

A few hours later, in a Mt Eden studio, Richardson sits at a conference table with four production staff and the other three hosts of The Project, running the evening's script.

He's swapped his Block-compulsory suede workboots for brown loafers, and is chewing on a carrot stick. He's pretty quiet at first, but determined about what he wants to say.

It comes to an item about two backpackers who've spent a year travelling New Zealand and writing a blog. The script calls for Richardson to ask them: "What's your job?"

"Shouldn't it be 'haven't you got a job you should be at?'" he says, with just the right amount of sneer. It works well when he launches it on the backpackers live.

Richardson says whenever he was asked who he played cricket for, he never felt comfortable just baldly saying "The Black Caps". It was always easier to say he'd played provincial cricket and a few tests.

Despite the massive amounts of airtime he enjoys, he feels the same about television. "I am on primetime TV, but it doesn't feel that way."

In fact, he worries every day about being punted (needlessly, says Szusterman: "we would always be on the look-out for projects for him, but I think where he goes next is completely up to him - I think he's that good").

ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/STUFF Richardson on the set of The Project TV show just before filming.

So, in contrast to the on-screen Richardson, the off-screen Richardson's coping strategy, the modern equivalent of the motivational mantra, seems to be working hard at being likeable.

"It's a very small talent pool in New Zealand," he says.

"And I reckon you know you are going to get the arse at some stage, so don't burn your bridges on the way out, don't get known as a difficult person to deal with, and then there will be other opportunities."

Seems to work.

"He's bloody good to work with," says The Block's executive producer, Aaron Dolbel. "He's super chilled out. Of all the people I've worked with, he's the easiest. And I've never known anyone to learn a script like him."

When he quit cricket, Richardson took up distance running.

He was pretty good, but it blew his knees out. So he tried triathlon, but was a crap swimmer ("I swim like a set of keys - throw your car keys in the pool, they swim about as well as I do").

He'd like to be a good golfer, but doesn't have the time.

So he's settled for 40-minute jogs, but he clearly misses the opportunity to be fiercely competitive about something, anything. As an aside, he admits he wouldn't mind a go at being a National MP, because "it's a game, it's a competition".

Szusterman reckons Richardson's advantage comes from the hard edge of his sports background.

When I watch him film at The Block, he says he's had one read-through of the script.

Then he delivers most of it in one take, throw in some ad-libs, pauses, and asks if they can shoot a specific part again. Dolbel, who seemed happy either way, says this self-editing is not unusual.

"He does that all the time. If he makes one mistake, he comes to talk to me about it - he's just disappointed in himself." Richardson tells me later he gets angry with himself if he makes a mistake on-screen.

ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/STUFF Rehearsing for The Project.

He likes doing The Project, he says, because it's "quite difficult...quite awkward", a test of all the things he wasn't good at when he first started, like quick jokes and one-liners. "You get quite nervous, 'oh, it is my turn to talk next', and you've got to nail it."

And almost every show Richardson is on, he seems to get bagged. On one episode of The Project, Jeremy Corbett compared him to disgraced US television host Matt Lauer. Richardson says he likes it, it means he fits in. And "it's better if they do. I always maintain if I say something that might be upsetting, someone has to slap me on air, and I welcome that. To balance it."

That doesn't happen so much on The AM Show, where he's encouraged to speak up. Indeed, it was executive producer Sarah Bristow who suggested he declare his politics (true blue) on the show, so he did.

"I thought bugger it, I will do. I am not a journo and I don't consider myself part of the media." Oh come on, even after all this time? "I am a bitter and twisted old sportsman." Then he laughs, and admits that of course he's the media.

Bitter and twisted? Not so much.

ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/STUFF Off-screen, Richardson works hard to be likeable.

We're back to talking how people perceive him.

"The brand I'd like people to have of me is - is he for real or not? I don't want to people to go 'he's acting', but I also want them to question do I really mean what i am saying, even when I do mean it…"

He chortles. "It's a carefully managed brand."

He's a curious one. As one TV colleague says: "It's weird: he's very private, but yet very open."

And he has told me a whole lot about how he feels and thinks, his insecurities and his fears. He's answered every question. He's talked about the topics the PR handler wanted to know if he would be asked about (like the Ardern thing). He's happy to chat again if I need anything more. He's extremely likeable.

And yet, when the PR asks what I think, I say I don't feel like I really know him any better than I did before. Yes, she says, nodding, as if she expected that outcome all along.

* Comments on this article have now closed

﻿