Comedy par for course for these two
It’s been almost 21 years since Dave Hemstad was struck by lightning. But he remembers the moment rather well.
It turned his lips purple, for one. It fried his nervous system sufficiently that he didn’t feel like himself for most of six months. And somewhere along the way, that biblical, treesplitting bolt — which arrived as he competed in the Ontario amateur golf championship in 1999 — also delivered a career brainwave. Up until that moment, Hemstad was an aspiring golf pro. On a scholarship at Missouri State, he’d already won a tournament at the NCAA Division I level. He was the reigning champion of the Toronto Star Amateur, played at the prestigious St. George’s Golf and Country Club. The kid had game.
But when his post-lightningstrike golf skills suffered, he turned his gaze elsewhere: to comedy.
He entered a student standup competition, won the $200 first prize and promptly dropped out of college, announcing to his parents how he planned to earn his living telling jokes to strangers in nightclubs.
“God bless the ignorance and resilience of kids. Back then I thought I needed some financial security in my life, so I chose standup comedy over golf,” Hemstad said.
“I didn’t realize there was something you could make less money at than golf, but I found it.”
All these years later, after a couple of decades spent as a comedian (with requisite survival-enhancing side gigs as an actor, writer and a voiceover professional best known for narrating ads for Home Depot), Hemstad has lately found a way to meld a couple of his life’s great passions. As one of the co-stars of “Off the Hozzle,” a new spin on a golf travel TV show, he’s found a way to earn a paycheque playing golf while occasionally inspiring a laugh.
The show is the brainchild of Hemstad’s lifelong friend and co-star, Mark Zecchino, best known as a broadcaster whose gigs include TSN’s “Golf Talk Canada” and PGA Tour radio. And the concept is simple. You know that person in your life with whom you’re hypercompetitive? Maybe it’s your sibling, or your best friend or your neighbour. Maybe, if you’re Michael Jordan, it’s the entirety of humanity.
For Hemstad, it’s Zecchino. For Zecchino, Hemstad. They began their rivalry as teenagers working at Dynamic Golf, the since-departed equipment retailer in Thornhill, where they would spend hours competing on the in-house putting green, with the loser getting the undesirable assignment of manning the store’s shoe department on a Saturday afternoon.
As travelling buddies in “Off the Hozzle,” the venues are considerably more upscale (only some of the world’s finest golf resorts) and the stakes are more compelling. The winner of the match typically gets to partake in a fun bucket-list sort of adventure — say, a spin around a NASCAR-esque speedway at 200 m.p.h. And the loser, in the tradition of the Canadian bro-comedy of yesteryear “Kenny vs. Spenny,” suffers an elaborate humiliation, if you consider being forced to walk the Las Vegas strip dressed as a showgirl a humiliation. Hemstad, after losing to Zecchino in episode one, said his moment in pinkfeathered regalia turned out to be more bearable than he’d imagined.
“I couldn’t believe how supportive people were on the strip; women were cheering me on,” he said. “But it was one of those moments where you look around and you think, ‘I’m not sure I made all the right choices in my life.’ ”
Dubious choices or not, the duo has discovered backers among North American broadcast executives who’ve lately been in search of sports-related content. Season one’s five episodes began airing this month on CBS Sports Network, which reaches some 65 million households in the United States and a fraction of that in Canada. Come June, they’ll be broadcast to a wider audience in Canada on TSN.
“It only took the shutdown of all professional sports and a global pandemic to get us on the air,” Zecchino said with a laugh.
Hemstad and Zecchino, though they’re both scratch players, are unfailingly modest about their golfing prowess. Hemstad was profiled in these pages last summer after he bookended his win in the inaugural Toronto Star Amateur with a victory in the event’s final running, beating Ben Snaidero on the first playoff hole to take the title. But Hemstad said his time playing at the NCAA level helped put his skills in proper perspective.
“I thought I was good, but I realized how many guys were still better than me,” he said. “I didn’t have the personality to spend eight hours a day alone on a driving range. More importantly, I don’t think I wanted to.” Zecchino — who grew up playing AAA hockey for the Don Mills Flyers, among other organizations, in what is now the Greater Toronto Hockey League — started pursuing competitive golf after he got tired of 10-month seasons at the rink. But his brief stab at making it as a pro gave him a good understanding of what separates the sport’s contenders from its pretenders. The story goes that Zecchino once reeled off a hot start at a oneday qualifier for the Canadian Open a couple of decades back, finding himself several strokes under par through nine holes. When informed by a volunteer scorer that he was leading the field by a considerable margin — meaning he was in a prime position to earn an automatic spot in the field of his first PGA Tour event with the victory, or at the very least find himself among a handful of players who would earn advancement to a second stage of qualifying — his game suddenly took a turn for the worse.
“I go to the 10th tee and completely freeze. I mean, total choke moment,” Zecchino said. “Not only did I not win the qualifier, I did not manage to (advance to the second stage). It goes to show you why the brain is the most important tool in any golfer’s golf bag.”
The brain’s important. But as “Off the Hozzle” happily reminds us, a sense of humour doesn’t hurt, either.
“The last thing the world needs is another golf travel show where people go somewhere and showcase a facility — they feel like infomercials,” said Zecchino.
“I thought, what if you did it a different way? Our show is more of a comedy about my relationship with Dave, about how we can’t stand losing to each other. But about how, at the end of the day, it always stays on the golf course.”
It stays on the golf course, or at least on the Vegas strip, in the name of well-timed comedy and infectious camaraderie.