At the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto they have a radio booth where visitors can try their hand at calling play-by-play.
Mark Zecchino didn’t even have that to fall back on and he didn’t have a heck of a lot of time either to prepare for his first play-by-play broadcast of golf for PGA Tour Radio.
“Unlike some of the other guys on our team who have play-by-play backgrounds in football, I have no play-by-play experience whatsoever,” says Zecchino, a Scarborough native who is just finishing up his third season of calling the shots on the PGA Tour for PGA Tour Radio.
Zecchino was by no means a radio novice, though. He’d been broadcasting since 2011 as a host of GolfTalk Canada and had even been working for PGA Tour Radio as a studio host.
But you can ask anybody in broadcasting and they will tell you that doing play-by-play is a completely different animal than studio work.
There is a much more frenetic pace to it and there are so many things that can go wrong.
Still, Zecchino says he was getting a little tired of studio work and thought play-by-play of golf was something he wanted to try.
“I put the bug in the ear of the people at PGA Tour Radio,” Zecchino says. “We were coming up to the (2015) RBC Canadian Open and at the last minute they told me they needed somebody.
“I can tell you there’s no better way of learning than being thrown right into the fire. I was nervous as hell.”
To ease his nerves and perhaps their own as well, Zecchino’s play-by-play calls were on a slight time-delay on Thursday and Friday. By the weekend, however, they had him going live with the other two broadcasters.
That was the year that David Hearn almost won the Canadian Open and they had Zecchino calling all of his shots.
Calling play-by-play of golf may not be done exactly as you envision it. You might assume that they just sit in a booth watching TV monitors and calling the action from there.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
“We have a director in a studio who has many different monitors and computer screens so he can follow the leaderboards,” Zecchino explains. “We have three play-by-play guys and he’ll send us each out to follow a group.”
When the director calls his name, Zecchino has to be with the group he was assigned to and be ready to call the shot of whichever player is hitting, and then throw the broadcast on to the next person.
“We’re walking inside the ropes but we have to be in the right position so that the players can’t hear us and we can’t be moving or in their sight line,” says Zecchino, who admits that all of the play-by-play broadcasters have, on occasion, had to apologize to players for getting too close, or moving when they were hitting.
The hardest part of covering golf, he says, can be the putting.
“We have to have 30 different ways of saying ‘the ball went in.’”
When PGA Tour radio offered him the chance to do play-by-play at Glen Abbey Golf Club that summer of 2015 there was no commitment beyond that.
By the weekend, though, PGA Tour Radio had told him they would need him again for play-by-play in a couple of weeks. And ever since then he’s been a regular.
“Everyone has their own style,” Zecchino says of the play-by-play guys he works with the most.
“Bill Rosinski was the voice of the Carolina Panthers and he has that classic broadcasting voice. Dennis Paulson is a former PGA Tour winner who talks from the players’ perspective.
“I’m a fan. I’m an excitable guy and I bring the energy and that’s what the directors want out of me, to be the energy guy.”
Zecchino says he’s learned, though, he has to temper that a little.
“If it’s Thursday, maybe you can bring too much energy because it’s Thursday and there’s three more days left,” he explains. “By the weekend I let the energy out and I call it like I’d call hockey or wrestling.”
Although he really loves doing the job, Zecchino says it isn’t easy being away from his family so much, and also trying to balance being on the road a lot, with his responsibilities with GolfTalk Canada and TSN.
Still, there’s something about doing the job on a Sunday.
“The last two hours on Sunday is the most fun you can have,” he says. “You actually feel like you’re part of the event, like you’re in the tournament itself.”
