I think I've mentioned this before but anyway..in "typical" Canadian English the vowels in hock and hawk have merged, that is, they are pronounced the same. So Canadians (on average, and including myself) see the following word pairs as homophones:

hock/hawk
don/dawn (this can be awkward since Don is a man's name and Dawn is a woman's name)
tot/taught
cot/caught
awful/offal
cod/cawed

I think this may be the case for some parts of the US - I remember looking at some vowel map at the American Dialect Society - but I can't remember the details anymore. Anyway, hock/hawk sounds perfectly normal to my ears but I can see the source of confusion.