Thanks for your help walking me through this. A little embarrassing, I rewrote the stub and it is working fine. This script isn't on git so unfortunately I cannot back track. It's curious I found the original post here, I now wonder what I/we were doing; it must have been a typo. Note, it wasn't a procedure but good call on that behaviour.
Very simple, as the sample goes..
import arcpy
print "Connecting to SQL Server.."
sqlConn = arcpy.ArcSDESQLExecute(r"\\gismsa\...\sde@iSphereBuoys.sde")
table_name = 'iSphereBuoys'
field_name = 'hashId'
sql = '''
SELECT {0} FROM {1} WHERE {0}='943906c71d6c93c7a2515b33d7a5be65'
'''.format(field_name, table_name)
sqlReturn = sqlConn.execute(sql)
print sqlReturn
for i in sqlReturn:
print i