Zucker brings passion to North Shore CC

When some people are first smitten by the golf bug, they take lessons and buy new clubs. They play as much as they can. They plan vacations around golf. The fortunate ones get to join private clubs.

Donald Zucker, a convert to golf when he was well into his 50s, did all of that. Then he bought a country club. And that was only the start of it.

Zucker did not stop at becoming the owner of North Shore, a scenic and historic club in Glen Head. He jumped with both feet into the business of upgrading it. He did not ask architect Tom Doak to move mountains. But he did give permission to move things around and create a few new holes.

This explains why Zucker is even more excited than usual about the game he took up 22 years ago. The revised and restored North Shore Country Club (est. 1914) will reopen on May 7, and that is the closest thing to a new course opening on Long Island has this spring.

"It's like a baby on the way," Zucker said during an enthusiastic tour this week.

He loves the holes that Doak created from scratch, including the 19th, a challenging short par 3 that Zucker requested just to make the place different. Having saved the club from almost certain doom in 2009, he can't wait to see how his members play the potentially drive-able but well bunkered second hole (288 yards from the white tees).

Zucker is thrilled just thinking about the reactions to the new, stunning, sloped approach on the par-4 13th. He really wants to hear what they have to say after they have finished No. 18, an amalgam of the former first and second holes, which measures 639 yards and plays into a prevailing wind.

"I said I had only one request," Zucker said, referring to early conversations with Doak. "I said, make a great finishing hole for me because anybody who comes to play here, when they leave this golf course, the thing that's going to stick in their memory the most is the last hole they played.' "

He wants them to want them to come back, as Zucker, a prominent Manhattan builder, has done since his wife made a golfer out of him.

"You want to hear the whole story?" he said, before talking about how his wife, a golf enthusiast, encouraged him to tag along with another couple during their normal round at North Fork Country Club in Cutchogue.

"My friend says to me, 'Why don't you hit the golf ball?' He gives me a stick, I take a swing and I don't know what I'm doing," the 79-year-old said. "And the next hole, he does the same thing. I must have done it 10 or 15 times. At the end, I told my wife, 'That was fun, maybe I should take some lessons.' She had planned the whole thing."

Before he knew it, he had played all over the country (including Augusta National) and Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. He joined five clubs. When a broker friend asked him to find a buyer for North Shore, Zucker found one standing in his own shoes.

So there he was the other day, praising the staff that he inherited (he retained just about everyone who worked there before he bought the club), coaxing the grass that already is a deep green ("We need some sun"), proudly showed off the new exercise facility run by John Ondrush, one of Long Island's top golf fitness experts.

Zucker has taken to golf and to North Shore the way he embraces an apartment complex in SoHo and the way he got behind Long Island Jewish Medical Center (they named a hospital after Zucker and his wife). When he gets in, he goes all out.

"My heart and soul is in everything I do," he said. "Otherwise why do it?"

He is proud that North Shore has the feel that Seth Raynor instilled 97 years ago. He is confident that it will be challenging for scratch golfers and enjoyable for others. "I'm not looking to punish anybody," he said. "I've taken my wife to play some golf courses on Long Island -- and I'm not going to mention any names -- but I mean it, she will never go back."

All the same, wait until North Shore's members try putting on the extraordinarily hilly green on No. 17 (125 yards from the back tees). And wait until they hit from the tips on No. 18. "I will not," the owner said, "be playing from 639 yards."