Alicia Zuckerman walked around the Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club on Friday morning wearing gleaming diamond earrings, a ruby-and-diamond ring fashioned into the shape of a snake, a massive 18-carat gold Rolex Yacht-Master II and an engagement ring so large that someone might confuse it for a really shiny quail egg.
All that serious bling isn’t just for show — it’s all business.
Zuckerman’s father, David, owns Leo’s Jewelry in Wayne, and she has become the unofficial jeweler to the PGA Tour’s pros and their wives and girlfriends. She estimates she has sold jewelry to about a quarter of the tour’s pros and basically wears merchandise as a walking billboard.
Whenever someone on the golf course compliments her jewelry, Zuckerman’s standard response is, “I’m in the business.” And the sale begins. She has literally sold the earrings off her ears several times. She even sold the earrings she got for her 21st birthday.
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“Nothing is sentimental to me,” she said.
But all that flashy brilliance that adorned Zuckerman’s ears and hands didn’t match her mood Friday; she was feeling sentimental in a different way.
“I’m usually never like this,” she said. “Ask anyone.”
The reason for Zuckerman’s unhappiness was obvious. She was following fiancé Brian Stuard, who was struggling on his way to missing the cut at the Rocket Mortgage Classic. The former Oakland University golfer from Jackson shot a 2-over-par 74 and finished at 1-over, missing the cut by four strokes.
But this isn’t a story about Stuard, who has been well-chronicled for his play and local support at the tournament. This is a story about Zuckerman and the side of the PGA Tour few see or understand. It’s the side of those who love and support PGA Tour pros, who ride the highs and the lows, who cheer from the periphery but can do nothing to help them when they struggle.
“It just sucks to watch,” Zuckerman said as Stuard slumped his shoulders in the fairway after an approach shot to the 12th green landed 37 feet short of the pin, leading to a disappointing par. Two holes later, he found the water and triple-bogeyed.
Zuckerman is different than many of the women who watch their husbands and boyfriends play; she was once an accomplished golfer and knows exactly what she’s watching.
After she graduated from Ann Arbor Huron, Zuckerman played at Oakland University, where she met Stuard, two years ahead of her. She aspired to play on the LPGA but didn’t make it past qualifying school, then decided to work for her father.
I hadn’t met Zuckerman before Friday, but I knew of her. I saw her follow the 39-year-old Stuard when she was his longtime girlfriend, happily embracing him after he tied for fifth in the inaugural tourney at Detroit Golf Club in 2019. I saw her again Thursday when I followed Stuard and spoke with a friend of theirs (who also works at Leo’s) who told me about the way Zuckerman has expertly pivoted by selling jewelry on golf courses instead of in the store.
The coronavirus pandemic showed Zuckerman how much more effective she could be working remotely using her phone and contacts. In the past two years, she has tripled her sales. The key is obviously access to millionaire athletes, but also the convenience no other jeweler has, as she attends every one of Stuard’s tournaments and personally knows many players.
“I make it easy for them,” she said. “I hand-deliver. If they want something, I can have it overnighted to wherever I am and then I hand-deliver it to them in the clubhouse or in their locker. They don’t have to walk in (to a store) and deal with a salesperson trying to sell them something they don’t need.
“They call me and say, ‘Hey, Alicia, my wife wants this.’ I show them a couple options, they send me a text back with a thumbs up on the picture they like, I get it and I literally just put it in their locker. They send me a check or write me a check and put in Brian’s locker, and Brian gives it to me.”
Zuckerman isn’t too forthcoming with details about her clients because she wants to respect their privacy. You can see some of her clients’ jewelry on her Instagram account, jewelsby.alicia.
But one of her key clients is Jon Rahm’s wife, Kelley. They met when Rahm was paired in one of his first PGA Tour events with Stuard. Zuckerman has sold Kelley all of her jewelry since then, including the snake ring she wore when she walked onto the 18th green at Torrey Pines after her husband won the 2021 U.S. Open.
Kelley Rahm’s jewelry collection has helped spread the word on tour about Zuckerman’s expertise. Players are willing to pay a premium over retail for the convenience of not having to visit a store in between traveling to tournaments.
One example is the five to 10 requests she gets each week for the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona with a white dial, commonly known as the Panda Daytona. It retails for $14,550, but it’s scarce. Players happily pay Zuckerman its market price — anywhere between $35,000-40,000, according to chrono24.com.
Her family’s history in the jewelry business, which dates to 1945, has helped Zuckerman forge connections that make it possible for her to acquire almost any watch or jewelry.
The most expensive watch she has sold is a diamond-encrusted Rolex Day-Date for $106,000. The most expensive piece? An $800,000 ring.
As for her engagement ring? It’s a work of art that Zuckerman designed. It’s huge and much larger than she would actually prefer, but she wears it to help catch clients’ eyes. It works. Right after she started wearing it, she sold two 13-carat rings.
And yet, it seems like Zuckerman would have traded it all Friday for the chance to watch Stuard play well. She was emotional when fans rallied around him three years ago in Detroit. But this year brought a quiet struggle for Stuard and a different kind of emotion for Zuckerman; she cares deeply about jewelry and making sales, but she reserves her sentiment for things that truly matter.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.
