On Aug. 29, three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina rearranged the face of New Orleans, a new day will dawn at City Park.

Helping usher in Day 1 post-Katrina at the remodeled North Course is Don Tillar, a 47-year-old graduate of Notre Dame who left a job selling insurance four years ago to pursue his life's passion.

As the new director of golf at the North Course, Tillar will oversee the daily operation of the driving range and 5,700-yard, par-67 course for Billy Casper Golf, a Virginia-based management group that is contracted to make $6,500 per month through 2010, according to City Park spokesman John Hopper.

Tillar actually took the job sight unseen in a city that still is recovering from the storm, suggesting he might have one or two loose screws.

Truth be told, he simply couldn't pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of history.

"I wasn't there for the conference call when we were shown pictures of the course right after Katrina and a year or so later," Tillar said during a driving tour of the North Course on Tuesday. "But I talked to enough people who painted a pretty good picture for me.

"I had some friends tell me, 'I can't believe you're going down there!' But part of the lure for me was to think outside the box and be a part of starting from scratch at a golf course that has so much history."

Casper is part of that history, winning the 1958 Greater New Orleans Open on the old West Course at City Park, across the street from where Tillar, golf course superintendent Louis Bischoff and their combined work force of 20 full- and part-time people have set up shop.

In the coming weeks, the old clubhouse on Filmore Avenue will be razed, another sign of recovery at City Park. Meantime, it continues to serve as a painful reminder of three long years.

"I remember driving up to the course at 8:30 the morning of July 15, my first day on the job," Tillar said. "When I first saw the golf course it looked like it was asleep. You could tell it was a golf course, but it was asleep.

"Now it looks awake, and hopefully by Labor Day weekend it will be wide awake and ready to go."

Tillar's first order of business is getting the North Course ready for what promises to be a busy and memorable Labor Day weekend, beginning with a fundraising event called "Play the Park" on Aug. 29 sponsored by the Fore!Kids Foundation.

On Aug. 30, 224 lottery winners will play a best-ball scramble in the morning for free. That afternoon, the course will officially welcome back the paying public for play through the rest of the holiday weekend.

Tillar said more than 500 golfers have entered the lottery online (www@cityparkgolf.com) and in person at the park. The deadline to enter is midnight Sunday.

Each entrant will be assigned a number, and those numbers will be fed into a computer. The winners will be picked randomly and notified by phone beginning at 8 a.m. Monday.

"We'll start filling up the foursomes starting with the first group at 6 a.m.," Tillar said. "The afternoon of the 30th, we'll turn it over to the paying public. That means someone out of that first tee time at 2 p.m. on Aug. 30 will hold the course record if only for eight to 10 minutes. But they'll have the course record."

In the coming days, Bischoff and his crew will put the finishing touches on the course, placing mulch in tree beds and pins and tee boxes in their proper spots. They'll put out water coolers and put up welcome signs, spruce up the on-course bathrooms, beautify the driving range and paint where needed.

"The big carrot for Billy Casper Golf and me is what happens long term to the whole golf complex," said Tillar, who previously worked as an assistant director of golf operations at a municipal course in Cincinnati. "There is great potential here, and it would be a wonderful facility to be involved in, both from a corporate standpoint and for me personally.

Tillar paused.

"In 2 1/2 years we're going to get this place running the best we can, have some fun, give it back to the community and get the driving range humming and back to where it was when it was churning out tens of thousands of buckets every year," he said. "From a demographic point of view, if we give them a good product that can happen again. When people leave here, I want them to say they had a fun and enjoyable experience and they're coming back."

That indeed will be music to the ears of every City Park golfer past, present and future.

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