JUST ANOTHER GUY : Bruce Jenner Won’t Win Any Medals on the Golf Course

The world’s greatest athlete is in a bit of trouble now after launching his tee shot into a swamp, crashing his second shot far over the green into a refreshment area and screeching his third shot through the branches of a pine tree.

He makes a belated recovery, chipping onto the green and two-putting. But after the penalty strokes are added on, the world’s greatest athlete has taken a monstrous score on the first hole. An 8 to be exact. A quadruple bogey.

If Bruce Jenner had thrown the discus, the javelin or the shot the way he hits his driver, the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal would have been a paramedic’s nightmare.

If his pole vaulting skills had been no better than his ability to hit long irons, he might have gone under the bar but over the upper deck in Olympic Stadium and into Saskatchewan. He would have been forced to allow the silver and bronze medalists to play through in that memorable decathlon 12 years ago.

Jenner, the gold medalist in the Montreal Games, isn’t a terrible golfer. He shoots in the low 90s.

But somehow you expect more. You tend to figure that some guy who has been immortalized on Wheaties boxes isn’t going to slam-shank one so far off target that dogs should be brought in to find the ball. You believe that the same man who blitzed the finest athletes in the world in a grueling 10-event display of athletic prowess isn’t going to dredge up so much mud during a round of golf that he could find work as a backhoe operator.

You expect, well, you expect greatness.

“That’s Jenner, huh?” asked an excited Jon McLean of Newbury Park during the second round of the pro-am for the GTE Seniors tournament this week at Wood Ranch Golf Club in Simi Valley. “He must be really good, huh? I think I’ll follow him the rest of the round.”

Seconds later, Jenner sent a low liner into a swampy stand of cattails, adding his own sound effects, a high, whistling imitation of an incoming rocket. And he laughed.

McLean’s eyes widened to the size of trash can lids.

“Geez, he plays like me,” he said. “I thought he’d really be good.”

It’s a situation Jenner faces every time he steps onto a field of competition.

“People always expect me to be terrific,” said Jenner, his shoulder-length brown hair cascading out from under a golf visor as the sun reflects off his dark glasses. “I see it and hear it all the time. ‘Here comes WGA--the world’s greatest athlete.’

“My golf game tends to surprise them.”

Let us count the ways.

On the second hole Thursday, Jenner belted a 575-yard drive--200 yards up and 200 down before it slammed to earth about 175 yards from the tee.

His second shot screamed across the fairway and the cart path, the ball wedging itself on the side of a hill, tangled amid things you would dig out of your lawn with a shovel.

Standing on the cart path, he took his third swing, and the ball trickled down the rough about 40 feet, stopping beneath a tree. He punched the ball onto the green, slammed his first putt so hard that it hit the back of the hole and popped out, then sunk the putt with his sixth stroke on the par-5 hole.

It was not pretty, but the score wasn’t bad.

On the fourth hole, a 373-yard, par-4, Jenner took a route from tee to green that perhaps no other golfer had taken before. His tee shot sailed far to the left, over a sand trap and the cart path and within feet of the fairway for the fifth hole.

His second shot smacked the concrete cart path and bounded 75 feet into the air. When it finally stopped, it was within inches of the door to the women’s restroom, perched on a lonely tuft of grass. Undaunted, Jenner lofted the ball onto the green, two-putted for a bogey-5 and then announced, “This just isn’t my sport.”

Isn’t his sport? The guy won the Olympic decathlon and something isn’t his sport?

No. It isn’t.

Quinton Gray, a professional golfer,watched Jenner for nine holes. He had no difficulty making an evaluation.

“Being a good athlete helps him because of the timing of a golf swing,” he said. “But you don’t have to be a good athlete to be a good golfer.

“I can tell he has a lot of natural ability. He doesn’t swing the golf club like a normal 21-handicapper. But he doesn’t play much, and it shows. I don’t care how many Olympic decathlons you win, you don’t get good at this game without putting a lot of time and practice into it.”

Jenner knows that. And he also knows he probably won’t ever get any better.

“The guy out here isn’t the same guy who was in the Olympics,” he said. “Sports now is just for fun. I’m definitely not obsessed with it. . . . I don’t want to spend six hours a day playing and practicing. I’m good enough right now for me.

“But still, people don’t understand that. They see ol’ WGA plunk one into a lake and they’re so surprised. Like I’m supposed to be able to play perfect golf because I threw the discus and ran real fast 12 years ago. Those things have little to do with this game, believe me.”

Perhaps you need more proof?

OK. Take hole No. 5, a par-4, 430-yarder. Jenner boomed his tee shot and immediately bellowed, “Stay out of those bushes.” And the ball would have gone into the bushes if that giant sand trap hadn’t snatched it first.

He exploded from the trap in a shower of sand, knocking the ball over another trap by inches. The ball stopped in heavy rough. His next shot crossed the fairway and stopped in more heavy grass. His fourth shot was a winner, though, rolling onto the green from 50 feet and stopping 6 feet from the pin.

He made the putt for a bogey, and as he walked off the green, a man lunged forward with a pen and a scrap of paper, begging for a signature from the world’s greatest athlete.

“Just like golf fans,” Jenner said. “You make one nice putt and everyone wants your autograph.”