Johnny Come Lately

They still tell the stories around the ol’ Senior PGA Tour campfire and at any 19th hole where the glass is up, and the yarn-spinners are off.

John Jacobs doesn’t deny the stories; actually, he probably embellishes them, though he really doesn’t have to because who needs hyperbole when fact is so much more entertaining?

Like the time he was in Monterrey, Mexico, playing golf, as usual.

“I was in a Callaway for a guy and I would have gotten $50,000 if I had won, and I was in the semifinals when it was rained out,” says Jacobs, an overnight sensation on the senior tour after almost a lifetime of overnights . . . and more than a few sunrises.

It wasn’t that $50,000 was that big a deal, even to a soldier with the rank of Specialist Fourth Class, which Jacobs held in the mid-’60s.

“He would just get his pockets full and couldn’t wait to get them empty again,” says his brother, Tommy, a player of enough renown to have competed on a Ryder Cup team and won four PGA Tour events. At 17, he was the youngest player ever in the Masters.

But John didn’t get a chance to get his pockets full on the Monterrey trip.

“They sent some Army and Air Force guys after me, from that air base in San Antonio [Lackland AFB], and brought me back,” he says.

Seems Sp4 Jacobs was AWOL at the time.

“A couple of days later, I was in Vietnam.”

Actually, not just for that.

“Well, I was at Fort Hood, Texas, at the time and the general there thought I was fooling around with his wife,” Jacobs says. “Actually, it wasn’t me but another guy in the pro shop.”

Mistaken identity plus AWOL led to four months in the jungle before Jacobs beat the rap, largely by giving golf lessons to the wife of Nguyen Cao Ky, the premier of South Vietnam.

Playing golf is what he’s good at . . . that and handicapping horses and keeping friends happy and spending money and throwing and going to parties.

And, now, finally, winning golf tournaments.

After years of roaming around the world, the money coming in, the money going out faster, John Jacobs is ready for prime time, winner of the Nationwide Championship on the Senior PGA Tour in June and in town this week for the U.S. Senior Open at Riviera.

What took him so long?

Actually, he’s what took him so long.

“Before, it wasn’t as if I was a degenerate,” he says. “I just didn’t do the things that would have made me a champion. I was just having too good a time.”

He was a good player, maybe a great player, from when he was handed a club at 4, by his dad, Keith, who ran Montebello Golf Course.

His first 300-yard drive came when he was 13, just before he became a star at California High in Whittier and before he won the Southern California Amateur.

“John was as good as he wanted to be,” says Bill Barisoff, the agent for jockey Eddie Delahoussaye and a longtime Jacobs friend from both the golf course and the racetrack.

“He never practiced. As a kid, he had natural talent. Tommy had more success than John. If John had applied himself the way Tommy did. . . . I think everybody knew John had more natural ability.”

Enough ability to win the Southern California Amateur. Enough to be a high school phenom, with greater things predicted. Enough to . . . well, too much, really.

“I never wanted for anything,” Jacobs says. “If I had wanted, I might have played harder. I never worked hard enough to be a champion, but I can’t worry about that now. I’ve got no regrets. I’m 53 years old and I’m having the time of my life.”

He’s 53 years old, and he’s been having the time of his life for, oh, about 53 years.

Take his college career. His biography in the Senior PGA Tour media guide lists college attended: University of Southern California.

“Three days,” he says.

Santa Anita was more fun.

“I got hooked because, instead of working hard by hitting balls and practicing my short game, all I had to do was read the Daily Racing Form and clock a few horses,” he says. “Which one made more sense?”

Well. . . .

“He’s a pretty good handicapper,” Tommy says. “You know what a pretty good handicapper is?”

Yeah, he’s a guy who loses his money more slowly than a pretty bad handicapper.

“Right,” Tommy says.

More important were the people John met at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar.

“I have a lot of friends, and I love the people at the track,” he says. “Now I don’t have time to go there as much, but I love the people because I love people who take a chance. Really, that’s what golfers do: Take a chance.”

After Vietnam, he took a chance on the PGA Tour, but it wasn’t much of a chance really. He played 12 years, earned $119,776 and probably spent four or five times that, supplementing his income by winning long-drive contests and cultivating friends.

“It was a waste,” Barisoff said of Jacobs’ time on the PGA Tour, in which his best finish was a second place at Jacksonville, Fla.

Jacobs defends himself, saying, “I [messed] up my life, nobody else’s. But everything gets exaggerated. The stories get exaggerated. I played hard, but I only hurt myself.”

Not totally.

“It bothered me [that John wasted so much talent],” Tommy says. “And I know it was frustrating to his friends. But Johnny was going to do what Johnny wanted to do.”

Adds Barisoff: “I think John became a little self-destructive along the way. Maybe he was afraid of success. He was just so likable. Everybody liked John.

“If John had $10 in his pocket, you’d think he had $10,000.

“The truth of the matter is that John had never had to face tough times. Everybody always supported him. If John wanted something, John had it. He has never missed anything. There has always been a sponsor.

“But nobody was happier for John when he won that tournament than me and the rest of his friends.”

Says Jacobs: “I never was a millionaire, with a house on the hill and a Ferrari.”

But he knew millionaires, with houses on hills and Ferraris.

“Yeah, and I could borrow them.”

And he admits he wasn’t exactly diligent about the PGA Tour, for that matter about golf in general.

“One time, I had a deal with an air travel card and $1,800 a month, which was pretty good money then, in 1969-70,” he says. “But if I was east of the Mississippi and missed the cut, I might end up in Paris for Sunday breakfast.”

Or more likely London for lunch and Valerie, his on-and-off girlfriend of more than two decades, his wife of a year.

She is largely the reason he played enough on the European tour to keep his card after finding enough success in Asia to be the first American to win the Asian Golf Circuit Order of Merit.

And she is a large reason for his success on the Senior PGA Tour, establishing a home base in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“She has been a steadying influence,” he says.

The senior tour advertises itself as giving golfers a mulligan. Jacobs has made the most of it.

“I wasn’t a bad player my whole life,” he says. “When I turned 50, I wasn’t going to let this second chance go by. It’s kind of nice in life that you get a second chance after squandering the first.”

Says Tommy: “[Winning a senior tour tournament] was a very big thrill for him. He had really been pointing for the senior tour: one, for the money and two, because he wanted to show he could play, that he wasn’t a screw-up, that he would win.”

The money has been there, since he came to the circuit from the qualifying school. Jacobs earned $510,263 in 1996, his first full year on the tour, and added $802,942 last year. He is ninth on the ’98 money list, with earnings of $551,907 going into this weekend’s Ameritech Classic.

And the strength has always been there. Jacobs leads the tour in driving for distance, averaging 279 yards per tee shot.

It will keep him going, he says, allowing “me to put away some money for my old age.”

And allowing him and others to keep telling the stories, the true ones and the fables. The true ones are better.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Senior Open Championship

* When: Thursday through Sunday.

* Where: Riviera Country Club, Pacific Palisades (6,906 yards, par 71).

* Defending champion: Graham Marsh.

* Television: ESPN (Thursday and Friday, 12:30 and 4:30 p.m.; Channel 4 (Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m.).