Finally Smokin'

You have your choice of exotic starting points when you write about John Jacobs: Santa Anita Park in the late '60s; the 1st tee at Saigon Country Club during the Vietnam War; the Monte Carlo Casino in the late '80s. But the life that Jacobs enjoys today as a two-time winner on the Senior PGA Tour dates to that summer day in 1975 when he met Valerie Lennard, a divorced Englishwoman with two children, on a yacht in Marbella, Spain.

The owner of the yacht, a friend of an American hotelier who had befriended Jacobs, was a character right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. "I don't know where he got his money," says Jacobs, telling the story, "but he was married to a hooker, and there was Dom Pérignon everywhere."

How did Jacobs know the host's wife was a hooker? "He told us," Jacobs recalls. "He said, 'I'd like to introduce you to my wife, the hooker, and our little bastard kids.' "

This long-remembered line still amuses Jacobs, but it was the other woman, the aristocratic Valerie, who caught his eye that day. He invited her to dinner, but she declined. He invited her to lunch the following day—with her children—and she accepted. But Valerie wasn't really interested in the charming but dissolute American golf pro. As she explains today, "I was going out with this very nice German prince."

Well, you know how these grand romances turn out. Twenty-two years later, John married Valerie and found happiness in a cozy house on a lake in Scottsdale, Ariz.

There is some disagreement about how John Jacobs spent those 22 years of on-and-off courtship. Golfers who played the Asian and European tours in the '80s remember him as a gallery favorite who won long-drive contests and partied away his future. "He probably had too much fun," says Brian Mogg, a former touring pro who now teaches at the David Leadbetter Academy in Lake Nona, Fla. "Many of us expected to find JJ dead somewhere in the middle of Asia." Others gleefully tell Jacobs stories that slip in and out of the time frame: how he gave golf lessons in Saigon to the wife of the notorious South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky; how he won and lost thousands handicapping horse races in Southern California; how he went AWOL from the Army for two days in 1964; how he flew to Vietnam in a business suit, surrounded by fellow soldiers in battle gear; how he wiped out on a motorcycle in Thailand in '84 but played with a broken right leg the next day and went on to top that season's Asian tour money list.

"I feel very uptight about those stories," says Valerie Jacobs, sipping iced tea in a Florida clubhouse while her husband warms up for a tournament round. "I've known John since he was 30, and none of those things have happened since I've known him." Specifically, she rejects the notion that her husband is an unrepentant boozer. When it came time to celebrate his victory at the MasterCard Championship in January, "We drank tea in our hotel room," Valerie says, adding, "I'm a teetotaler. I'm never drunk. Why would I marry somebody who was?"

She knows, of course, that her husband encourages the stories. Like a latter-day Dean Martin, he spins yarns of Far Eastern excess ("The problem is that Asia is so f——— hot; two beers and you're drunk") and tournament torpor ("I could play, but I was always more concerned about getting to the next party"). Competing in a recent pro-am, the engaging Jacobs entertained his amateur partners with self-deprecatory jabs and Rat Pack humor. He joked with former major leaguer John Kruk about binge drinking, saying, "At least in Scottsdale they've got streetlights to help me get home."

"It's bravado," says Valerie. "He's never behaved in a way to embarrass me."

Which is not to say that Jacobs hasn't dismayed Valerie and others during his hit-and-myth career. "He just never had any discipline," says his older brother, Tommy, winner of four events as a professional and the runner-up to Ken Venturi in the 1964 U.S. Open. "I could tell you story after story." With a smile, he adds, "I'm not going to."