Before the 1976 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale few people outside his home village on Spain’s northern coast had heard of Seve Ballesteros, who has died of cancer aged 54. By the end of the tournament, however, the whole world knew of the dashing teenager with the big smile and the adventurous style of play.
Though he led for the first three days of golf’s biggest event, Ballesteros faded on the final day, eventually tying for second place with Jack Nicklaus, six shots behind Johnny Miller. For all that, he was the talk of the tournament, especially for the show-stopping way in which he exited centre-stage.
Short and left of the 18th green in two shots and with a pair of bunkers blocking his way to the flagstick, Ballesteros produced the shot of the championship, a chip-and-run that tiptoed delicately between the sand traps and finished less than a metre from the cup. So exquisite was his touch that, watching on television at home in Texas the former Open, US Open and US PGA champion, Lee Trevino, was moved to leap from his armchair in spontaneous celebration of the youngster’s audacity and disregard for potential disaster.
Such brilliance was only the start. Over the next two decades, Ballesteros won 87 tournaments around the world, including five major championships — three Opens and two Masters — and a record 50 victories on the European Tour alone. In the process the gifted Spaniard became the leader of a pack that changed the face of world golf.
With Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam and Bernhard Langer, Ballesteros made up Europe’s “big five”, who, between them, won 16 grand slam titles and, along the way, resurrected the all but moribund Ryder Cup matches between the US and Europe. Previously no more than an exhibition match routinely won by the Americans, the biennial contest is now the most exciting event in golf.
Born in Pedrena, a nondescript fishing village on the southern shore of the Bay of Santander, Ballesteros was the youngest of four brothers, all of whom became professional golfers — the children of Baldomero Ballesteros Presmanes and Carmen Sota Ocejo (whose brother, Ramon, was a good enough player to finish sixth in the 1965 Masters). All six members of the Ballesteros clan lived in a one-storey dwelling above a barn. Their cows occupied the ground floor.
From an early age the baby of the family showed an unusual aptitude for golf. At the age of seven he was already hitting stones and pebbles across the nearby fields and the beach, his only club comprising an old three-iron head into which he would ram sticks to form a shaft. Forced to play every shot of whatever length and height with a club designed to hit the ball far and low, the boy developed the touch and feel for invention that would later captivate the world.
‘Amazing to see’
Graduating to the local club, the Real Golf de Pedrena, as a caddie, Ballesteros would sneak on to the course after dark and play by the light of the moon. By the time he was 13 he was easily winning the annual caddie championship.
Eight days after his 17th birthday Ballesteros turned professional, his first tournament being the Spanish Professional Championship, in which he finished a lowly 20th. Afterwards he cried in the locker room. In an early taste of the legendary Ballesteros competitiveness, he expected to finish no less than first.
Winning, however, would come later. But it is not so much for his impressive list of victories that Ballesteros was revered. Indeed, if he had had a more prosaic approach to his art — playing for the middle of the green rather than going for the flag — there can be little doubt that he would have won more than the five majors he did. For Ballesteros, the importance of the journey always far outweighed that of the arrival. So, while Faldo outnumbers him in terms of majors won, it is Ballesteros whom history will judge the more significant. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his magnetism and charisma, the European Tour — where prize-money in excess of £112-million was on offer last year — would be but a shadow of its current self. He was the catalyst around which the whole circuit was built.
In the Ryder Cup, too, Ballesteros, for all the contributions of others, was the foundation of the European side, for which he competed eight times as a player and once, memorably, as non-playing captain at Valderrama in 1997. Alongside his compatriot, Jose Maria Olazabal, Ballesteros played 15 matches against the Americans, winning 11, halving two and losing only twice. At that level of the game, theirs is a remarkable record. “I had great experiences with Seve in the Ryder Cup,” Olazabal told Golf Digest magazine. “He was amazing to see. He believed anything was possible. He constantly shocked me. I wish there was a tape of all the shots he has hit. Then we would really know how special he was.
“No one has ever made a bigger contribution to the European Tour. He was the one who broke down all the barriers, all the walls. He made the rest of the players of his time believe they could play everywhere in the world. I don’t think anyone comes close to him in this part of the world.”
Although he would hit what Nicklaus would later call “the greatest shot I have ever seen” — a 210m three-wood from a bunker during the 1983 Ryder Cup — perhaps the defining moment of Ballesteros’s career came in 1984 at St Andrews. Battling his great rival, Tom Watson, over the closing holes, Ballesteros was 3m or so from the flag on the 18th hole after two shots.
Should he make his putt, a second Open Championship victory was all but his. Later, he said he “willed” the ball into the hole, a result followed by the most joyous of celebrations. Again and again Ballesteros punched the air, his expressive face alive with adrenaline-fuelled emotion, as every spectator in the surrounding grandstands rose as one to acclaim his effort.
Retirement
On the other side of the ledger, however, there were shots of sheer ineptitude that only endeared the man even more to his audience. No one — not least Ballesteros himself — ever erased from the memory bank the four-iron he scuffed into the pond fronting the 15th green at Augusta National during the final round of the 1986 Masters. Had he hit the green, the tournament would have been all but over, regardless of the heroics of the eventual champion, Nicklaus.
Sadly, such disasters became more and more common. By the mid-1990s, Ballesteros, always bothered by a bad back, was but a shadow of the golfer he had once been. His last victory of any consequence came in 1995 — appropriately, at the Spanish Open. Perhaps the most damning statistic — one that points to the rapid decline of his game over the latter stages of his career — is that between 1976 and 1992 he was never out of the top 20 on the European Tour Order of Merit. Between 1996 and 2001 he was never inside the top 100.
As well as physical problems Ballesteros had his share of disagreements with golf’s establishment. In 1981 he was left out of the European Ryder Cup side after falling out with the European Tour over the payment of appearance money — cash inducements to which Ballesteros felt he was entitled just for turning up at an event.
In 2000, with Faldo, Langer and Olazabal, Ballesteros asked for a close and independent examination of the European Tour’s accounts for the previous five years. Controversial at best, insulting at worst, it was a request that did nothing for his popularity with tour officials.
Even worse, in March 2003 he was involved in an ugly altercation with an official after his group had been warned about their slow play during the Madeira Island Open. That was bad enough, but only six weeks later he was penalised a shot for playing too slowly during the third round of the Italian Open. He refused to accept the penalty and was disqualified.
Such incidents, however, were mere distractions from the sad deterioration in Ballesteros’s on-course performances, a period that eventually led to his retirement from competitive golf in July 2007. —