Taking another opportunity to post a previously published article, this time one written on the great Seve Ballesteros, who is still struggling manfully through treatment for brain cancer. This was published on iseekgolf.com.
“Peter Alliss used to say I hit miracle shots. I never thought that. Miracles don’t happen very often; I was hitting those shots all the time” Severiano Ballesteros
Few true golf lovers will be unaware of the plight of the great Seve Ballesteros, released from a Spanish hospital recently after four separate surgeries to remove a brain tumour.
For those that hold the game dear, the Spaniard occupies a special place. Trying to quantify charisma is a challenging task, but it is no abuse of journalistic license to say that in this respect he occupies a similar stratosphere to Walter Hagen and Arnold Palmer, two of the most talismanic figures ever to lace up a pair of spikes.
Call it charisma, or je ne sais quoi, or what you will, but Ballesteros had an over supply of something that set him apart. When he walked on the course, he created a buzz. He infused the atmosphere with electricity, and created the anticipation that golfing magic was a possibility.
Despite his golf game going south in recent years, an inherent, pied piper-like magnetism remained. At 51, he is, by modern standards, still in the prime of his life, which makes all the more shocking the graveness of his current situation.
Seve announced his arrival to the golfing world at The Open Championship in 1976 as a 19-year-old. Displaying an outrageous sense of imagination and bravado, he saved par in ways that left observers speechless.
The famous episode at the Open Championship in 1979, where he made birdie from the middle of a Royal Lytham car park after a wildly errant tee shot, remains one of the most oft repeated anecdotes of golfing folklore.
At his peak, he played with an unconscious air of arrogance, with almost total disdain for the golf course.
The commentator Jim Murray once had this to say of Ballesteros:
“He goes after a golf course like a lion at a zebra. He doesn’t reason with it. He tries to hold its head underwater until it stops wriggling.”
There was no shot too difficult for him to visualise, no copse of trees too thick to manufacture a shot out of. Consequently, he played with little fear, attacking golf courses with abandon, fortified by the knowledge that his mercurial short game was gilt edged insurance against any indiscretion. It was stunning, entrepreneurial golf of the rawest form. Ben Crenshaw, no short game mug himself, observed that “Seve plays shots that I don’t even see in my dreams.”
For me, the memories of Ballesteros are powerful, and inspirational. When you watched him on television you were on edge. Golf seemed to take on a new dimension under his influence.
I played with Seve once, in a practice round during the 1996 Alfred Dunhill in Hong Kong. It was an ignominious introduction. I became so entranced by a conversation with the great man on the sixth hole that I forgot my golf clubs, leaving them 250 metres behind on the tee.
Embarrassing moments aside, what I remember most was a bunker shot played on the par five, ninth hole. Seve had short sided himself, on the downslope of the green side trap, pitching to a tight pin with the green sloping away from him, out of grainy, stony sand where the ball sat down.
I’m not sure that I could have kept it on the green. Needless to say, I was more than interested to watch what he could conjure up out of his mythical bag of tricks.
He made a pass at it like Tiger teeing off with a driver on a par five. The ball came out in slow motion, seemingly on time delay, spinning like a whirling dervish. It landed a foot over the lip, took one bounce and stopped on a dime six inches from the hole.
I turned to playing partner Peter Lonard, and appreciative, raised eyebrows met simultaneously. Words were unnecessary. From such moments legends are born. In this instance Seve’s was merely further entrenched, laser-etched into the cortex for perpetuity.
When Seve turned up to play, it seemed that little other than golf was on his mind. His intensity was legendary, and often intimidated opponents. He described his approach to the start of round in the following way,
“I look into their eyes, shake their hand, pat their back, and wish them luck, but I am thinking, ‘I am going to bury you’.”
It was little wonder then that small talk wasn’t his forte. Famously aloof, with a Hogan-esque intensity on the golf course, he mostly gave short shrift to niceties. Asked whether Lee Trevino and he conversed in Spanish, he replied, “ No- he’s Mexican.”
Capturing the essence of a personality like Seve stretches the boundaries of objectivity. Like most geniuses, he was, and is, a complex amalgam of factors and influences. Emotional, passionate, often thoughtful, sometimes dark and brooding. Free of spirit, competitive, enigmatic and they’re just the things we freely assume about him from observing his publicly presented identity.
But try to capture it we should, because as one of the true greats, he deserves to be remembered at his dynamic best. He may very well regain his former equilibrium with time, but there would be few prepared to argue against the reality that he has a serious fight on his hands. Premature as the eulogising tone of this article is, Seve needs to fight the great fight in the weeks and months ahead. He can rest assured that he’ll have no shortage of well wishers and support to help him along the way.
For me, nothing quite sums up my perception of the great Spaniard better than an answer given to a journalist in the 1990’s. His round had included a catastrophic four putt, and the writer asked him to describe how it had evolved.
After a moment’s contemplation, he replied laconicly,
“I miss, I miss, I miss, I make”,
Get better soon, Senor.
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