Seve- The Matador Fights Back

I wrote this back in December 2008 when the great Severiano Ballesteros was first diagnosed with cancer. He passed away today at the age of 54. A great in the game of golf, I thought I would reproduce this as a tribute.

“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, because 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.

Pro Golfers deserve to win $1 million a week

Just after I bought my first Lamborghini Diablo, I played in a pro-am with Michael Schumacher...this months exchange in Australian Golf Digest

A Reminiscence of Pens

My Golf Digest (December) article, asking the question, "What is the collective form of a box of pens?"

The Point of Distractions

This months Golf Digest article looks one of the pieces of the puzzle currently out of place for former world number one, Tiger Woods.

Nostalgia-The Aging Disease

Something profound happened to me recently. I was at customs in Brisbane Airport, writing down my birth date on the immigration form, and the page jumped out at me. For the first time, two concurrent numbers reflected an uncomfortable truth. I am getting old.

Growing old has never worried me, mainly because it was something that only happened to others. When you are male and young (or think yourself to be), everyone who has a standing relationship of more than six months is old. But this moment in time was something of a wake-up, and upon further examination, I find that I am exhibiting tell-tale, irrefutable signs of aging.

The chief of these is the increasing prevalence of nostalgic thought. The habit of reminiscing about the past was to me, always something that old people did. Invariably, it induced a yawn and a roll of the eyes as the mind immediately wandered off to the present. Day of yore have little relevance to the young.

But lately, nostalgia is creeping up on me, especially when it comes to golf. The summer golf season is simmering, waiting to ignite, and makes me yearn, just a touch, for the heady days of the late 80’s when there was a feverish sense of excitement surrounding the onset of the tournament golf season.

Golf changed forever during this period. The arrival of Norman mania in 1986 lifted both media interest and participation in the sport. A simple test of this could be found playing out at the club I first joined as a junior when I moved to Sydney in 1985.

Kogarah Golf Club is situated right next to the airport in central Sydney. It is highly visible, and with plenty of passing traffic. Despite this, in 1985 you could fire a gun there on some days and not be seen or heard by anyone. Every Friday afternoon, a group of guys would head out for a skins match – and I mean up to ten players, teeing off in one group. It was never a problem because there was no-one in front, or behind.

Come 1986, this was no longer possible. Golf changed. People wanted to play. Tee times filled up, memberships grew, and most visibly, this new legion of golfers flocked to the summer tournaments to watch, filling the fairways with numbers not previously seen.

Much of this excitement was built around Greg Norman. Why, commercial radio even kept a hole by hole report on his round on the airwaves over the weekend. The Shark was to the 80’s what Tiger Woods is to the noughtie’s, but most importantly, he was Australian.

Remember those tight pants with the front pockets that the Shark used to wear? The ones that made wetsuits look like hessian sacks by comparison? I had them, about five pairs, the more colourful and garish the better. His wide takeway? I had one of those too. Niblick shoes with the flap over the laces? Had to have them – although as soon as Shark stopped wearing them, I threw mine out.

I even used those dreadful Spalding Tour Edition balls for as long as Shark did, until he realised they were crap (after they cost him three majors) and mercifully moved on. I knew they were crap long before him, but if the Shark used them, well, there was only one choice.

When the Shark flew into town, every news crew in existence was at the airport waiting for an exclusive. More to the point, we watched, glued to our screens as he alighted from his jet like Australia’s own version of royalty. He was news, he was golf, and he was the man.

Of course, those days are long past. Shark is in his 50’s, with a dodgy, sutured together body and his mind on other things than golf. We’ve got new stars now, perhaps more of them than ever before, but none with the kind of charisma and magnetism of the blonde bomber.

That’s not to imply a criticism of any of the current crop either. They are who they are -Scott, Ogilvy, Baddeley et al, are all brilliant players in their own right, with their own personalities and individual ways of conducting themselves. By any assessment they are world class golfers, competing with distinction during golf’s most competitive era.

The difference is though that we know what we are going to get from them. We’ll get good, often magnificent golf, but rarely much drama. We don’t anticipate them tearing up the back nine on Sunday with birdie after birdie, chasing down the leader, a cacophonous roar greeting every putt holed. We also don’t foresee an implosion of train smash proportions; the unknown and the unpredictable was what made Norman so tantalising, so utterly fascinating and ultimately, entertaining.

Perhaps that’s the key. Golf is about entertainment, and our expectations of what should fall under that description are now a moving target. The precedent, the model, is built around a one off, home bred, unique individual, the type of which may only come along once in a lifetime. We also have a degree of over-familiarity bought on by the immediacy of the internet and digital age, which, when combined with the rapidly shrinking attention span of the ‘Now’ generation creates an environment ill attuned to the staid, time consuming nature of golf.

But the game is still here, we love it, and it’s not going away in a hurry as a result. This affinity for the game is also the chief reason why we reminisce about its past – the seeds of nostalgia need passion in order to germinate.

Or old people

Nothing to do with Golf #1

Totally non-golf related, I know, but I couldn't resist the temptation to put this spectacular photo on the blog. Shot at the infamous Shipsterns break in Tasmania, this has to be the scariest looking wave in the history of surfing.

There have been bigger, to be sure,but for reflecting pure evil and a desire to tear body from limb nothing quite matches this.

Songdo Championship, Final Round

Just a few hours to air in Korea, and to sort out a winner in the $US3 million Songdo Championship. Fred Funk leads, and looks ominous given that he really hasn't holed a putt of note so far this week. Funk is close to the straightest hitter I've seen in professional golf, and plays such mistake free golf that it is hard to see him blowing himslef out of this event.

Someone is going to have to come and get him, and that person might be John Cook, who tends to find his best form late in the season. Cook is two shots back at 6 under and has an air of confidence about him at the moment. If he doesn't get the job done today then it might be worth a flutter on him over the next few weeks.

Other than Cook, keep an eye out for Russ Cochran and Michael Allen, both in good touch and hitting the ball a long way. There isn't a golf course in the world where length off the tee isn't some sort of an advantage.