Seve Ballesteros the magician who breathed life into golf

Seve Ballesteros was a magician with a golf club and a magnet for crowds on the course. He was also my sporting idol.

European Ryder Cup team captain Seve Ballesteros holds the trophy after victory over the US at Valderrama in Spain in 1997.

Seve Ballesteros was a magician with a golf club and a magnet for crowds on the course.

He once jokingly said he was Tiger Woods before Tiger Woods. He wasn’t wrong.

The Spaniard, who would have been 63 this week with his birthday falling during Masters week, brought a devil-may-care attitude to a staid sport.

To him it seemed no situation could be labelled impossible, no shot too difficult to take on.

As a child learning to play he had just one club, so he taught himself to hit all the shots with it. As a result, it seemed he could make the golf ball do extraordinary things. Few could match his touch around the green, his bold inventiveness and brazen audacity.

He was charismatic and mesmerising to watch, and much like his regular adversary at the majors, Greg Norman, did with young Australians, drew people to the game. I wanted to hit shots like Seve, and during my school years would regularly spend hours until dark by the practice green, dropping a handful of balls down and trying to conjure up some Seve-esque escapology.

Ballesteros turned professional in 1974 when he was 16 but he grabbed the attention of this then nine-year-old golf fan and the public at large with his second-place finish at the Open Championship in 1976 behind Johnny Miller.

I watched that performance at Royal Birkdale and I was hooked. As he rose to be a dominant force from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s, I cheered. When he died from a brain tumour at the age of 54 in 2011, I wept.

A 19 year old @seveballesteros producing absolute genius on the 72nd hole to finish second in 1976 at Royal Birkdale 👏 pic.twitter.com/mLxtOfCB83

— The Open (@TheOpen) April 9, 2020

He won tournaments all over the world.

Among them, 50 victories on the European Tour, nine on the US PGA Tour, six in Japan and even one Down Under, the 1981 Australian PGA.

But golfers’ reputations are most obviously marked by majors, and Seve won five of them. While his two wins in the Masters, in 1980 and 1983, opened the floodgates for European players to make their own mark at Augusta, Seve’s 1984 win at St Andrews, the second of his three Open ­Championship titles, was probably the pinnacle of his individual career.

Sealed with a curling birdie putt on the final green at the Old Course and celebrated with a matador-style flourish and fist pumps of unbridled joy, this was Seve at his most memorable.

But above all the tournament wins, the Ryder Cup remains Seve’s greatest legacy.

Seve Ballesteros in swashbuckling pose during the 1988 Open Championship at Royal Lytham, which he went on to win. Picture: Dave Cannon/Allsport

The biennial event between the US and Great Britain & Ireland was on the rocks when the GB&I team was expanded to include continental Europe from 1979 in the hope of giving a bit more competition to the traditionally dominant American team.

Well they certainly got that, with Seve the inspiration in dragging the European team out of the doldrums and moulding them into a winning outfit.

Since Europe first lifted the Ryder Cup in 1985 they have become the dominant force in an event that has transformed from a ho-hum affair to one of the most exciting events in all of sport.

And the beating heart of it was the brilliant Spaniard, playing as if his life depended on it and lifting his teammates to heights they probably didn’t know they could reach.

Seve loved sticking it to the Yanks, and we loved him for it. His enmity towards the US ran deep. He felt he never got the respect he deserved from American fans, players and officials.

“In the United States, I’m lucky; in Europe, I’m good,” he once said.

Seve was absolute box office 🎬

Don't take our word for it, watch this recovery... pic.twitter.com/k3ytdv92Jj

— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) April 9, 2020

As a journalist I met the great man once, but was so starstruck when I was introduced I could barely get a sentence out of my mouth. It was a product launch for one of the big golf equipment companies, and as one of their Tour players, Seve was on hand to spruik the new gear.

As a player his powers were on the wane by that time — not the short game, which was never less than brilliant — but off the tee finding the fairway had become a real problem.

So to use him to launch their latest hi-tech driver seemed a particularly bold move by the company, but Seve didn’t disappoint, giving a clinic that concluded with him demonstrating just how good the new driver was by hitting a series of shots while on his knees, 220m or so, arrow straight.

Genius.