Memories of Seve Ballesteros

Memories of Seve Ballesteros

Seve Ballesteros, the charismatic Spanish golfer who won the Masters twice and the British Open three times and helped propel Europe’s rise in the Ryder Cup competition with the United States, died early Saturday at his home in northern Spain, where his struggle with brain cancer had gained wide attention in the sports world. He was 54.

Everybody who cares a little about the great game of golf should have a first memory of Seve's arrival. For this writer, who was a 15 year-old sports mad fan in 1976, 'the brick through the window moment' was a single shot during the final round of the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, that is still burned How Can You Perfect Your Golf Swing indelibly in the memory.After Seve had given memorable chase to the eventual winner Johnny Miller, he faced a chip over bone-hard turf along a narrow ridge between two bunkers on the 72nd hole.The difficulty quotient was extreme but nevertheless he bumped and ran the ball along a razor edge to near tap-in range for a closing birdie and thereby secured a tie with Jack Nicklaus for second place which effectively launched his star into orbit. The following week he won the Dutch Open, the first of his 87 tournament victories worldwide. The rest, as they say, is history.

But for all his short game wizardry, for much of the fillet of his career, especially in the 1980's, Seve was unfairly labelled as a wayward-striking escape artist. Three years after his runner-up finish at Birkdale, he was already well established as Europe's top player when he won the Open at Royal Lytham.

Seve's extraordinary capacity to conjure up birdies and pars from positions on the course best reserved for wildlife, masked an equal and probably over-riding ability to play 'straight-down-the-middle' seamless golf when his all-round game came together which was more frequent than not during his best years in the 1980's. As he matured as a player, the dashing, slashing swing of his teens became quieter, more classic and certainly more controlled. That made him a consistent performer on the greatest stage of all, the majors, which provided the five most defining achievements of his career.In the course of his first Masters victory less than a year after his Lytham triumph, Seve's marshalling of the destiny of his golf ball was extraordinary as he built up a lead that stretched to ten strokes in the course of the final round at Augusta.In the space of a year, he had become the youngest winner of the Open in the 20th century and the youngest man to don the green jacket up to that point.Three years later he came from one shot off the lead after three rounds to win the Masters, again by four strokes, dominating the last 18 holes from tee to green and on them as well.