Links Magazine | The Best Of Golf | Seve and Everything After

To me, it’s no coincidence that Ballesteros has not won a major since 1988, the year when the time and mental energy taken up by score-settling began to overtake that devoted to celebrating the game. By 1995, when he last won a tournament, those negative motivations dominated him. Today, Ballesteros resembles no one so much as the despairing George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” standing on the steel bridge of life, battered by icy winds. Rich in record, wealthy in the way that only happens when one of Spain’s most famous sportsmen marries the heiress to one of the nation’s biggest banks (although even that union has recently crumbled), he seems incapable of seeing beyond the flooded ruins of his career, demanding instead: “Why me? What was it all for?”

And it is left to us to remind ourselves what golf—the Masters in particular—would have been without Seve.

The 1976 British Open, where he finished in a tie for second behind Johnny Miller, was the event that introduced Ballesteros to the world. But it was his 1979 Open win—a white-knuckle ride via the car-park at Royal Lytham’s 16th—that first launched him as a superstar, just 22 years old and already possessed of what Feherty, then a rookie, saw as “a feline grace. He prowled. He had absolutely everything. And he was beautiful.”

In a Europe crying out for a hero more dynamic than slow, sweet Sandy Lyle, introverted Nick Faldo or workaholic Bernhard Langer, the peasant farmer’s son from Pedrena with the heart-stopping smile and otherworldly golf game instantly became all things to all people. To the girls who swarmed round him, the young golfers who imitated his moves and the galleries who tried to keep pace with him, he was Elvis before Vegas; Palmer reinvented as a Latin movie star; a dashing matador in a cape, challenging all comers.

To Ben Crenshaw, he was the most exciting golfer in the world. “He stalked the golf course,” Crenshaw says. “He was almost regal in the way that he did it, because he played by pure instinct. And it was a wondrous thing to watch. Very, very formidable to play against.”

That Ballesteros had a rare array of gifts was obvious from the outset, but it was his imagination that made his play magical. He thought nothing of dribbling 4-irons through bunkers, willing 3-woods through tree limbs. Much was made of his wildness at Lytham and even Augusta, where the Americans incensed him with charges of being “lucky,” but Crenshaw recognized in him a kindred spirit, one who relished testing his artistry against the architecture. Far from living and dying on his short game, as many believed, he was a majestic long-iron player and a phenomenal, if errant, driver. With a persimmon club, he could propel the ball 300 yards through the air.

“He said, ‘I just hit it as far as I can and as close to the green as possible,’” remembers Faldo. “Rough or trees, it didn’t matter.”
Everyone who knew Ballesteros in those early years describes him as sunny and good-humored. Friends and rivals agree that, while he courted and even craved the heady fame that followed the first of his five majors, he yearned even more for the normal, youthful life that had been lost. At home, he clung hard to his roots in Pedrena. On tour, he stayed close to his Spanish friends. But as much as he tried to stay grounded, his conviction—some would say arrogant assumption—that certain privileges were a divine right if you were a champion escalated year after year.

In the wake of his starry progress, European golf exploded. For Faldo, Langer, Ian Woosnam and Jose Maria Olazabal, Ballesteros was the pathfinder. He was to U.S. majors what Roger Bannister had been to the four-minute mile, proving they were attainable. Once he’d done that, the rush was on to follow him, and his victories at Augusta triggered a period of virtual foreign domination at the Masters that endured until the rise of Tiger Woods in the late ’90s.