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

It was the Ryder Cup, though, where his influence was felt globally, in performances so intense that, at Kiawah Island in 1991, Paul Azinger anointed Seve the “king of gamesmanship.” (Despite that criticism, Azinger’s respect for his rival was such that he agreed to write the foreword to my Ballesteros biography six years later.)

Crenshaw has gone head-to-head with Ballesteros on numerous occasions and says he witnessed no hi-jinks whatever. But other players have accused him of practice-putting in their field of vision, walking off the tee box while they’re in mid-swing, or using the force of his personality to bend the will of rules officials. John Paramor, chief referee on the European Tour and a recipient of the Ballesteros glower many a time, believes that while the Spaniard is not above using the rules to his advantage, it has more to do with psyching out opponents than gamesmanship.

“He’s a supreme competitor,” Paramor says. “He never, ever wants to believe he’s wrong.”

As Ballesteros’ assistant at Valderrama in ’97, the year he captained the Ryder Cup team, James got close enough to that competitive fire to suffer radiation burns.

“‘Devious’ is a bit strong, but he’s an incredibly cunning person,” says James. “If he’s playing foursomes he’ll have so many reasons why one person should play odds and the other evens or what ball they should be playing or how they should play the course. He thinks long and hard and passionately about every aspect of what he’s doing.”

It is these qualities that have made Ballesteros such a force at the Ryder Cup, but it is his softer side that has made him Europe’s inspirational leader. Feherty, one of five rookies on the 1991 side, recalls Ballesteros administering neck rubs in the team trailer. “I remember feeling bigger, feeling like I occupied more space. I thought, I wonder why that is? But it was that he made himself small for us. He made himself human. He allowed himself to be vulnerable.”

But no matter how high he rose into the stratosphere in Europe, in the U.S. Ballesteros was always an ambiguity. He was too thorny, too Latin, too prone to spitting thunderbolts. Something always got lost in the translation.

A decade after Ballesteros had his PGA Tour card snatched away by Beman for failing to play the 15-event minimum, because he was too proud and too private to say that his father was dying, Golfweb’s Dan King summed up Severiano’s career thusly: “In Britain, Japan and Spain, Ballesteros is seen as one of the all-time greatest golfers. In America he is often regarded as a bull-headed egotist with visions of grandeur.”

To many who witnessed the rise of Ballesteros on the global stage, things could easily have turned out for the better.

“I think there’s a regret here,” Feherty observes. “Americans should have loved him. Any kind of character or somebody out of the ordinary, with that kind of talent, is just going to make a fortune here if they can only exploit it. But he never did. They never got to see the best of him. The resentment that he had showed up in his game.”

Holding a two-stroke lead on the final day of the 1986 Masters, Ballesteros arrived at his second shot on Augusta’s 15th hole seemingly cloaked in invincibility. Elsewhere Jack Nicklaus had begun to charge, but Ballesteros was convinced that a third green coat was his destino. A month earlier, he had promised his father on his deathbed he would win the Masters in his honor. Now, standing over a 4-iron with a breeze ruffling his hair, indecision crept into his heart. Could it be a 5? He hesitated and hit the ball into the water.

“That was classic nerves,” Faldo says. “When the nerves hit the shoulders, the shoulders stop moving. He didn’t get through it, he hit it fat.” It was one shot and one moment, but the scarring, Faldo believes, was permanent. “It’s amazing how one shot can wreck your self-belief.”

On paper, Ballesteros’ career continued uninterrupted. He lost the ’87 Masters (along with Greg Norman) in a playoff with Larry Mize, but bounced back in ’88 with a dazzling victory over Nick Price in the British Open. But nothing could arrest the drip, drip, drip of his confidence or the creeping onset of a slump that would soon seem bottomless.

The 1991 season was to be Seve’s last great campaign. After unexpectedly approaching David Leadbetter at the Dunlop Open in Japan in late April, he went on to top the European money list a record sixth time and win six titles in 11 months, thanks to a shorter, wider backswing and an improved posture that alleviated the agony in his back. Then, a typical Ballesteros twist: Two weeks after visiting Leadbetter at Lake Nona in 1992 and declaring himself extremely happy, Ballesteros gave him the cold shoulder on the practice range at Augusta. It transpired that his brother and sometime coach Manuel had told him that his swing was too mechanical. Two days before the tournament began, Seve was hitting it sideways.