He marked an entire era and elevated European golf -not to mention Spanish golf- to stardom thanks to his spectacular game, which translated into incredible shots and extraordinary results. At the age of 54, Seve has definitively “hung up his clubs”, but his wake, his charisma, will last for a long time in international golf. In thirty years, between 1976 and 1995, he won 87 victories in the five continents, fifty of them in the European Tour, and won five times in the Grand Slam (British Open in 1979, 1984 and 1988 and Masters in 1980 and 1983).
“It has been the hardest decision of my life”. With these words Seve announced his definitive retirement from top-level competition four years ago at a press conference at Carnoustie during the British Open. His arthritis problems and back and knee pains had kept him almost in the dry dock for several years. It was probably the same problems – aggravated by a family misfortune, the death of his girlfriend – that led him to leave the U.S. Senior PGA Tour just a week after announcing his debut on it.
The Cantabrian player, who had undergone a hospital check-up in 2006 due to heart problems, said that he reconsidered the decision to quit golf for good after having failed in an attempt to play the U.S. Senior Tour. In February of that year, life dealt him one of the hardest blows of his life, when his girlfriend died in a traffic accident, making it very uncertain whether he would be able to continue competing.
Seve, the ‘Spanish Matador’ as the British say, had only taken part in two tournaments in the 2006 season. He made his debut that year in the Masters, with cards of 86 and 80 strokes, and closed his participation in the Regios Charity Classic in Birmingham, Alabama, in mid-May with a card of 78, 81 and 73 impacts, which left him in the last place of the ranking.
“For a few months there was something confusing inside me, an internal struggle. My head was saying ‘I think you should retire’ but my heart was telling me it was best to keep playing and competing,” he said at Carnoustie. “I have to say that golf has given me so much that it’s really hard to give back even 25 percent of what I got from it. It gave me the pleasure of competing and the glory of winning,” he said.
“It gave me the possibility to travel all over the world, meet many people and the great feeling of meeting people who showed me understanding and appreciation for what I have done in this game,” Ballesteros acknowledged. “I feel like a very, very lucky person and very grateful for everything that has happened to me in these thirty years (of career),” he concluded.
Its beginnings
Born on April 9, 1957 in the small town of Pedreña, located south of the Bay of Santander, this universal Cantabrian began his passionate relationship with golf thanks to his family environment. His father, Baldomero, worked as a gardener at the Real Club de Golf de Pedreña, and his mother’s brother, Ramón de la Sota, was one of the best golfers in Europe during the 1960s (he won four Spanish Professional Championships, was sixth in the 1965 Augusta Masters and second in the World Cup teams in 1963 and 1965). Seve, the youngest of four brothers (Baldomero, Manuel and Vicente), who would eventually also become professionals in this sport, began to hit his first shots with a 3-iron adapted to his size on the beach or on the sly at night on the Pedreña golf course when the moon illuminated the scene. Sometimes, for playing without permission, he even suffered some sanctions that made him rethink his future.
At the age of 9 he made his debut as a caddy and at the age of 10 he played his first caddy tournament, in which he shot 51 strokes in the 9 holes of the competition. The following year he finished second with 42 strokes. When he was only 12 years old, playing 18 holes, he won the tournament with a 79. His progression was unstoppable and when he was 13 years old he was already making rounds of 65 strokes. He learned everything he saw. In 1971, on the occasion of the inauguration of La Manga Club, he was able to watch great players up close, Gary Player being the one who had the greatest impact on him. Seve was clear about his destiny: golf was his life. On March 22, 1974, less than three weeks before his 17th birthday, he turned professional.
The first ‘serious’ tournament he played was the Spanish Professional Championship in San Cugat. He qualified twentieth but was very upset, despite being only 16 years old, as his goal was to win. His first victory came in Pedreña, in the Spanish Under-25 Championship, and the following week he finished second in the Santander Open. Seven days later he won the Vizcaya Open. All these tournaments belonged to the Northern Spain Circuit. At the international level, his fifth place in the Italian Open was his best classification.
Although from the beginning his aggressive and effective golf gave much to talk about and he began to make a name for himself in the European scene, his first great season would be 1976, when he won the Order of Merit of the European Tour, in a year in which he won the World Cup, the Ryder Cup, the Dutch Open and the Lancome Trophy, recovering four strokes ahead of Arnold Palmer with nine holes to go. But the definitive trigger for his leap to world fame was the British Open played that year at Royal Birkdale, where he finished second tied with Jack Nicklaus in a tournament won by Johnny Miller. Seve led the tournament for the first three days and everyone was amazed by the chip he rolled with great precision between two bunkers, sliding to just over a meter from the flag to get the birdie on the last hole. His courage in the most compromising situations caused a furor among the public and admiration and fear among his colleagues.
international dimension
In 1977 he topped the Order of Merit again, and in 1978, with his victories in the United States, Kenya and Japan, he became a true international champion. He won six consecutive tournaments in four non-European continents. An unattainable feat for everyone, especially because at the age of 20 he had already won on all five continents.
One of the crowning moments of any elite golfer is his first victory in a major. Seve won the first one, the British Open, in 1979, becoming the youngest winner of the century. As he said in an interview he had with this magazine on the occasion of his 30th birthday as a professional, that victory “was a very special moment, because logically winning the British Open, especially for Europeans, is the ultimate, and then the fact of having my brothers there, on the last hole. When we all hugged each other it was a very emotional moment and I still get emotional when I see it: it was very special. And then there have been many other very positive things: all the majors I have won, the two World Cups, the Ryder Cups…. But the fact that I managed to convince the Ryder Cup committee for Spain to host the Ryder Cup in ’97 and then to come here and be captain and win with the team has been one of the most special and most satisfying moments for me. And then another satisfaction of which I am very proud is to have managed to make a minority sport, a sport frowned upon and rejected by society, that today is the third sport with more players in our country and to have changed the chip of the vast majority of Spaniards to see golf in a positive way, as a great sport and as a very good thing for our country.
After his victory in 1979, his next Grand Slam appearance was at the 1980 Augusta Masters, where he once again astonished everyone. With nine holes to go, he was ten strokes ahead of the runner-up. The Spaniard made twenty-three birdies and an eagle, and at the age of 23 became the second foreigner and the first European to wear the green jacket of the Augusta champions. The bells of the church in his village rang, but the rest of Spain, where golf was still a minority sport with little popular appeal, showed little interest.
By then he was already known as one of the longest hitters in world golf and came to Augusta to confirm that he was the most complete player of the moment.
When he started playing on the Tour, Seve did not speak a word of English and had to make do with the help of his brother Manolo, who accompanied him to the tournaments. Sign language gradually gave way to oral language.
In Seve’s early days on the international scene, his brother Manuel, José María Cañizares, Manuel Piñero and Antonio Garrido played on the Tour.
Seve joined the Tour when he was 17 years old. At that time there was no Qualifying School, as there is today, and the Tour was accessed in a different way. “Mostly we entered through invitations from the federations of the European countries,” the Cantabrian told this magazine. “There was a continental Order of Merit, sponsored by American Express, which I won in 75, and that was the reason why I was exempt from playing the British Open in 76. I don’t know if I was the first or the first five of the continental order, I don’t remember very well, but that’s how it worked, there was no School, there was nothing. It was a much more difficult time, much more complicated, especially in terms of traveling and all that”. In those days there were far fewer players on the Tour than there are now. “The first years there were 125 or 130 of us, and there were even two cuts, one on Friday and one on Saturday, which made it easier and more difficult. It was more difficult for those who were playing poorly and easier for those who were playing better, because it gave you a little more margin to recover if you started badly,” a very expensive delay, Seve recalled.
His streak of two consecutive Grand Slam victories was cut short at the U.S. Open when he was disqualified for arriving late to the tee. There he suffered his first major disappointment. Although his worst moment, the most frustrating in sporting terms, was -as he told this magazine- at the 1986 Augusta Masters, when a ball that went into the water on the 15th hole on the last day cost him the title.
Seve’s combative spirit may have been inherited from his father and has been reflected in all his actions, even away from the courses. He has fought to dignify the European Tour, costing him many disappointments, such as not being selected for the 1981 Ryder Cup. Despite this, his contribution has been vital to raise this tournament to the highest level of expectation and become one of the most watched sporting events on television.
Seve played the 1985 Ryder Cup, and in the following tournaments he showed that his level was far above the rest of the players on the Tour. In the six tournaments he played in the remainder of the year, he won four important titles (Spanish Open, World Match-Play, Dunlop Phoenix in Japan and Australia PGA), lost the play-off with Miller in Sun City and finished third in the Johnnie Walker Trophy.
To talk about golf in the world was to talk about Seve, and for this reason, when he refused to play exclusively on the North American Tour (the PGA Tour), a controversy arose with the top leaders of the most powerful golf circuit in the world and, as a result, the rules were changed.
In 1983, Seve won his second Masters green jacket. The start he had in the last round (birdie, eagle, par, birdie) left the tournament almost sentenced. Tom Kite, runner-up, said of the Cantabrian: “When he’s on a roll, it’s like Seve drives a Ferrrari and the rest of us drive Chevrolets”.
He demonstrated the perfect symbiosis that exists between him and this tournament. Proof of this is that even in some of the courses he has designed one can appreciate details reminiscent of Augusta National that are already assimilated to Seve’s own philosophy.
At the end of the 80’s, in a book written by four personalities such as Arnold Palmer, M. Mc. Cormack, P. Dobereigner and P. Allis, one could read the following: “Even before he won the Open at Royal Lytham in 1979, there was an important current of golfing opinion that maintained that Severiano Ballesteros was number one. By 1983 all discussions on the subject had ceased: the daring Spaniard was at the top of the mast, no matter which way he was measured”.
Golf authorities have pointed out that Severiano had the elegance of Hogan, the skill and strength of Snead, the power and aggressiveness of Palmer, the tenacity of Player, the technique of Nicklaus and the coolness of Watson.
In 1984, the British Open was played in St. Andrews, that is, the most important tournament in the world in the most legendary scenario, in the cradle of the goal. Severiano won by demonstrating his concentration, dominance and capacity for victory. It is, without a doubt, one of the key moments in the history of world golf. His last putt was a definitive birdie that went around the world and really marked an era. So much so that this image became the logo of Seve and his companies.
No victory in a major tournament is easy. Great was the last round of the British Open in 1988, precisely in the same venue where he had already won in 1979, Royal Lytham & St. Annes. With 65 strokes, Seve clearly won over his rivals, all great champions. Undoubtedly, one of the best final rounds of a British Open. With this, Seve reiterated his dominance throughout the 80’s.
Curiously, Golf World magazine in the days leading up to the Open published an exhaustive report on how Seve had played the last 6 holes of Royal Lytham & St. Annes in 1979, comparing the “conventional route” with “the Seve way”. These are shots that have gone down in history. They defined a player with his own style, for example, the way he approached the 16th by the shortest route, teeing off with the driver instead of a conservative iron, to have to hit a second shot from a parking lot, far from the distance that the other players were getting, and reach the green in such a good position as to finish it off with an important putt for a decisive birdie.
Undoubtedly, for Seve the British as well as the Masters is something special. The same goes for the World Match Play Championship, which he has won five times.
But, if in the individual competition Seve has marked his own style, in the Ryder Cup his presence since 1979 and especially from 1983 onwards, was the revulsive that changed the course of this competition. That edition was the first time in many years that Europe faced the United States. We still remember Seve’s extraordinary shot with a 3-wood from a bunker almost 200 meters from the green in his match against Fuzzy Zoeller at the PGA National in Palm Beach. Undoubtedly, the triumph in 1985 was very emotional, but perhaps the most significant thing was the revalidation in ’87 on American soil. It was there that a radical change in world golf was confirmed.
The Europeans proved that golf was more than just the American Tour. Proof of this was that, after this triumph achieved in Ohio, in the following seven Masters played, six jackets came to Europe. Something previously unthinkable.
These victories of Europe over the United States made the subsequent editions of the Ryder Cup reach truly spectacular dimensions. For this reason, Seve was particularly keen for this competition to be held in Spain. His dream finally came true and the 1997 Ryder Cup was played on the Costa del Sol. Ballesteros himself was captain of the European team that deservedly defeated the American team at Valderrama. That Ryder is remembered by many as Seve’s Ryder, the victory of a true team over the great American individuals.
Based on this team spirit, the Seve Ballesteros Trophy was created, pitting continental Europe against Great Britain and Ireland. Something similar to the clashes that took place in the 70s. Precisely in one of them, played at The Belfry, Seve, in a match against Faldo, executed one of the most spectacular shots in memory at The Brabazon, reaching from the tee the green of the 10th hole, a par 4 flanked by a stream. Since that day, the most spectacular hole on the course has a name: The Ballesteros Hole.
In 1999, on the occasion of Severiano’s induction ceremony into the Hall of Fame, Lee Trevino remarked: “In every generation there is one golfer who is a little better than the rest. I think Ballesteros is one of them; in golf he has everything, and everything means touch, power, knowledge, courage and charisma”. The best summary of this review was expressed by Ben Crenshaw when he said: “Seve hits shots that I can’t even visualize in my dreams”.
The death of his girlfriend in a traffic accident was one of the hardest blows in Seve’s life. At the presentation, last year, of his book “The keys to golf for life” (a work in which, in the words of its author, “there is room for a series of keys, advice, for anyone who is lost” in the world of golf), he acknowledged that he was missing some strokes, such as “getting to be happy”. For the Cantabrian, “happiness comes in moments, the one who is happiest is the best hitter”.
RECOGNITION OF THEIR COLLEAGUES
The reactions to Seve’s death were innumerable around the world.
Jack Nicklaus: “We have lost a great champion and a great friend, a great artist and an ambassador of our sport. I always had immense respect for Seve’s talent, his way of playing, his brilliance. It was his creativity, his imagination, his desire to win that made him so popular, not only in Europe, but throughout America as well. His enthusiasm was unparalleled. Seve was, without a doubt, an extraordinary player, as evidenced by his results, but even more important has been his influence, especially in Europe. He was the most passionate Ryder Cup player we have ever seen”.
Tiger Woods: “Seve was one of the most exciting and talented golfers to ever play the game. His creativity and intensity on a golf course may never be surpassed. I am deeply saddened. I always enjoyed his company at the Champions dinner.”
José María Olazabal: “The most outstanding thing about Seve was his strength, his fighting spirit and the passion he put into everything he did. We have lost an icon and, to tell the truth, in the world of golf, I don’t think we will see another player like him for many years. With his charisma, his passion on the golf course… there are many brilliant players, but not with his charisma.”
“He made me trust myself and my skills and I learned a lot from him. We trained many times together, he taught me an important part of what I know around the greens, my short game… He has given me so many things, as a professional and as a person.”
“He was a no-bend person and always did what he had to do. I will remember all the good times we shared, everything he has achieved. He is a man who has opened many doors for European golf.”
Nick Faldo: “Sad day. Now Seve is called the Cirque du Soleil of golf. The greatest show on earth. I was a real fan.
Phil Mickelson: “He was the one I always looked forward to playing practice rounds with the most, and when I first played on the PGA Tour in San Diego in 1988, Ernie Gonzales, another left-handed player, organized one with him. Since that day, he couldn’t have been nicer to me. We had a great round of golf. He taught me a thing or two, a few strokes, and since then we’ve had a good relationship for the last 23 years. I have nothing but good things to say about him. He’s had an impact on the game obviously, but for me the biggest thing about Seve was his aptitude and charisma. Because the way he played golf drew you to him. You wanted to go and see him play. He had charisma and he hit certain shots that made you want to go see him.”
Miguel Ángel Jiménez: “The most outstanding thing about him was his determination, his tenacity and his passion for everything he did. He never gave anything for lost, he was always looking for a way out and that reflected his personality”.
Lee Westwood: “It’s a sad day, we have lost an inspiration, a genius, a role model, a hero and a friend. Seve made European golf what it is today”.
Sergio Garcia: “I always admired many things about Seve, especially his fighting spirit, which he once again demonstrated by fighting against this terrible disease that has taken him away. He has left us a great champion on and off the course”.
Colin Montgomerie: “It was an honor for me to play with Seve and to be under him as captain at the Ryder. It was a great loss, there are very few legendary sportsmen in the world and ‘Seve’ is one of them. I have never seen so much talent on a golf course and we may never see it again.”
Graeme McDowell: “One of European golf’s brightest lights and one of its most charismatic stars is gone but not forgotten.”
Rory McIlroy: “He is and always will be what made the sport of golf great.” “A true legend in every way. An inspiration to a lot of people.”
Ian Poulter: “I will remember his words for the rest of my life. I am truly honored to have been able to meet Seve and call him a friend, to play golf with him and to watch and learn from a true Genius,” he confesses.
Manuel Piñero: “Golf cannot be understood without Severiano Ballesteros, nor surely Seve without golf, his life, his passion. For me there have been three legends in the history of golf: Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Severiano Ballesteros. Each one in his own time and with his own style, but all three are essential to understand the evolution and development of this sport.
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