Recalling Ballesteros

Ten years since Seve's death, the unique golfer's legacy is clear

When Seve Ballesteros died 10 years ago, on May 7, 2011 at age 54 from complications of brain cancer, the Regions Tradition, a PGA Tour Champions event, was being played in Alabama. I was there to cover the tournament for Golf World, but when news of Ballesteros’ death was announced, my focus shifted from the golf being played to the legendary golfer who had passed away.

Despite knowing that Ballesteros had been in grave condition 2½ years after collapsing in the Madrid airport and being diagnosed with a malignant tumor, his contemporaries competing in the Tradition took the news hard. They saw their own mortality as they reflected on the Spaniard who had been such a compelling presence in the game for decades, who had competed ferociously against them in the Ryder Cup and in the major championships, the occasions the man from Pedreña, a small fishing village in northern Spain, called the “big fish.”  

Typing into the wee hours that weekend, I wrote that Ballesteros “played the sport with a tenacious flair, pugilistic in its intent and painterly in its method.” I tried to portray Ballesteros as a complete person, someone who could irritate as well as inspire, especially to those who were competing against him in the Ryder Cup. No one has summed up Seve better than the British writer Robert Green, who described him this way in a 2006 biography, Seve: Golf’s Flawed Genius: “He is a complex character—charming and manipulative, gregarious and withdrawn, open and suspicious, generous and mean—depending on how the mood takes him.”

This week, looking back on the coverage of Ballesteros’ death a decade later, I was struck by a comment from Gonzaga Escauriaza, president of the Royal Spanish Golf Association. Escauriaza said the 50-time European Tour winner and five-time major champion was una persona única e irrepetible.

A unique and unrepeatable person.

You don’t tend to think of people as being unrepeatable, but Seve really was.

As Ben Crenshaw once said, “Seve plays shots I don’t even see in my dreams.”

The day after Ballesteros died, Curtis Strange told me, “He would try shots none of us had the guts to try. It’s called talent.”

Tres madera.

That was Ballesteros on the final day of the 1983 Ryder Cup at PGA National telling caddie Nick DePaul, despite a bad drive and bad second shot, he wasn’t going to lay up from where his ball sat in a deep bunker 250 yards from the green on the par-5 18th hole. He took the 3-wood that he had ordered and executed the unlikely shot, his ball clearing the lip and soaring just as his imaginative mind had envisioned to a safe resting place just short of the putting surface. As John Huggan wrote in The Guardian in 2011, “For Ballesteros, the importance of the journey always far outweighed that of the arrival.”

Seve’s joyous reaction after making a birdie on the 72nd hole of the 1984 Open Championship at St. Andrews—when he won the Claret Jug for the second of three times—is the image many think of when recalling Ballesteros. He loved the fist-pumping exuberance enough to have gotten it inked on his left arm. Yet Phil Sheldon’s photo sequence of the jaw-dropping sandy recovery in Palm Beach Gardens, what Jack Nicklaus (who captained the United States that week) called the greatest shot he’d ever seen, is better explanatory evidence of just how dazzlingly skilled Seve was.

The first Open Championship I covered, in 1988 at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, was the last major Ballesteros won. It was an odd week, raining so hard that Saturday’s third round had to be scrapped. In the final round, played on Monday, Seve shot 65 to beat Nick Price by two strokes. Ballesteros was only 31 years old. He would win other tournaments, but seldom factored in majors again as his back, his swing and his confidence all deteriorated. The last year Ballesteros played in all four majors was 1995, when he turned 38, the same season that he won for the final time on the European Tour, fittingly, at the Spanish Open. He made a farewell Open appearance in 2006, proud that the  oldest of his three children, Javier, then 15, was caddying for him and got to see the appreciation the British fans had for the charismatic three-time champion they embraced  like one of their own.

“He was just a lot of fun to be around,” Javier told Bunkered magazine last year. “I miss him and think about him every day. We’ve kept his home the same as it was when he was alive. We haven’t touched a thing. Everything is in exactly the same place as he left it.”

Our memories of Ballesteros tend to be frozen in time as well. They are centered not on someone weary, and then terminally ill, in middle age, but on the persona irrepetible who as a young man made a hard game bend toward him through skill, will and creativity.  

Today in St. Andrews, on the beach, they marked the 10 years since Seve’s death by creating his likeness in the sand. It is larger than life, the way Ballesteros often seemed when there was a flagstick to attack or a forest to flee. All the greats are full of talent, but his was sprinkled generously with magic, a seasoning all his own.