The bald facts are impressive enough. Between his first win, the 1976
Dutch Open, and his last, the 1995 Spanish Open, Seve Ballesteros won
forty-eight European tour titles. During the same period he was World
Match Play champion five times, won thirty-three other titles around the
world, played in eight Ryder Cups (winning three), played in four World
Cups (two wins), and picked up five major championships—three British
Opens and two Masters.
But those are mere numbers. It isn’t so much what Ballesteros achieved
during his colorful career; it was how he achieved it. For the great Seve,
hero to a continent’s youngsters reared on generations of American golfing
triumphs, the journey was always much more important than the arrival.
So it is that, while his great rival Nick Faldo may have won more majors—
six to five—and in the minds of many may even have been the better player,
there is no doubt that it is Seve who is the most significant in historical
terms.
Although he and Faldo were part of Europe’s so-called “big five”—Ian
Woosnam, Sandy Lyle, and Bernhard Langer the others—Ballesteros
showed the way. He was always the leader. First of the five to win a major—
the 1979 British Open at Royal Lytham. First to win in America—the 1978 Greater Greensboro Open (his debut on the PGA Tour). And first to win
an American major title, the 1980 Masters. Seve broke the mold when it
came to golf at the highest level.
In retrospect, the eleven months between April 1957 and March 1958
represented a special time in European golf. Not only were the Americans
defeated in the Ryder Cup match at Lindrick, but five seemingly unconnected births would, some two decades later, change the face of the professional game across the globe. Remarkably, the five Europeans who would
push the mighty Americans off the top of the golfing tree and who all
would win at least one major championship first saw the light of day within
one year of each other.
Appropriately, as it would turn out, the first born was Ballesteros. Christened Severiano Ballesteros Sota in Pedrena, a small fishing village in the
north of Spain, he was the fifth son of Baldomero Ballesteros Presmanes
and Carmen Sota Ocejo. Young Seve’s father was a sometime farmer, sometime fisherman whose home, a modest two-story building, was, significantly, close to the Club de Golf de Pedrena.
Within a few short years, the game he could see across the stone wall at
the back of his house would consume the youngster.
“The golf course was only a hundred yards from my house,” he remembers. “Most of the people from the village worked there. The children were
all caddies, making a few pesetas to help the family. My uncle, Ramon Sota,
was a successful professional, good enough to finish sixth in the 1965 Masters. He was probably the best Spanish golfer before myself. And my brothers were all caddies and then professionals. So I was surrounded by a golfing
atmosphere. Straightaway the game got into me. I would practice on the
beach because I was not allowed on the golf course.”
Which isn’t to say that he never played. Long after his parents thought
he was fast asleep in bed, young Seve would sneak onto the course and play
by the light of the moon with his trusty three-iron. Through his obsession
with golf his schoolwork suffered. “I would go to school in the morning,”
he says, that distinctive smile across his face, “go home for lunch, then I
was supposed to go back to school. But I didn’t. I would leave my books in
a big pipe that was between my house and the school. I would take my club
and go to the beach. Or, if no one was around, I would sneak onto the far
end of the golf course where I couldn’t be seen. I’d be there all afternoon.”
108 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
As he owned only one club, Seve had to manufacture every kind of
shot—high, low, short, and long—an informal education that would be
just one of the factors setting him apart from his peers later in life. But it
wasn’t winning the local caddies’ championship—his only competitive golf
before turning pro—that persuaded him to play for pay. “The reason I
turned pro in March 1974 was because I was banned from the golf club
for a month in January that year,” he says. “On the 31st of December I
would always get together with my friends. That year there were a lot of
pipes on the course; they were going to be put in for drainage. On the sixth
hole, which is downhill, four or five of us were on the tee, and a couple of
my friends pushed the pipes down the hill. They rolled maybe 250 yards.
No one saw us, but word got out. I was suspended because I was there,
although I didn’t push any of the tubes.
“That was a crucial moment in my life. My nephew came to me then
and offered me a job in a factory making boats. My mother was in favor.
She thought I needed a future. But my father was against. He said I must
start playing golf for a living because I was good.”
A fact the world at large would soon discover. By August of 1974 Seve
was the best player in Spain under the age of twenty-five. One year later
he was the best in Spain, period. And two years after that he was the best
in Europe. In the midst of that period came the first of many defining
moments for the dashing young Spaniard who put so many in mind of
Arnold Palmer.
In July of 1976, Ballesteros arrived, unknown and unheralded, in Southport for the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. He left, seven days
later, as golf’s newest star. At the age of nineteen he tied for second with
Jack Nicklaus behind Johnny Miller. The story of that week is a remarkable one. Seve came, almost literally, from nowhere. He spent two days carrying his brother’s bag in the qualifying event. His own caddie was a
policeman who did not play golf and knew next to nothing about the game.
And at that time Seve did not speak English. “I shot 69 in the first round,”
he remembers. “Everyone was congratulating my brother, Manuel. He was
helping me with the press. I was enjoying myself. I knew it was the Open,
but I had no idea it was that important.
“In the second round I shot 73 or something; I don’t remember. Then
I was playing with Johnny Miller in the third round. The night before the
Of Castanets and Kings • Severiano Ballesteros 109
last round—I was leading—I wasn’t worried about the next day. I was only
nineteen, remember. I thought I could win. I was convinced. Anyway, I
went out to a disco with my brother. We were dancing there until maybe
midnight. Then we went back to our bed-and-breakfast place. As we were
walking back, I could see that my brother was a little worried. He was obviously thinking, My God, my brother could win the British Open—this is
unbelievable. I just wasn’t that aware of what was going on, which was
maybe a good thing. I told my brother I thought I was going to win. He
just looked shocked. I asked him how I should play. He told me just to
keep playing the way I did in the first three rounds. And that’s how I went
out in the last round.”
He didn’t win, of course. But it wasn’t long until he did. Indeed, as the
1980s dawned, Ballesteros became the youngest British Open champion
of the twentieth century. At the tender age of twenty-two he was not only
taking on the world; he was beating it.
Yet his significance goes far beyond mere statistics. Over the next ten
years of his career, the man from Spain—Spain!—transcended the game
and became, outside of the United States at least, a true sporting icon. Simply by playing the way he did and doing what he did—winning and losing tournaments in the most unpredictable manner since Arnie—the young
Seve became Europe’s Palmer both on and off the course. His influence was
everywhere.
For example: Prize money in Europe grew more than sixfold during the
1980s, in no small part due to the golf Ballesteros played and the charismatic way in which he played it. His drawing power and marketability were
enormously attractive to prospective sponsors. The key was Seve’s British
Open victory at Lytham in ’79. In that win were the seeds of many things,
not least the effect it had on those players around him and the fact that, in
the United States, he was destined never to reach the same heights of popularity he enjoyed in the United Kingdom. That was the year America
christened Seve the “car park champion.” His drive off the sixteenth tee in
the final round finished under a parked car, from where he received a free
drop.
For Seve fans it was a typically eccentric and endearing moment; for others like the sour-faced loser Hale Irwin it was a moment of outrageous and
undeserved fortune. As so often in Seve’s controversial career, he polarized
opinion.
