Still, his peers watched and learned. Inspired by their contemporary’s
ability to meet and beat the Americans, five other Europeans—Langer, Lyle,
Faldo, Woosnam, and Jose Maria Olazabal—would, over the next fifteen
years, follow him to major championship victories. “Seve was really the
leader; the others followed in his wake,” says former European Tour professional Ken Brown. “Because of the way he played and how successful he
was, the others could see that they could do it, too. It was like, ‘If Seve can
win major championships, so can I.’”
It was in golf’s four biggest events and in the Ryder Cup where Ballesteros would enjoy his finest moments. Individually, Ballesteros made himself the best player on the planet. With his European amigos alongside him,
the Americans were soon losing the biennial tussle with the Old World.
It was, however, at St. Andrews in 1984 that Ballesteros enjoyed the
biggest and best triumph of his career. In a pulsating duel between the best
two players on the planet, he edged out Tom Watson to lift his second
Open title.
Two shots stand out. Watson’s approach to the penultimate green—“the
wrong shot with the wrong club at the wrong time”—and the putt Ballesteros holed on the Old Course’s final green. It was only ten feet or so in
length. It didn’t even go in the middle. But it provoked the most memorable reaction of the decade. Seve punched the air over and over, turning
to all sides of the green, his face a picture of ecstasy. For those who were
there it remains the single most powerful Ballesteros memory. At that
moment Seve was at the height of his powers.
He was the Tiger of his time.
And there the similarities do not end. Seventeen years before Woods
would eclipse his competition at Augusta National, Seve did the same en
route to his first green jacket. Well, almost. The record book says that Seve
finished a mere four strokes ahead of runner-up Jack Newton in the 1980
Masters. But look again. After sixty-three holes Ballesteros was sixteen
under par, and the gap between first and second was a yawning ten shots.
Had it not been for a potentially disastrous back nine of thirty-nine—
which could have been a lot more—Tiger may have had to work a little
harder for his record-breaking margin of victory.
But that was Seve. He always was more Arnie than Jack, a fact that
became even clearer six years later, again at Augusta. One month after the
death of his father and three years after his second Masters win, Ballesteros
Of Castanets and Kings • Severiano Ballesteros 111
was standing in the middle of Augusta National’s fifteenth fairway during
the final round. Nicklaus was going crazy up ahead, but Seve had it all
under control. Or so everyone thought.
All he had to do was hit the green with a four-iron, and the tournament
was as good as over. It wouldn’t matter what Jack did. But Seve didn’t hit
the green. In truth his shot did well to reach the water in front, so poor
was the contact between club and ball. It was, no question, the worst swing
made by a genuinely world-class player during the 1980s.
Two years later, Ballesteros won his fifth and last major championship
at Royal Lytham when a closing 65 saw him lift a third British Open. But
he never really was the same after Augusta ‘86. Neither was golf.
With that shot at fifteen, in a forerunner of the game’s saddest quality
in the nineties, came some unseemly cheering from the galleries. Strangely
for one so obviously charismatic, Seve never was a popular figure in the
United States. And, it must be said, the feeling was reciprocated, especially
when it came to the Ryder Cup.
The emergence of Ballesteros, then many other world-class players from
Europe, had far-reaching consequences. Before Seve the matches were
nothing more than a garden party for golfers. The Americans won. The
Brits lost. And everyone had a jolly nice time. Losing, particularly to Americans and America, wasn’t something Seve had a lot of time for. Ever since
he received a less than warm welcome on the eighteenth green at Greensboro as he was about to win his first U.S. Tour title (“Let’s have a big “Ole!”
for the Spic” is how many golfers recall that greeting) Ballesteros’s relationship with Uncle Sam’s nieces and nephews had been more frosty than
friendly.
“The American players—not all of them—would never accept someone
coming from overseas and beating them at home,” he explains. “I heard
many comments in the locker room. I remember hearing them say that I
was ‘stealing’ their money.” Such experiences only served, of course, to drive
him on, especially when it came to the Ryder Cup.
“Seve was unbelievable,” says Sam Torrance, eight times a Ryder Cup
player. “He was always there when you needed a boost, always there when
you needed help with your game. He always seemed to put the team first,
which was remarkable, as he was the world’s number-one player. Of course,
he didn’t like the Americans very much at all. He really wanted to win.”
112 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
Soon enough then, the European side started kicking some Yankee butts
in the previously all-but-dormant Ryder Cup. In 1983, at PGA National
in Florida, the Europeans lost by the slenderest of margins, serving notice
that their first victory since 1957 wasn’t going to take them much longer
to achieve. Still, for all that, it was clear who was the real star of the show.
Even in ultimate defeat for his side, Ballesteros managed to distinguish
himself.
All square on the final tee against Fuzzy Zoeller, the Spaniard hit a rotten drive, then an even poorer second into a fairway bunker well over two
hundred yards from the putting surface. All looked lost, but Seve wasn’t
done. Marching into the sand with a three-wood in his hand, he struck an
outrageous slice to the fringe of the green. It was, according to the American captain, one Jack Nicklaus, “the best shot I ever saw.”
Two years later Europe did win the Ryder Cup, and ever since it has
been the most exciting thing in all of golf. A bit like Seve himself, in fact.
Sadly, the glory days for Ballesteros ended in the mid-1990s. By the
1995 Ryder Cup at Oak Hill he was but a shadow of his former self. The
peerless short game was still intact, but his long game—always erratic—
had deteriorated to the point where he had trouble finding the fairway with
a five-iron. Still, for all that, his final-day singles match against Tom
Lehman remains one of the most vivid Ballesteros memories. It is no exaggeration to say that no one else could have played the way Ballesteros did
that day and lost by less than eight and seven. That the match continued
as far as the sixteenth green is a tribute to the remarkable tenacity and shotmaking abilities of a proud man.
Indeed, it was perhaps only his pride that carried Ballesteros through
the following, declining, years. Between 1976 and 1992 he was never out
of the top twenty on the European Order of Merit. Between 1996 and
2001 he was never inside the top one hundred.
“It is hard to know you don’t have the game to win and that making the
cut is the best you can hope for,” he concedes. “When you do that, you
never get the chance to compete. And you never have rhythm. Then you
lose confidence. You are what you believe you are.”
For the man himself then—and his many fans—those were harrowing
years. Yet through it all, Ballesteros retained his enormous charisma. In
1997 he was an inspiring and enthusiastic nonplaying captain when the
Of Castanets and Kings • Severiano Ballesteros 113
Ryder Cup paid its first visit to his homeland, at Valderrama. As he cajoled
and encouraged his men to a famous victory, he was seemingly everywhere.
He even found time to concede the final meaningless putt to Scott Hoch
in the deciding match with Colin Montgomerie.
For Seve, it was always center stage or nothing.
God, he was great!
