A player of great daring and flair, Ballesteros won 87 titles, including three Open championships (1979, 1984 and 1988) and two Masters at Augusta (1980 and 1983). At one stage he made the World Match Play championship at Wentworth his own, winning it four times between 1981 and 1985. He also proved a charismatic captain of the European team which won the Ryder Cup at Valderrama in 1997.
Among Ballesteros’s many assets was his considerable strength; he had large hands with each of which, it was said, he could grasp 11 golf balls at once. He was also a most engaging personality, and the glamour that attached to him was in the early days enhanced by his youth. In July 1979 he became the youngest player in more than 100 years to win the Open; the following year, at Augusta, he became, at 23, the youngest Masters champion.
At his best Ballesteros was gifted with a soaring drive, and his short game was among the best ever seen on a golf course — on countless occasions he was able to make a birdie or par where neither had seemed possible. He once observed: “It doesn’t matter where you hit the drive if you make the putt.”
He was a superb chipper of the ball and a master of the bunker shot; and he seemed to know instinctively how best to redeem a difficult situation, although he himself put it more prosaically: “The more you go into trees, the more you have practice.”
Never a man to shirk controversy, Ballesteros enjoyed some long-running battles with tournament referees and with officials of both the European and US Tours. A fierce pride was part of his make-up, in the tradition of his Cantabrian forebears.
Severiano Ballesteros was born on April 9 1957 at Pedreña, a fishing village on the Bay of Biscay in northern Spain, the fifth son of a dairy farmer. One of his brothers died in childhood, and the other three, like Seve, were to become professional golfers. It was a sporting family: Seve’s father had been a well-known rower, and his mother’s brother had been a professional golfer who had competed in the Masters.
As a young boy Seve was a gifted athlete and football player, but at the age of nine — with the encouragement of his uncle — he followed the example of his older brothers and became a golf caddie. The family’s farmhouse was situated close to the second hole of Real Pedreña golf course, but caddies were not permitted to play on it; so Seve practised secretly at night when the place was deserted, and during the day made use of the nearby beach. At the same time he augmented his pocket money by betting on chip and pitch shots with the other caddies as they waited for clients.
At the age of 10 he took part in the caddies’ championship, playing the first hole in 10 and all nine holes in only 51. In the same event the following year he finished second (returning a score of 42); and the next year he won it, over 18 holes, with 79. This achievement led to his being allowed to use the course in the evenings; more practice was carried out in the family’s barn, in which he would drive the balls again and again into a hanging backcloth. He later said that between the ages of 12 and 18 he had probably driven as many as 1,000 golf balls a day.
Seve left the local school when he was 14 to concentrate on the game that would become his life. Three years later he qualified for the Portuguese Open at Estoril, in which he scored 89. Later that year he came fifth in the Italian Open, and he won the Spanish Young Pro tournaments in both 1974 and 1975.
It was in 1976, however, that the world of golf realised that it had a potential new superstar. That year Ballesteros took part in no fewer than 34 tournaments, only once missing the cut and amassing some $100,000 in prize money. In the Open at Royal Birkdale, at the age of only 19, he finished in a tie for second place with Jack Nicklaus; Ballesteros had begun the last round in the lead, but in the end succumbed by six strokes to Johnny Miller.
Only a few weeks later — in the Double Diamond World Golf Tournament at the Gleneagles hotel — Ballesteros beat Miller. Pointing out that, on this occasion, Miller had been off his game, the Spaniard charmed everyone with his remark: “If at Birkdale he play like this, he lose.”
In the same year Ballesteros performed creditably in the other European open championships, winning the Dutch event, and in October became the youngest player to take the Harry Vardon Trophy for the lowest stroke average. He also beat Arnold Palmer to take the Lancôme Trophy in Paris; having announced to the crowd watching him at the ninth tee: “My heart tells me that the time has come”, he proceeded to birdie five of the remaining nine holes. With Manuel Piñero, he won the World Cup for Spain at Palm Springs, California. He headed the European Order of Merit that year, as he would in 1977 and 1978.
In 1977-78 Ballesteros served in the Spanish Air Force, but was able to continue with his golfing career. He won the Swiss, French and Japanese opens; and he again won the World Cup, this time with Antonio Garrido, held in Manila.
Ballesteros now appeared to be almost unstoppable. In 1978 he won a further five open titles (Swiss, Japanese, Kenyan, Scandinavian and German) as well as finishing second in the French and the Irish events. He also won his first American title, the Greater Greensboro Open in North Carolina.
The British Open of 1979 was held in testing conditions at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s. No continental European had won the event since the Frenchman Arnaud Massey in 1907. Ballesteros, who at the time was still only 22, hit some wayward drives (on one occasion he found himself having to recover from a temporary parking lot) but returned scores of 73, 65, 75 and 70 to finish with a one-under-par 283, leaving in his wake opponents such as Jack Nicklaus and Hale Irwin. He was the only player in the field to finish under par.
Nine months later Ballesteros won the Masters at Augusta at his fourth attempt; he was (until Tiger Woods’s triumph in 1997) the youngest player ever to win the event — three months younger than Jack Nicklaus had been when he took the title in 1963. Some of his opponents claimed that Ballesteros was fortunate, in that the conditions suited him. The Spaniard replied: “I win on narrow courses, I win on open courses. I win when it’s wet and I win when it’s dry. I win when it’s windy and I win when it’s calm. Still they say I am lucky.”
Proving that this success was no fluke, Ballesteros again won the Masters three years later. In 1984, at St Andrews, he won his second Open before adding a third, in 1988, at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s.
During the 1980s and 1990s Ballesteros represented Europe in the Ryder Cup, and his partnership with José María Olazábal — the pair gleaned 11 wins and two halved matches in their 15 outings — was the most successful in the history of the competition. With his help Europe won the Cup in 1985 and 1987, retained it in 1989, and regained it in 1995. In 1997 he captained the side when it won the event at Valderrama Golf Club at Sotogrande, in Spain, the first time the Ryder Cup had been held on the Continent.
During the 1990s Ballesteros began to suffer increasingly from back problems. Eventually he was struggling to find his form, and his long game began to desert him. A Seve Trophy match was introduced in his honour, and was first played at Sunningdale in 2000. Ballesteros played in it that year, defeating Colin Montgomerie at the top of the singles line-up. In 2002, at Druids Glen, he beat the Scot again.
In 2003, as it became clear that he was in the twilight of his career, Ballesteros observed philosophically: “You are born, you live and you die, and it is the same with golf: you go up, you are there for some time, and then you go down.”
Three years later he returned to play in the Open at Hoylake, where one of his sons caddied for him. Although he missed the halfway cut, all the top professionals gathered around to watch him practising his bunker shots on the range.
In 2007, on the eve of the Open at Carnoustie, he announced his retirement from the game, saying that he would still play golf with his children and that his focus would now be on his family and on his Madrid-based business, an enterprise designing golf courses and organising tournaments. In October 2008, however, he was operated on for a brain tumour and subsequently underwent chemotherapy.
From his earliest years Ballesteros had been driven by a profound love of the game of golf. He certainly enjoyed receiving appearance money, but the material rewards — which, in his case, were considerable — were, he maintained, secondary: “From the start, from a very early age, I played the game because I loved it. I never played because I wanted to become professional, make a lot of money, have a big house and drive a Ferrari. It was all because I enjoyed doing it.”
Seve Ballesteros married, in 1988, Carmen Botín, of the family that owns Banco Santander, but the marriage was dissolved; they had two sons and a daughter.
