Executive Golf Magazine

Scene: the Great Room at the Grosvenor House hotel in London two weeks before Christmas. Present: 1200 of the great and good in golf. Occasion: the annual lunch of the Professional Golfers’ Association. A master of ceremonies silences the hubbub, the lights are dimmed and as searchlights criss-cross the floor every person in the room stands to welcome Severiano Ballesteros, the guest of honour. Ballesteros zig-zags towards the top table and, picked out by the searchlights as he is, he looks for all the world like a boxer making his way to the ring.

An hour or so later, Ballesteros stood up to be interviewed by the former BBC radio golf correspondent Tony Adamson. Ballesteros was in dynamic form. Adamson asked him one question and Seve took this to be the time when he was supposed to speak. Five minutes later he drew breath long enough for Adamson to slip in another question.

If Adamson felt interviewing Ballesteros was as difficult as watching Ballesteros, few of the assembled felt likewise. They lionised the Spaniard in this London hotel as they had for decades on golf courses as far apart as Valderrama, St Andrews, Wentworth and Portmarnock. This was a demonstration of what Ballesteros had commented upon repeatedly throughout his career, namely that the only place where he felt really appreciated was in Britain.

In November, I interviewed Ballesteros at The Heritage club, an hour’s drive south of Dublin where the Seve Trophy will be held this September. “No one would mistake …. Ballesteros for a top-ranking professional golfer any more, not given that he has not lasted four rounds in a tournament for three-and-a-half years,” I noted then. “These days, just a few months before his 50th birthday, he is a course architect, staging golf tournaments, captaining teams, generally promoting his own business interests.”

What struck me was that Ballesteros had brought as much dignity to his new role as one would expect of a man who could turn the placing of a tee into the ground into a piece of unmissable theatre. You do not so much have an interview with Ballesteros as be granted an audience.

It took place in an ante-room of a hotel suite and it had something regal about it. Buckets of ice, soft drinks and Thermoses were waiting on a table. Pastries were piled on a silver dish. You sensed that you had only to raise an eyebrow and someone would appear to answer your query. The door opened and there was Ballesteros, his hand outstretched, a sardonic smile on his face, moving stiffly and coughing slightly.

He seemed broody. His dark eyes were deep and sorrowful. He had filled out and looked less haggard. He lit a cigarette and said, somewhat defensively, “one cigarette from time to time is ok” and poured some water into a saucer to use as an ashtray. He was heavier in physique, more imposing, than when I had last interviewed him, and he fixed me with a stare so that I felt as though I was under scrutiny, not him.

“You remember things in life, don’t you? Your first kiss, your first car, your first crash, the day you sign a five-figure cheque, your first job. I will never, ever, forget that shot”

Even the most hard-bitten journalist has one hero in front of whom he feels less than adequate. I have interviewed Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, George Bush, the father of George W, George Best, Jackie Stewart, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Arthur Ashe, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods without too much internal discombobulation but for so long as Ballesteros was playing I must confess I had to fight a tendency to be on my knees in front of him. That should not be, should it? A journalist must maintain his dispassion, his neutrality at all times.

Yet try as I might, I could not help myself. I and many colleagues found ourselves entranced by his ability to do exceptional things with a golf ball. When I think of great golf shots I think of Nicklaus’s thunderous drive at the 71st hole in the 1966 Open at Muirfield; of Jacklin’s fairway-splitting tee shot on the 72nd at Royal Lytham in 1969.

I think of any number of clubbing iron shots by Woods in the second round of last year’s Open, the best display of middle to long iron play I have seen in 50 years. I do not forget Woods’s remarkable 6-iron from thick rough on the sixth at Pebble Beach in the 2000 US Open which he won by 15 strokes. For sheer strength, that took some beating. He could have cleaved the Monterey Peninsula in half with that effort.

Yet it is Ballesteros’s deft chip across the 18th green to win the 1988 Open that I return to when I think of strokes of genius; of his second shot to the 16th in the last round of the 1979 when Hale Irwin labelled him the car park champion; of his shot from amidst trees and over a high wall on the corner of the 18th at Crans-sur-Sierre; of a 4-wood he played off his knees in a tournament.

Most of all I think of the shot that I think is the most remarkable I have ever seen by anyone anywhere in the world - his bunker shot with a 3-wood on the 18th hole of his singles against Fuzzy Zoeller in the 1981 Ryder Cup. He caused the ball to bend 20 yards in the air to curve its way back towards its target and end on the side of the green. My memory is that as I stood perhaps 15 yards away from Ballesteros, I felt shivers of excitement run up and down my spine.

The brilliance of that shot was twofold: that he had the vision to conceive it and the skill to execute it. Few could have thought of such a stroke and those who might have would surely have dismissed it instantly as too dangerous. Bringing it off was even greater. If he had taken a teaspoonful of sand the shot would not have worked. He hit the ball so cleanly there was not a mark left in the sand. Ballesteros called it one of the best shots of his life. I would like to have seen the others. Jack Nicklaus said it was “the best shot I ever saw.”

You remember things in life, don’t you? Your first kiss, your first car, your first crash, the day you sign a five-figure cheque, your first job. I will never, ever, forget that shot, which is why I am slightly coy about admitting that on that December day in London I was on my feet with everyone else clapping Ballesteros as he made his regal way to the top table.

Once a hero, always a hero.

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