GOLF/SEVERIANO BALLESTEROS REMEMBERED: PHILIP REIDonce played a round with the great man and has only fond memories of a true legend, who had a chemistry and obsessive love of the game

GREATNESS IS measured in many tangible ways. In professional golf, it tends to be about how many Majors are claimed. So, with five of those titles, it’s true that Seve Ballesteros achieved greatness. But his life story is about more than that. It is about his charisma and his passion, about how he became the iconic figure of European golf or, as Ernie Els once put it, “Seve was Tiger before Tiger was Tiger”.

Indeed, a shortened Christian name – the elongated Severiano reduced merely to Seve – captured his great appeal, of how he became a man of the people. He was the conquistador who brought his mercurial talents to a world stage, and whose entry into the Ryder Cup as part of a team extended from the traditional British and Irish base to include continental Europeans transformed that competition into the event it is now.

It’s noteworthy that many of the tributes to Seve have used words such as “genius” and “legend”, for he was those things and more. He had the ability to imagine and create shots that nobody else would dare dream of hitting, like the three-wood he struck from a cavernous bunker to the edge of the final green at PGA National in Florida during the 1983 Ryder Cup. It was a shot which had no less a figure than Jack Nicklaus recalling it as the greatest shot he had ever witnessed.

Ballesteros, who grew up in the tiny fishing village of Pedrena on Spain’s northern coast, first crafted shots on the beach there with a rusty three-iron. They were shots which were to be replicated on courses around the world as he became a champion, winning 87 professional tournaments in a career which made him one of the world’s most favoured sportsmen.

He won three British Opens and two US Masters titles, with arguably his most precious title coming with victory in the 1984 British Open at St Andrews. On that day, what was to become an iconic image – of his fist-pumping on the 18th green and which would later form the likeness atop the Seve Trophy named in his honour – demonstrated the passion that the game of golf and closing the deal meant to him.

As the man himself once responded when it was put to him that his formative years on the beach at Pedrena made him what he was to become, “never when you are a child do you think you are especially gifted for something. What you do notice is passion, because you feel it. Passion makes you devote yourself to what you really like. Between golf and me there was chemistry, there was mutual love. And when you devote yourself, success comes. The distance between talent and success is hard work. If you do not work hard, success waters down”.

Anyone who came into contact with Ballesteros couldn’t help but be pulled in by his magnetism, for he had a charisma that even made his scowls seem gracious.

My Seve moment dates back to the Irish Open pro-am at Fota Island in 2002. The call to play on Seve’s team had come on a Monday, making a roadside stop in Mountrath seem like a heavenly place on this earth as the news was first digested and then the trepidation started. Even as his playing performances were evidently in decline, his personality and achievements fuelled his status as a legend of the game.

On the following Wednesday, the alarm call came at seven, two hours after I’d already woken up. You couldn’t be late for a date with the great man, and – being greeted on the first tee, not as a sports journalist but as a fellow-golfer – was a moment shared with the other amateurs Con Horgan and Frank Murray. And you’re shaking hands with him, the tattoo on his left arm an outline of his swashbuckling, cavaliering self.

All the way around the pro-am round, the impulse to solve imperfection is incessant. He is standing on the tee, arms raised above his shoulders seeking the perfect takeaway that once came so naturally. Not only that, but there was a compulsion to fix imperfection in others. Me! “Demasiado rapido . . . too fast, Philip . . . Move your head,” he would say. “More. Okay, hit.”

As we know, Ballesteros never did find that old magic with the clubs again and eventually called time on any pretensions he had to continue playing by retiring from the game in 2007.

In his heyday, Seve was the best. He won five Majors, and accumulated 87 professional titles worldwide. He was on World Cup and Ryder Cup-winning teams. As Ben Crenshaw observed, “Seve’s got shots people don’t even know about . . . he’s the most talented, innovative shot-maker we have in golf.”

Ballesteros was a man who loved to be in control, and when his swing went, he wasn’t. “When I was playing good,” he was to remark, “I knew I was in control. I was in control of the galleries, of the golf courses, even the other players. I knew I would win and winning was enough.”

But he has left us all with memories of a life where he achieved so much in his 54 years, and he has left a legacy with the health of the European Tour which criss-crosses the globe providing big-money tournaments for its members from one end of the year to the other.