Licence To Thrill
Bill Elliott looks back on Seve’s life and ponders the void left by his untimely death 10 years ago
Ten years? Is it really a decade since Severiano Ballesteros Sota was finally overwhelmed by the brain cancer that brought such a rich life to so premature an end? He was 54 years and 29 days old when he died.
Of course, we had already lost him as a competitive golfer, his retirement from the old game also premature because of his neverending back problems, his announcement in the media centre during The Open week at Carnoustie offering a sad preview to the 2007 Championship.
He told me on that afternoon in Scotland that while he obviously regretted leaving the jousting fields, he looked forward to continued involvement in golf, to designing courses, to promoting the game, to leadership and inspiration and motivation as well as, occasionally, to being a bit of a rascal, of the loveable kind, while enthusiastically remaining a maverick.
Instead, he was diagnosed with brain tumours. It was a seriously cruel irony that one of the most creative minds ever to embrace golf turned out to be the cradle for what destroyed him. Not that Seve railed against this too much, consoling those of us who cared deeply for
him by repeatedly stressing that he had enjoyed “a wonderful life and a journey he would not change”. He didn’t want us to feel sorry for him, but we did. We also felt sorry for ourselves.
So much to offer
A colleague asked me before I began writing this if Seve’s departure had left any kind of vacuum in professional golf. I suppose the answer is that in one sense no but in another yes, absolutely. There is no doubt that a healthy Seve could have offered much had he lived longer and been able to cast that critical eye of his on a game that is shifting this way and that as times change and this mad world spins on its axis.
During his life he turned out to be right about many things and wrong about many others, even if he stubbornly believed that, actually, he was right about everything. Like all truly outstanding sportsmen he enjoyed a vibrant ego, an amplified sense of self that was counterbalanced by an instinctive, quite humble affinity with you, me and quite probably everyone except Deane Beman. For 20 years Beman was the boss of the PGA Tour and for a big slice of those years a man whose determination to both protect and enhance the US Tour, barricading it from outsiders for too long, irritated Seve more than anyone else ever managed.
He had a temper – who doesn’t – but also a natural charm and charisma few possess that embraced men and women in equal measure. His charm, his imagination would surely have enhanced and impacted on the pro game as he looked out from Spain to poke golf with the sharpest of sticks. During his playing career he showed us that you did not need to be perfect to succeed, but you did need to know that never, ever, do you quit. It’s a philosophy that is not restricted to games.
“He was our Laurence Olivier, our Richard Burton, our John Wayne”
A priceless gem
During my career, there have been three European Tours. There was the one that started in the early ’70s and struggled to breathe properly, growing slowly. Then there was the European Tour that grew spectacularly thanks largely to Seve’s presence and the inspiration he offered to the likes of Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer and Ian Woosnam.
Of course, this latter quartet had their own special talents, their own exceptional drive. But would they have achieved as much as they did without Seve showing them his route to the very top of the game’s
highest mountains? Maybe. Maybe not. Finally we have the present Tour, its major stars in America and general media interest diminished apart from the very biggest weeks.
One man who knows better than anyone what Seve meant and what he could have continued to mean to golf generally and the European Tour specifically is Ken Schofield, who was head honcho of the Tour for an extraordinary 30 years.
Like many of us, Ken first realised that his burgeoning pro circuit had just acquired a priceless asset when Seve chipped that ball between bunkers on the final hole of the 1976 Open Championship. While Lee Trevino led the whooping and hollering in the Royal Birkdale clubhouse at this audacious shot, Schofield quietly crossed his fingers and hoped this young Spaniard would prosper. Turned out he needn’t have worried.
“Seve clearly was taken far, far too early,” Ken says. “Okay, his competing days were behind him, but he was still Seve, still had that charisma, that magnetism. Most of us knew that day in Southport we were witnessing something, someone, very special. He was an inspiration to so many, encouraging boys and girls, men and women into golf just by being Seve. And, as you say, he was the leader of our international group of golfers. In fact, to your quartet of Nick and Sandy, Bernhard and Woosie, I’d add Greg Norman. Seve winning The Open and then The Masters had a profound effect on them all. As he did on Jose Maria and Monty.
“He may be gone but his legacy lives on, his spirit continues. Had he lived there would have been a strong case, a very strong case, for him to take the Ryder Cup captaincy for a second time. I’m sure of it. Our job as administrators was to provide a stage for the players to perform on and no one performed more sensationally than Seve. He was our Laurence Olivier, our Richard Burton, our John Wayne.
“We had our disagreements at times, usually in three areas. One was the payment of appearance money, another was when I’d say ‘no’ to a release he’d requested and later in his career he became convinced that we were trying to influence the rules guys when it came to Seve. I got our senior referees, John Paramor and Andy Mcfee, to talk to him and persuade him that the rules as applied to him would have been the same for anyone else. But none of these things ever became personal. I always felt our job was to try to understand what makes the athlete tick and then to cut them some slack.
“If he was still with us, he would be influencing many things, from course design to the direction the game is heading. He would still be a leader. Instead, we miss him, we will always miss him.”
True to his roots
Amen to that final sentiment. Of course, Schofield was helped by the fact that Seve stayed true to the European Tour. Yes, he played in America as well, but he never left here for there. This was partly because the PGA Tour did not really want outsiders and partly because Seve was Spanish first
and European second. He collected Open titles, deliberately sought them out, because he wanted to be champion of a country, not just a player with a commercial title and a cheque.
Just consider the Opens he won, some of them multiple times: The Open, the Dutch Open, the French Open, the Spanish Open, the Swiss Open, the German Open, the Irish Open, the Scandinavian Open, the Kenya Open. His last Open victory was, fittingly, another Spanish Open in 1995. “I like the Opens very much of the different countries,” he once told me. “They are special, they have history, they have a past and, hopefully, a future. The others come and go, but with the Opens you join a band of brothers if you are lucky enough to win one.”
This was typical Seve. He always was a man who had both eyes on the money but he was also a player who embraced things with his heart. Passion and emotion were his key drivers. He offered love to many and he was easy to love back. Over many chats, many lunches, occasional interviews, we became friends. We argued and laughed and argued some more. It was never dull.
In 2004 I joined Seve at the Heritage Golf Resort in
Ireland for the official opening of the course he had co-designed. I hadn’t seen him for a while and I was taken aback when we met in his suite. He looked older, more worn, a little agitated and he was chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. I’d never seen him smoke anything before. It wasn’t a sin, but it was a sign something had changed and probably not for the better.
A few years earlier I had interviewed his brother, Manuel, himself an accomplished golfer on the European playgrounds. Manuel told me he was worried about Seve, that he feared his kid brother was “a bit loco” and that he had all but given up knocking on Seve’s door because “he was never in”. It was a worry, though he had seemed to recover from this dark period by the time he told us at Carnoustie that he was officially retired. It seemed clear back then that he had at last come to terms with who, what and where he was at that stage in his life and was ready to move on.
“He offered love to many and was easy to love back”
For his eyes only
He didn’t get the chance, though how he coped with the cancer over the next few years said much for the continued existence of the fortitude that he had once brought to bear on a bizarrely difficult recovery shot from behind a tree, a bush and quite probably a herd of cattle.
In 1983, my then editor told me to ask Seve if he would pose for a glamorous photo for the paper. He told me to offer Seve £1,000 in whatever currency he preferred. I told Seve we would dress him like James Bond in a white dinner jacket and a bow tie, a red rose in a lapel, while he held a golf club. He declined the money but agreed to do the picture, intrigued and flattered by the 007 angle.
The photo, taken by the brilliant Mark Bourdillon, was sensational. To thank Seve, I had it framed and gave it to him a few weeks later. At that year’s World Match Play at Wentworth I bumped into his fiancee Carmen Botin. I asked her if she had seen the photo. She said yes and I asked if she now had it on her bedside table. “No,” she laughed. “Seve has it on his bedside table.”
That’s the Seve I knew and loved. That’s the one I miss.