Masters competitors miss former champion Seve Ballesteros

It’s been nearly a year since Seve Ballesteros succumbed to cancer at age 54, and the secondary repercussions of that loss are only beginning to be felt.

As past Masters Tournament winners gathered for the annual Champions Dinner on Tuesday night, the Spanish golf icon who won two green jackets was dearly missed. It’s the generations of golfers coming up, however, who lost the most with Seve’s passing.

“Golf misses him,” said Ben Crenshaw, the two-time winner who serves as host to the exclusive club of past champions. “He leaves such a void there because he did so much for the European Tour. He started so young, and the European Tour grew up with him. He was a giant over there. He had it all.”

Ballesteros lifted the European Tour and later the Ryder Cup on his shoulders and helped carry them to the lofty heights they enjoy today. His passion and charisma endeared him to fans and inspired legions of young European golfers to follow in his path.

“For me he was the most important,” Sergio Garcia said of his golfing influences. “Seve was everything to Spanish sports in the ’80s and ’90s, not only to golf. To me he was a great influence. One of my idols.”

Garcia, 32, was fortunate enough to get to play and pick the competitive mind of Ballesteros for years before he died. That’s a luxury that many young golfers have had the opportunity to do for decades with legends such as Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player just as they did with Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead and they in turn did with Bobby Jones and Gene Sarazen.

Younger golfers will miss out on that chance to learn from a master the way reigning Masters and U.S. Open champs Charl Schwartzel and Rory McIlroy have learned from conversations with Nicklaus.

“The beauty about the game of golf is that as years go by you have the opportunity to share moments and knowledge from people who were there before you,” said Jose Maria Olazabal, Ballesteros’ playing partner and friend. “In this case unfortunately, we’re not going to have the opportunity to talk with this person.I imagine he would be coming here every year and how many practice rounds he would have been able to play with young players and share that knowledge and information with those players.

“Even though we have video footage of him with his magical shots and those special moments from the trees or chipping around the greens, you actually don’t have the person himself. And that I think is the great loss that we have in this case.”

Phil Mickelson had similar sentiments.

“I think his leadership and his passion for the game will be missed,” he said, pointing to Ballesteros’ Masters victory in 1980 as the inspiration for his own style and ambitions.

Olazabal credits Balle­steros’ mentoring for lifting him into the realm of major champions.

“He was crucial in the sense that he was my mentor and he made me believe in my abilities,” the two-time Masters winner said. “That was the main thing for me. He was always very clear and very positive and made me believe in myself.”

WHAT REMAINS ARE the memories. Golfers lucky enough to compete against him relish the stories that typically ended at their own expense.

Davis Love III, the current U.S. Ryder Cup captain, was indoctrinated into the tense biennial events in 1993 at The Belfry with three consecutive match-ups against Ballesteros and Olazabal.

“We actually drew them my first three and (captain Tom) Watson said, ‘You guys are done’ and had to sit me out Saturday afternoon because it was so intense over there playing against those two,” said Love, who went 1-2 with partner Tom Kite against the Spanish duo. “He was definitely the man. It was an education for me playing against Seve because he was the Ryder Cup at that time.”

Palmer, who is most often linked with Ballesteros as influences on their respective tours, never got to duel with the Spaniard at the peak of their powers, but even the King got a taste of what Seve was all about.

“One of my last defeats, after I was old and not playing, I played in the World Match Play,” Palmer said. “I played Seve and I was one up going to 18 at Wentworth. He was in the woods and I was just a foot or two short of the green in two. I didn’t know where Seve was. I couldn’t see him. And he holed it for 3 out of the woods and I lost the hole and lost the first extra hole. He did things like that all the time.”

MICKELSON, WHO SAID Bal­le­steros “was everything I hoped he would be” when he met him in a practice round at Torrey Pines, remembers marveling at the Spaniard’s creativity and touch.

“We were both with Hugo Boss doing photo shoots at Loch Lomond and would do some trick shots out of bunkers,” Mickelson said. “Watching him be able to control the amount of spin or side spin with a 4- or 5-iron out of the bunker, those were the shots that I remember. Certainly a lot of his hole-outs, the ’95 Ryder Cup he holed out on No. 2 with (Tom) Lehman.

“But watching him in a different environment create shots that he had, that was the most impressive to me.”

Garcia got to experience the full measure of Ballesteros’ stature during practice rounds at the 1996 British Open at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, where Ballesteros had won his first and last majors in 1979 and ’88.

“It was amazing, not only to spend a couple of days with him around that course but to see how all the people loved him and how much he meant to everyone out there,” Garcia said. “It was very impressive.”

Bob Toski, a former tour player turned teaching pro, believes there was genius in Ballesteros’ game.

“I always said he should have been a matador,” Toski said. “His hand-eye coordination and his imagination for golf – he’s in the trees and the rough where you have to invent golf shots – no one did it better. He lived every shot. Some of those guys only come along so often with that flair and exuberance and they affect people.”

Said Crenshaw: “He just had that aura about him. Always did. He did things with such flair and wore his emotions on his sleeve and that Spanish temper came out so many times. He just loved competition. My God, he was a maestro.”

Love, who would sometimes sneak back onto the golf course at the British Open to watch Ballesteros play, says the greatest compliment he ever got from his father came during a collegiate tournament.

“I hit this big high cut 4-iron out of the woods and onto the green,” Love said. “My dad said, ‘The two most exciting players in the game are you and Seve Ballesteros.’ I always tried to have the passion Seve had, the grind-it-out mentality. I always looked up to him.”

WITH TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY and agronomy, players aren’t asked the same questions of the game that Ballesteros routinely answered. His style of play is largely lost, with only a handful of players such as Mickelson and Bubba Watson displaying glimpses of that creative aggression.

“Golf has changed a lot,” said Alvaro Quiros, who was born in 1983 a few months before Ballesteros won his final Masters. “Golf course setups are completely different. It’s never going to happen again.”

The living champions will gather again in the library of the Augusta National clubhouse for the annual dinner, where last year Olazabal read a heartfelt letter from Ballesteros letting them know he wouldn’t be around much longer.

“His emphasis was that he would miss us all,” Crenshaw said.

Not nearly as much, however, as the present and future generations in golf will miss him.