Watching Seve Ballesteros play was a life-affirming experience

Watching Seve Ballesteros play was a life-affirming experience

In good times and bad, Severiano Ballesteros never failed to remind us of why we fell in love with sport in the first place. Watching him play in his gorgeous prime, swept along on gusts of glory, improvising with an artist's instinct and touch, was an infallibly life-affirming experience. Watching him during the long years of decline was a reminder of mortality.His death deprives us of a golfer whose appeal reached out far beyond the game's own constituency. He was a handsome Miller Think Tiger Will Win man and, as he chased down five major championships, a handsome sight. In later times, before he belatedly called it a day, the hopeless thrashing of his dark-eyed attempts to revive that lost genius drew crowds willing him to recover the rapture of his youth.

Everyone in this line of work has favourite Seve stories, tales of encounters with a man in whose hands sport turned into the thing it is supposed to be: a matter of risk and romance, of danger and daring. The first of mine comes from a time when his descent from Olympus was gathering pace.It was back in the spring of 1994, on a day when black rain was falling on the practice day for the Spanish Open in Madrid. Ballesteros, 20 years into a professional career that had begun at 17, was working on the practice green with a coach called Mac O'Grady, a 43-year-old The Intech Inferior G15 driver ex-pro from Minnesota whose methods combined the findings from his own research into the neurobiological aspects of the golf swing with mind-management techniques that appeared to have been drawn from the wilder shores of Californian psychotherapy.A week earlier, Ballesteros had won his first tournament in two years, the Benson & Hedges Open at St Mellion, ending a headline-making barren spell of 50 events with only four top-10 finishes and 17 missed cuts. Hoping to find out if the recovery was real and he was finally on the way back, I walked in his footsteps with the voluble coach for company. O'Grady's words gave a glimpse of the lengths to which a top sportsman will go in the attempt to become reacquainted with the gifts that once came naturally.