In Search Of Seve

With a new wife, a new son and a new maturity, will the old Ballesteros ever be the same?

In Serch Of Seve (Golf Digest November 1990)

Jaime Diaz's profile of Seve Ballesteros originally appeared in the November 1990 issue of Golf Digest.

By Jaime Diaz

Photos By Golf Sport Germany

November 1990

Seve Ballesteros carried himself with a rumpled, but comfortable bearing as he climbed on to the small practice green of the Real Pedreña Golf Club, a few steps from the caddie shack where he once served restive apprenticeship in the game. The famous slash of raven black hair that now begins high on the forehead fell lankly into his eyes. His golf shirt was wrinkled and his black belt didn't match his brown shoes.

Seve Ballesteros returns to his old schoolhouse in Santander and sits in his old seat, entertaining young friends who still look up to him.

Just four days earlier, his wife of two years, Carmen, had givenbirth to their first child, an 8-pound Baldomero, named after Seve's late father. the baby has made sleep difficult, but Ballesteros wore a bright if tired smile as he accepted congratulations from the friends and club members who gathered around him.

The circle included men and women he has known all his life, but Ballesteros seemed most at ease with the four or five children who anxiously sidled close to the group. He asked about the youths' golf games, commented on their outfits and smiled at their shy answers. Later, he chose a slightly overweight 10-year-old named Gabriel for the honor of shagging balls for him.

"You're a little heavy, so we are going to give you a workout," Ballesteros said to the boy in Spanish, drawing giggles from the other children and a grin from Gabriel.

Ballesteros, who officially lives in Monte Carlo, comes back to his birthplace of Pedreña, a seaside village of some 2,000 people in the north of Spain, about 10 times a year. Although he spends parts of most days working on his golf game, the bulk of his time in his birthplace is devoted to relaxation-cycling through the village lanes, fishing, target shooting, tooling around in a Volvo coupe, playing chess or cards with friends, or generally spending quiet time with his family in the simple country home he built for his mother, also named Carmen, near the golf course.

As he experimented on the elevated practice green for more than an hour with a Bulls Eye putter, his backdrop was the sparkling Bay of Santander, framed by its crowded beaches, and farther in the distance, rising on a narrow peninsula, the classic Palace of Magdelena, built at the turn of the century as a summer retreat for the king and queen of Spain. To his left, on top of a hill that overlooks Real Pedreña's front nine, is the two-story stone farmhouse in which he grew up, which is now the refurbished home of the family of his brother, Manuel.

Pedreña was a hard place to leave when the fire inside Ballesteros burned hotter than in any golfer in the world. Now that it no longer does, as he himself admits, the pull of his native land may be even greater.

"It's always been difficult for me to leave home," Ballesteros would say later. "For the Spanish people, it's not normal to leave where you were born. For Americans, it is more natural to leave, to go someplace else to find a good job. In Spain, the philosophy is to stay close to your family."

Ballesteros was speaking in the abstract, but there was a wistfulness in his tone that seemed to summarize the current state of his relationship with a game that has obsessed him since the age of 7. In his 17 years as a professional, Ballesteros has put himself at odds with his cultural and personal nature in his quest to be the best in the game. His five major championships and 60 victories around the world attest to a valiant fight, but it appears that the battles have left Ballesteros, at the relatively young age of 33, war weary and in need of repair.

The player who seduced the golf aficionados with a magisterial style marked by invention, courage and intensity is no longer considered the best in the world. The title has been inherited by the more prosaic but relentlessly efficient Nick Faldo, and among the contenders who have passed Ballesteros is Spaniard Jose-Maria Olazabal, the 24-year-old who in August transcended a record of precocious consistency with an explosive 12-shot victory at the World Series of Golf.

Meanwhile, Ballesteros, who won four major championships by the age of 28, has turned in two of the worst seasons of his career, winning only four tournaments in Europe and performing erratically in the majors.

And while other top players -- notably Sandy Lyle, Curtis Strange and Mark Calcavecchia -- are also suffering slumps, Ballesteros' long record of consistency and his passionate approach to the game makes his decline more alarming.

"Seve has a lot of reasons to be worn out," says Johnny Miller, who has been a friend of Ballesteros since 1976. "He's been a touring pro since he was 17, and he has carried a lot of baggage for a lot of years. He has had this tremendous drive to be the best, to set records, the extra pressure of being the favorite, and that can make you a little insane. His life is changing, and I'm sure he is wondering if golf will never have as big a role again. He is still a young man, but as far as golf, he is older than his age."

Commentator and former player Peter Alliss, a veteran Ballesteros watcher who recently angered the Spaniard by publicly opposing a move to hold the Ryder Cup in Spain in 1993, also cites the toll of the Spaniard's particular burden.

"He came in with a great deal of ammunition, but it's possible he may not have any left," said Alliss. "With as much globe-hopping as he's done, and as hard as he plays, he may have put into 14 or 15 years what someone else put into 25. It's too early to tell, but if he hasn't come roaring back by 1992, I would daresay then that it's probably come to an end for Seve."