Seve Ballesteros

Severiano Ballesteros Sota was born on 9 April 1957 in the village of Pedreña, Spain, and died of brain cancer on 7 May 2011 at age 54. He was a Spanish professional golfer who reached World No. 1 and dominated the sport from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Over his career, he won 90 international tournaments, including five major championships: three Open Championships (1979, 1984, 1988) and two Masters Tournaments (1980, 1983).

Ballesteros came from a golfing family. He was the youngest of five sons; one brother died in childhood, and the others all became professionals. His father Baldomero was a farm labourer, and his mother was Carmen Sota. He learned the game as a child on the beaches near his home, often skipping school, using a 3-iron his older brother Manuel gave him when he was eight. His maternal uncle Ramón Sota was a four-time Spanish professional champion and finished sixth at the 1965 Masters. Manuel Ballesteros finished in the top 100 of the European Tour Order of Merit every year from 1972 to 1983 and later became Seve’s manager. Brothers Vicente and Baldomero, and nephews Raúl and Iván, also became professional golfers.

He turned professional in March 1974 at age 16. He burst onto the international scene in 1976 at the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, where he led by two shots after three rounds but shot a final-round 74 to tie for second with Jack Nicklaus, six shots behind winner Johnny Miller. That same year, he won the European Tour Order of Merit, a title he would win six times total—a record at the time, later surpassed by Colin Montgomerie. He won his first Open in 1979 with a closing 70, famously hitting his tee shot into a car park on the 16th hole yet still making birdie.

His 1980 Masters win was the first by a European player, and at 23 he was the youngest winner of that tournament (a record broken by Tiger Woods in 1997). His 1979 Open win made him the youngest winner of that tournament in the 20th century and the first continental European to win a major since Arnaud Massy in 1907. He won the rain-delayed 1983 Masters by five shots, becoming the last golfer to win the Masters on a Monday as of 2023. He called the putt he holed on the 18th green at St Andrews to win the 1984 Open "the happiest moment of my whole sporting life."

Ballesteros joined the PGA Tour on 30 September 1983. In 1984 he played 15 tournaments, the minimum required for membership, and only nine the following season. He was later suspended by the PGA Tour for failing to meet his commitment. His fifth and final major came at the 1988 Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes, where a final-round 65 beat Nick Price by two shots after torrential rain forced Saturday’s play to be abandoned. He called that round "perhaps the best round of my entire career."

He was a mainstay of the European Ryder Cup team for much of the 1980s and 1990s, scoring 22½ points in 37 matches. His partnership with fellow Spaniard José María Olazábal was the most successful in Ryder Cup history, with 11 wins and two halved matches out of 15 pairs matches. He was part of European sides that won the Cup in 1985, retained it in 1987 and 1989, and regained it in 1995. The pinnacle came in 1997, when he captained the winning European side at Valderrama in Spain—the first Ryder Cup held in continental Europe.

Ballesteros won a record 50 European Tour titles, winning at least one for 17 consecutive years from 1976 to 1992. His final victory was the 1995 Peugeot Spanish Open. He led the Official World Golf Ranking for 61 weeks from its inauguration in April 1986 to September 1989, and was world number one at the end of 1988. He also led McCormack’s World Golf Rankings in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and was in the end-of-season top ten for 15 years starting in 1976.

Back injuries caused his form to decline in the late 1990s, but he stayed involved in golf, creating the Seve Trophy and running a golf course design business. In 2000, Golf Digest ranked him the greatest Continental European golfer of all time. He played sparingly in the 2000s due to ongoing back problems and retired from competitive golf in 2007. In 2008 he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. In 2009, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Sports Personality Awards for the second time, presented at his home by former Ryder Cup teammate José María Olazábal.