Jane Carter was a golf-mad teenager when she watched Seve Ballesteros win his first Open at Lytham in 1979. Fifty years on from his breakthrough at Royal Birkdale, she looks back on a career spent following him — and the man she later got to meet many times herself as editor of Golf Monthly.
This week marks fifty years since Seve Ballesteros first made the golfing world stop and stare. Royal Birkdale, 1976, a 19-year-old Spaniard nobody outside Spain had heard of, tied for the lead going into the final round of the Open.
He didn’t win it. Johnny Miller did. The Open returning to Birkdale this summer, has brought all the old footage back: that swashbuckling teenager finding a way to make birdie from places no sane golfer would attempt.
Three years later, I saw for myself what all the fuss had been about. I went to Royal Lytham in 1979 with a friend, young and with no real idea what we were about to watch. What we got was Seve’s first Open win, and it remains the most Seve way any major has ever been claimed. That famous drive into a car park on the final day, and somehow still a birdie.
Nobody else in the field would have survived that round. He didn’t just survive it. He won by three. I’ve watched a lot of golf since that week. I’ve never forgotten it.
He went on to win two more Claret Jugs and two Green Jackets, and dragged European golf up by the collar until it was competitive with America for the first time in a generation. But it was never really about the trophy count with Seve. It was about what he did to the people watching.
I met him myself, several times over, in my years editing Golf Monthly. He was everything you hoped he’d be up close. Charismatic, quick to laugh, fiery when he thought something something wasn’t right, and utterly incapable of talking about golf without his hands moving as fast as his mouth. There was no gap between the man on the course and the man off it. What you saw was what you got, and what you got was a lot.
We lost him far too young, in 2011, and golf has felt his absence ever since. We’ve had brilliant players since but very few who could make a gallery gasp just by standing over the ball. Too much of modern sport, golf included, comes pre-packaged now. Careful answers, careful smiles, nothing left to chance. Seve was the opposite of all that, and it’s exactly why we still talk about him fifty years on.
It isn’t only my generation, either. Charley Hull has said she watches old footage of Seve with her dad, a player from decades before her own career even started, still finding his way onto a screen in her house. That’s the real measure of him.
I’ve got a photograph of the two of us from one of those Golf Monthly meetings, and it’s staying right at the top of this column where it belongs. Some people you photograph next to because it’s your job. Seve, I’d have found an excuse either way. It still hangs on my wall today.
Te echamos de menos, Seve
