Seve Ballesteros: a champion’s eye for a course

Who he was

Severiano Ballesteros Sota was born on 9 April 1957 in Pedreña, a village in Cantabria, the youngest of five sons. His father was a farm labourer; one of the five sons died in childhood and the other four all became professional golfers. Seve learned on the beaches near home, skipping school, with a 3-iron given to him by his older brother Manuel when he was eight.

He first caught the golfing world’s eye in 1976, when at 19 he finished second at The Open. Between 1979 and 1988 he won five majors: The Open Championship three times and the Masters twice. In all he won 89 international tournaments, a record 50 of them on the European Tour.

His last major came in 1988, when he won The Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes with a final round of 65 on a Monday, after torrential rain had flooded the course. His final victory was the 1995 Peugeot Spanish Open.

The captain

He was a mainstay of the European Ryder Cup side for years. The high point came in 1997, when he captained the winning team at Valderrama in Sotogrande, the first Ryder Cup ever held in continental Europe.

Away from the playing side he created the Seve Trophy, a team event, and he captained Europe in the Royal Trophy from its inception in 2006. Seve traditionally wore navy blue on the final day of a tournament, and in 2012 the European Ryder Cup team wore navy blue and white in his memory.

How he came to design

After back injuries limited his playing in the late 1990s, he stayed in the game through the Seve Trophy and a golf course design business. In his later years he became involved in European course design, most famously by altering the 17th hole at Valderrama before the 1997 Ryder Cup.

He was a member of the Laureus World Sports Academy. In 2008 he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. He died on 7 May 2011, aged 54. The Seve Ballesteros Foundation aims to research cancer, especially brain tumours, and to help financially challenged young golfers.

His design ideas

The clearest statement comes from Los Arqueros, his first Costa del Sol course. The club says the idea was to create a course that followed the lie of the land and blended with its natural surroundings, and that Seve took the philosophy to heart, giving each hole its own personality.

The result, it adds, is a challenge for the experienced golfer and a genuine test for those fairly new to the game. At only 5,700 metres, the club says, the course was still designed to challenge the experienced golfer.

On ULTIMATE Golf

Los Arqueros Golf & Country Club in Marbella is an 18-hole, par-71 course designed in 1991 by Seve. The club calls it the first golf course on the Costa del Sol designed by him, and says it was inaugurated that year.

At San Roque Club, near Sotogrande, the Old Course was created by Dave Thomas in 1990, with bunkers redesigned by Seve. Its other claim is history: the Old Course hosted fifteen consecutive European Tour Schools from 1993 to 2007 and the Spanish Open in 2005.

Our advice: play Los Arqueros for the clearest Ballesteros plan, then drive along the coast to Valderrama and look at the 17th, where he left his mark before the Ryder Cup came to Spain.