In the 1983 Masters, there was that little chip he holed from the back of the final green to tie up that year’s championship after having duffed the shot at his first attempt.
In the following year’s Open at St Andrews, he had that putt at the eighteenth which, with a lovely touch of theatre, took forever to subside.
But arguably the most famous moment of the lot was his shot from the car park in the 1979 Open at Lytham.
On a day when he used his driver nine times but hit only one fairway, he had knocked his tee-shot at the sixteenth under a blue car – and somehow qualified for a free drop which paved the way for a birdie and a three-shot win over Jack Nicklaus. Not everyone approved but Seve deflated the critics with much the same touch of mischief that fuelled his more logic-defying shots. To his way of thinking, it was less a matter of his ball being in the wrong place than the cars. “But then,” he mused, “I suppose they’ve got to park them somewhere.”
When the dashing Spaniard captained the European Ryder Cup side of 1997, he was at his incorrigible best. Though he purported to have faith in his men, he could not begin to hide the fact that he would sooner have played all the more difficult shots himself.
There was a typical instance as Colin Montgomerie and Langer arrived on the last tee with a one-hole lead against Jim Furyk and Lee Janzen. Montgomerie hit into the trees on the right and, when he and Langer arrived at the ball, they found their captain lurking in the shadows and assessing the situation, first from one angle and then from another. He began to explain to Langer how he could hit under this branch and around that tree trunk but, as he looked across to Montgomerie for support, so Langer seized the chance to chop out sideways.
