Following the Ryder Cup, Ballesteros said he had plans to resurrect his own golfing career. It was a tall order and, as things turned out, his play became ever more erratic and with it his personal life. He and his wife, Carmen, parted company though, in fairness to Seve, it can never have been easy marrying into a banking family whose idea of a high flier had nothing to do with a wedge struck from the rough.
Along not too dissimilar lines, the aristocrats who still hold sway in pockets of Spanish golf took a long time to embrace their champion. Ballesteros already had a couple of majors under his belt when he was up at the Pedrena Golf Club one day and a couple of regulars asked what he was doing in the locker-room. "You’re not a member are you?” they chorused. By all accounts, the incident cut the player to the quick.
It was in the year before he was taken ill, at a press conference on the eve of the 2007 Open at Carnoustie, that Ballesteros opened his heart to the UK press and public, both of whom had embraced him from the first moment he arrived on British shores.
Though there had been times when he had pointed an accusing finger at the golf-writing corps, saying that they had put too much pressure on him, he had no complaints that day. Instead, he thanked them for writing fine stories and giving him headlines all over the world. “I thank you,” he said, “for making me look big.”
He wanted his audience to know that he felt he had made a mistake in giving his teenage years so wholly over to golf, while he also said he was sorry for “the odd spot of bother” he had caused along the way.
It was so disarmingly done that you had the feeling that if Jose Maria Zamora had been in the room, he would have forgiven him at once. Zamora was the referee on whom Ballesteros had launched a physical attack three years before because of what he saw as a couple of unfair warnings for slow-play.
