It was prior to the 2010 Open Championship at St Andrews that Seve Ballesteros did an interview with the BBC’s Peter Alliss, during the course of which he quoted his old friend, Roberto De Vicenzo, the great Argentinean player who won the Open Championship in 1967.
Ballesteros, whose own sentences had often been as original as his shot-making, had revelled in the way Vicenzo couched his advice. “You have good times and bad times” Vicenzo told him, “and when the bad times arrive, you put up your umbrella and wait for the rain to stop.”
For two and a half years following that fateful day when he collapsed at Madrid's Barajas airport and was diagnosed with a brain tumour until his death last month, Seve's umbrella was firmly up. He had been staying indoors at his home in the pretty northern Spanish village of Pedrena and had not ventured out other than for his latest chemotherapy treatments. In all, he had four operations, with the last of them involving a draining of fluid from the brain.
So many incursions took their toll but this great champion was better than most had anticipated when he gave his first public utterances at the beginning of May 2009 following initial surgery.
“I have had a lot of luck,” he said of his then state of health. “I’m alive, I can do things, I can speak, I can reason.”
Among the ‘things’ he undertook was to become the patron of the Spanish Ryder Cup bid for 2018, laying out his views on what a successful bid would mean to his country.
Yet the Spanish hierarchy did not push for anything in the way of a regular statement from their country’s golfing hero. As time wore on, the last thing they wanted was for people to accuse them of using Ballesteros’s illness as their trump card.
