When I was a kid the most exciting thing in golf was Seve Ballesteros. My friends who I played golf with actually called me Seve instead of Mike. Not because I was a magician with a golfclub the way Seve was, but because of the dark olive skin I had in the summer and because I was pretty long and loose with the driver.
In his prime, Seve was the nerviest and most creative player in the world. Who before Seve would have even thought it would be right to try to make a birdie from a parking lot?
It was Seve's mind that made him so great. It was as if he could will the ball into the hole or out of a tricky lie. That is why the brain tumours that are being worked on right now seem like such a tragic irony.
Here is a link to an article about Seve that I thought was interesting by Brian Doogan over at ESPN.com http://sports.espn.go.com/golf/columns/story?columnist=doogan_brian&id=3661739
In the article he talks about Seve's heroic putt on the final green of the 1984 Open.
"I had my deepest emotional experience in my golfing life when I played [and won] the 1984 Open at the cradle of golf, the Old Course at St Andrews," Ballesteros said in his autobiography. "The putt [on the final green] had a clear borrow to the left but, as I struck the ball, I felt I had overdone it. I hadn't. It rolled sweetly towards the hole, then seemed to hover on the edge of the cup before finally going in as if in slow motion, perhaps impelled by my powers of mental suggestion, so strong was my desire that it should drop in."
Only a wonderfully creative mind could have done what Seve could do. Here's hoping with all my heart that Seve pulls through.
The photo at the top is a creative commons photo from the Wikipedia page on Seve. Here's link to that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severiano_Ballesteros
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