Seve Ballesteros, the legendary five-time major winning golfer, has died at the age of 54 after losing his fight against cancer.
The news was confirmed by a statement on the
golfer's official website which said: "Today, at 2.10am Spanish time, Seve Ballesteros passed away peacefully surrounded by his family at his home in Pedrena.
"The Ballesteros family is very grateful for all the support and gestures of love that have been received since Seve was diagnosed with a brain tumour on 5th October 2008 at Madrid Hospital la Paz.
" Ballesteros' brother Baldomero told reporters the funeral will be held on Wednesday in Pedrena, while Miguel Angel Revilla, head of the local Cantabria government, said the region would observe three days of
official mourning.
Ballesteros had been recuperating at his home in northern Spain after a series of operations since being diagnosed with two malignant brain tumours in 2008.
His condition worsened on Wednesday, at which point he was admitted to hospital; rumours had swept Spain last week that Ballesteros's situation had taken a rapid downturn. On Friday, Ballesteros was under heavy sedation and his family released a statement confirming his situation had deteriorated.
In an unfortunate coincidence, the
Spanish Open – the last competition Ballesteros won as a professional in 1995 – is currently taking place in Barcelona.
José María Olazábal, the golfer closest to Ballesteros and inspired by him since childhood, was too emotional to speak to the media in the aftermath of his Friday round in Barcelona. "I can't talk," Olazábal said. "I can only wait, and cry."
Another Spanish golfer and Olazábal's playing partner,
Miguel Angel Jiménez, was in tears upon completion of his second round. Olazábal, Europe's Ryder Cup captain, recently stated his dream that Ballesteros could be alongside him for the meeting with the
United States in Chicago next autumn. The pair met a fortnight ago, at which point Ballesteros was in a wheelchair.
Olazábal's manager, Sergio Gómez, reported that Ballesteros's daughter had passed on details of her father's condition on Thursday. "Seve's physical condition was not good when José María went to see him, but they talked about
golf and everything," Gómez said. "Then came the call yesterday to tell him that Seve was in a critical condition."
Ballesteros's illness initially came to light after he collapsed at Madrid airport in October 2008; during the intervening period, he has rarely been seen in public. Since his first surgery, which lasted 12 hours, he has undergone almost continuous chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In 2009, after his fourth chemotherapy course, Ballesteros labelled it "a miracle" he was still alive.
In 2010, during his last television interview with the BBC, Ballesteros spoke of fighting cancer. "You can't have it all in life," he said. "One day you feel fantastic, the next you never know what is going to happen. You just take a look at how many days of glory I had before. It has been a fantastic life and this, what has happened to me, is what I will call destiny; one test that God is putting on me."
Ballesteros, who retired from professional golf in 2007, was earlier regarded as a pioneer for the European game overseas. He had turned professional at the age of 16, in 1974, finishing second to
Jack Nicklaus in the Open at Birkdale only two years later.
He was the first from this continent to claim a Masters title, in 1980, a feat he repeated at Augusta three years later. Ballesteros was the winner of the Open in 1979, 1984 and 1988. Besides winning a total of 87 titles in his career, Ballesteros played in eight
Ryder Cups, claiming 20 points from 37 matches. He also captained a successful European team, fittingly on his home soil in Valderrama, 14 years ago.
Ballesteros had not been deemed well enough to make a planned trip to St Andrews to say a farewell to British fans at the time of last year's Open. At the Masters last month,
Phil Mickelson dedicated a Spanish-themed champions' dinner to the absent Ballesteros, the man he credits with his own decision to start playing golf.
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Fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance
By James Lawton - The Independent
Ballesteros's death was more than the end of a great sports career
Seve Ballesteros, pictured in 1976
The great matador
Manuel Benitez announced to his young sister that he would dress her in the finest clothes – or in mourning. His compatriot Seve Ballesteros never made such a declaration. It wouldn't have been appropriate on the lips of a golfer, because when Seve was young the game he embraced as if it was life itself made no great call on Spanish emotions.
Last night, though, we could measure the extent of his achievement because much of his country, and the wide world of sport, were indeed in the deepest mourning.
There were times when the golf of Ballesteros was almost incidental. The passion and the grace and the burning eyes and the windswept hair and the noble head and the wild, fist-pumping self-belief were what commanded the attention of his people as much as the superb anarchy of his play, and they sent a great charge through a game that had never known such fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance.
Ballesteros's death, which came after a typically brave and stoic reaction to the crushing news of a cancerous brain tumour, was more than the end of a great sports career. It was the last sigh of a man who brought a flamenco snap to everything he did, whose life of 54 years was perhaps not so cruelly compressed as it might have seemed at the first news that he had gone. Not, at least, for anyone who had seen the poignant truth that when Ballesteros could no longer play golf as masterfully as a god and, sometimes, as impishly as a street urchin, a central part of his existence had disappeared.
Ballesteros at times hinted as much. His obsession with golf, a game far from the heart of most young Spaniards, was nurtured by the evidence that it could provide a boy of humble stock with a good living, something far above the expectations of his father, who worked on the land around the Real Golf Club of Pedrena on the Gulf of Santander.
Severiano's uncle Ramon Sota was professional champion of Spain four times and once finished sixth at the US Masters, a title his nephew would win twice in a blaze of virtuosity. The boy could see the most desirable of lives and he pursued the ambition as single-mindedly as the torero Benitez, better known as El Cordobes. But there was a price, one he acknowledged in the wake of his failed marriage to Carmen, the mother of his three children, and later the death in a car crash of his girlfriend.
Ballesteros saw more clearly than ever before that when he embraced golf, playing in the moonlight on a course banned to caddies but for one day of the year, he had immersed himself in a game which had brought him unimagined fame and wealth but one that also, when it withdrew its favours, and was no longer susceptible to his fierce will, had left him with a hollow place in the pit of his stomach – and a sometimes almost unbearable pain in his back.
El Cordobes had played with the bulls in the Andalucian breeding fields in the night, a gypsy boy, impertinent and impatient, and Ballesteros fashioned his game, almost completely self-taught, on the forbidden course and then on the neighbouring beach. The bullfighter risked his life; the golfer placed his in a tunnel from which in the end there was really no escape.
That was the truth which, at least in the view of so many of his warmest admirers, haunted the corridors of the La Paz hospital in Madrid, before he died surrounded by his family at his home in Pedrena.
Life isn't a game, of course, but the tragedy behind the glory of Seve Ballesteros was that sometimes he plainly found it hard to distinguish between the two. He wept unashamedly in defeat and was distraught when he finished second as a 19-year-old at the Open at Royal Birkdale in 1976. Ballesteros always lived in the moment, and if such anguish was hard to understand after he had been beaten only by the superstar American Johnny Miller, and tied with Jack Nicklaus, it was soon enough widely understood that the thin, intense youth played only to win. It wasn't considered an ambition; it was a birthright.
He won three Opens along with his Masters titles, and each time he won a major he seemed to journey a little deeper into the improbable, even the surreal.
When he won his first Open, the American Hale Irwin sneered that the Claret Jug had gone to the "car-park" champion, a wild hitter who had had to retrieve his ball from under a car. Ballesteros smouldered and went on to dazzle the world.
Before the range of his genius began to ebb, irretrievably, he was able to produce one last great expression of it. It was in his final major triumph at Lytham in 1988. He overwhelmed the tough and gifted pro Nick Price with golf that was filled with all of his nerve and invention and a touch that was rarely less than exquisite. For his last round he wore a blue sweater, and the banner headline was inevitable: Rhapsody in Blue.
But then if Seve Ballesteros was in some ways a rhapsody that turned into a lament, his meaning was never threatened, not even when his life rushed away these last few days.
When he received the grim diagnosis, he thanked all his admirers for their messages of support and said he would fight with as much courage and serenity as it was possible to muster. Serenity was something that had been denied him for some time, even to the extent that reports of an attempted suicide were not lightly dismissed.
But then if it was true that in his last days Seve Ballesteros found a degree of that elusive serenity, it may have had something to do with the fact that finally he understood quite how he was valued by the galleries he had fought so hard, and sometimes so desperately, to please. There was a time when he seemed to believe that everything he had achieved was finely balanced on the brilliance of his next shot. Of course it wasn't. Few sportsmen on earth had less reason to worry about the meaning of what they had done – and how much they would always be loved.
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