Acknowledgements: Fallible and fabulous Golf hero Seve Ballesteros, Spain

Sportsmen and women are qualified professional artists, and there is nothing wrong with this; they bring us joy and their mode of clothes a machine of time we are back to the time when we were younger and more innocent and living room, do not work.

But sometimes a sports personality comes along who more entertaining, and the Spanish golfer Severiano Ballesteros, who is deceased, aged 54 just, after a long fight against cancer, was one of them. Five major championships bear witness to its place in the Pantheon of golf, and to the way in which - in a cohort of talented, certainly - it been expelled European golf to parity with the American game, based on two generations of European players, transforming the Ryder Cup between Europe and the United States weekend of bi-annually in most eagerly anticipated golf. But there was more to him than that. (See the photos of Ballesteros, the master of golf).

First, there was the fact that he was Spanish. There was great Spanish sportsmen before him, of course, footballers terrific (although the Spain is always less than the international championships until he won the World Cup last year) and the tennis stars as the magician sublime geometryManuel Santana. But for me, Seve epitomized in a certain way the way in which Spain, who had been an introvert and stunted in the years of Franco, started parade trust his tips on the world stage after the death of the dictator. He was the first post-Franco remarkable generation - artists, actors, directors, heads - who have restored their nation to the position of cultural importance it deserves.

These flowery thoughts are obviously not why golf fans remember Seve with a condition given to a few stars of the sport. (See pictures of the British Open golf tournament benefits.)

It was wonderful reading assessments of him as American stars Phil Mickelson, because Seve has not played an American game to all the. Too young Americans are brought to play target Golf, a game that lives in the air. You bang a drive as much as you can on a billiard-table-smooth fairway and play a corner behind the hole, turn this return two-putt. That's all. This is an attempt (sentenced, in fact) to make predictable golf. Set the Seve, however, was improvised - he should be given of where his shots sometimes landed - and has played on the ground as in the air, running the ball through the impossible gaps and random humps in the hole.

But skill improvised everything which would have meant nothing if he was not allied to the power. In 1985, I followed Seve on Wentworth Royal Championship of the world match play for a few tours. It was not a giant. but I have this memory of him, standing on the tee, as a helical spring flesh. Then he pressed some switch, fired the club away in its more and raised a force which is - I remember this very distinctly - Women Watch shortness of breath.