Seve Ballesteros: The swing
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To celebrate the release of SEVE The Movie on June 27 (more about that here) we want to pay tribute to the great man’s swing. Powerful, elegant, dramatic, swash-buckling; Seve Ballesteros’s swing in its prime was a thing of absolute beauty. However, its virtues were also its vices. A reliance on the hands and arms gave an immensely talented golfer the flair and shotmaking ability for which he is rightly fabled. However, putting these smaller, hair-trigger muscles in control did give rise to his equally-famed wildness off the tee.
While the Ballesteros swing was very much his own, it was an action clearly born out of the Nicklaus era. Seve was relatively upright, made an enormous shoulder turn and drove his legs strongly through the downswing. While these moves created massive torque and clubhead speed, they would also put huge strain through his back, and lead to the chronic spinal problems that would plague his career.
The image here of his top-of-the-backswing – shoulders turned to something approaching 120 degrees, yet knees hardly moved and left heel still floored – will make anyone with a back problem wince.
The Ballesteros swing was a young man’s action, wonderfully natural and dynamic. As advancing years forced him to seek out a more technically correct, rotational action, he found himself moving further away from the pure golfing instinct that had brought him five Majors. His swing is better remembered as the mini-cyclone of poise and panache that characterised his early to mid-’80s heyday.
Indeed, anyone lucky enough to have watched him in the flesh in this period was left with an indelible impression that this was how a golf club was meant to be swung.