Seve special in so many ways - Turner

Golfing great Seve Ballesteros has been credited with having a more positive influence on the game than any other player in the sport's long and storied history.

Former New Zealand tour professional Greg Turner today joined a queue of golfers and officials to pay tribute to the Spaniard, the flamboyant winner of five major titles who died yesterday at the age of 54 after a long battle with cancer.

"I doubt there's been a player anywhere in the world who has had more of an impact on golf as him," Turner told NZPA.

"He brought golf into the living rooms in countries around the world where it wasn't really a mainstream sport.

"He was the inspiration for what happened throughout Europe and South America. As a consequence he probably impacted on the game in real terms more than just about any other individual."

Turner first saw Ballesteros as a 13-year-old and was transfixed by the teenaged Spaniard when he won the Otago Charity Classic in Dunedin in 1977.

"He was an inspiration for me back then," said Turner, a golf course designer who quit the professional circuit in 2003 after winning 13 times in Europe and Australasia.

Later, when Turner turned professional and joined the European Tour, he said Ballesteros was generous with his time in helping a tour rookie settle into his profession.

"He was bloody kind with his time. Any time I saw him going to the practice green I'd head over there as well. He was very free with his advice and he'd spend a lot of time with you, talking you through stuff. For a young guy that was purely inspirational."

Turner said the European Tour, on which Ballesteros won a record 50 titles, would not be the circuit it was today without the Spaniard's immense influence in the late 1970s and 1980s.

"He had a presence about him, a joie de vivre.

"He was a kid from the back streets of northern Spain who grew up playing on a beach. He made it feel it was possible that anyone could make it. Up until then it seemed like you had to be from America or go to America to be a great golfer.

"Now, here was this kid who broke all of those rules and he played with a flair and an instinct which was incredibly refreshing."

His extraordinary shotmaking spellbound galleries, thrilled to witness his powers of recovery whenever he found himself in trouble off the tee.

"It seemed he could imagine shots and see outcomes incredibly well. He didn't have to think about what he needed to do technically to make something happen, he just needed to see it happening in the mind's eye and the body would react accordingly.

"That's a flair you perhaps develop when you grow up with three clubs playing on a beach. You develop a capacity to invent and create which is far greater than if you have 14 clubs and are at the country club.``Turner considered Ballesteros unrivalled for the quality of his short game while his driving was not as erratic as generally assumed.

"He had a brilliant golfing mind. When the fairways were narrow he was never going to hit as many as the other players but he very seldom missed them on the wrong side.

"The stats say he missed fairways but what many didn't notice was where he missed them. In his pomp, seldom did he miss in the wrong place.

"He recognised his strengths and weakness, and he was very cunning about it.

"He had the finest short game of anyone ever and such a wide array of shots around the greens. He understood the percentages, and who knows whether that was an intuitive thing or an intelligence thing.

"He could hit any shot but seldom did he hit the one which didn't have the best chance of coming off."

Turner said Ballesteros' wider appeal owed much to the fact he was a flawed genius with a renowned temper, who said what was on his mind.

"For all of his flair and brilliance he was a human character who had his faults and weaknesses. Maybe people identified with that.

"If ever there was a golfer of the people, it was probably him."

- NZPA