THE MASTERS : Wild Day Is Seve Heaven

It was the Masters all right. One guy took a 10 on a hole. Steve Elkington opened with a seven on his way to an 81. Tom Watson was leading the tournament at four under par till he came to the 15th, where he took an eight. Golfers call that a “snowman.” Abominable. John Daly had a six. Greg Norman went from par to three under, then back to par, whereupon he went eagle-birdie on the 13th and 14th, hit it in the water on the 15th, and you had a picture of Greg standing in line at Disney World, saying, “What time’s the next roller-coaster?”

It’s not a tournament, it’s an ambush. A mass execution. The Augusta National without a blade of rough in it is making golf pay for its sins. In poor light, it looks like Custer’s Last Stand. The course is taking no prisoners.

In ordinary tournaments, guys who shoot one under par seldom get asked into the post-round interview room. At the Masters, they almost get a ticker-tape parade.

Naturally, the leader board is peppered with foreigners. Fulton Allem from South Africa is tied with Tom Kite for second. A Fiji-an, no less, is not far behind. This tournament is as hospitable to the foreign-born as Ellis Island.

But if it has gone out of its way to smother careers, it seemed in one case to be trying to make it up to golf by reviving the career of one of its most valuable marquee names. It seemed to salute the return of the happy hidalgo, Don Severiano Ballesteros.

Severiano Ballesteros was as exciting a presence on the golf scene as a runaway bull. He galvanized British golf when he first appeared on its hallowed courses.

Golfers are not supposed to come out of Spain, bullfighters are. And Seve Ballesteros would have looked good in a suit of lights and a muleta and sword. He had the drop-dead good looks of a Latin lover. He could have made a rich gigolo.

He was as good for golf as the steel shaft. There wasn’t a more exhilarating sight and sound on any fairway than that of Seve on the spoor of first money in a British Open. Or any other tournament.

No one ever figured out how you learn to play birdie golf in the north of Spain. You get golfers out of West Texas, Brigham Young and Southern California, and they’re all blond and blue-eyed and deliberate in their moves. The game was invented in Scotland and was played by the kind of men who made watches or cut diamonds, not fiery young Spaniards.

So they thought this young swashbuckling senor from Santander would be like that other Spanish armada and would crash and burn on the shores of Britain. The first time he saw the forbidding dunes of St. Andrews and Lytham & St. Anne’s, he would chuck it all and go back to a bullring.

First of all, he seemed to have the wrong temperament. He was full of passion and fire and played the game with the verve and panache of a guy serenading a senorita under a balcony.

He won the British Open out of a parking lot. He was daring, reckless, heedless. He, so to speak, went over the horns to slay the course. Not for Seve the tight-lipped, tension-ridden, hold-your-breath mental game of the masters. Seve was like a guy riding a shark.

He had a positive genius for inventing shots. He was utterly fearless. Where a more contemplative golfer would accept a shot that was hit behind trees, under the debris of coke bottles, tree limbs, leaf compost or even parked cars and would hit it safely back on the fairway, Seve went for the miracle. And the pin. For Seve, the fairway was nice but not necessary.

They thought this temperamental Iberian should have taken up the tango and that the canny U.K. professionals would soon have taught him the game was much tougher than he supposed.

Seve ignored them. He shocked the world when he won a British Open at 22. You would have thought he sank the fleet at Scapa Flow. He won Dutch Opens and French Opens. He was the best player in Europe.

But they said it wouldn’t play in America. After all, the best players in the world roamed there. They regularly beat back the Brits, even crossed the pond to win their Open whenever they felt like it. Seve would be in over his head with these battle-hardened Yanks who teed it up in the toughest test of golf in the world, the American tour.

But in 1978, Seve had won the Greensboro Open. In 1980, at 23, he won the Masters.

It was the way he won it that awed the Yanks. It was like the Dempsey-Firpo fight. But Seve kept getting off the floor to floor the course.

Three years later, Seve won the Masters again. And again it was a suspense movie. He had a 10-shot lead going into Amen Corner--Nos. 11, 12 and 13. He had a four-shot lead coming off that corner.

It was Saturday afternoon serial stuff. Seve kept escaping the tracks just before the train bore down on him. He was Houdini escaping chained trunks under water. Watching Seve play golf was like watching a guy swim through alligators.

He won two Masters, was in a playoff for another and finished second two other times. Hogan never played it any better.

Foreigners have begun to win the Masters as often as they stage it. But Seve was the one who showed the way. He won six times on the U.S. tour in all, which is a record for the European contingent.

Seve’s career took a nosedive in recent years. The wise guys said he finally found out you can’t keep winning from the parking lot.

Then, Seve came to this year’s Masters and showed he was only 37 and still inventive. He went out and shot a two-under-par 70 Thursday, a gutsy, typical Ballesteros round in which he hit only six greens all day. The fourth hole was vintage Seve. On the right of that par-three green with a sidehill lie and no real chance to aim at the pin, Seve reached into the hat again and pulled out the rabbit, a shot that his playing partner, Raymond Floyd, called “the greatest par I have ever seen in my life.”

Seve was off line in jail on this 205-yard hole with the pin cut into the neck of the green with barely five feet on each side and a yawning bunker alongside. Somehow, Ballesteros hit a shot that seemed to go straight up in the air about 10 stories high. It came down five feet from the hole. It was like hitting a ball up an elevator shaft not touching any wall and dropping onto a handkerchief.

It was a prickly Ballesteros who came into the press interview room later. He seemed to resent the fact he hadn’t been asked there of late. No, he didn’t want to talk about negative things. “Why can’t we talk about the fact I won the Masters twice and was second twice and in a playoff a third time?” he complained.

Fair enough. And if he wants to win it a third time, it will be all right with golf. They won’t even consider it a foreigner winning here. The dashing Spaniard is a citizen of the world. He even looks good in a green coat. And all golf hopes he can invent a way to get a third one.