Unflappable Ballesteros honored at the Memorial

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Butch Dill/PGA

Still fighting brain cancer, Ballesteros won't be present at Muirfield Village to accept the award.

Anyone who wants to be a successful professional golfer must have imagination. After all, at some point during an 18-hole round of golf, the ball will inevitably end up in a place you didn't expect. How a player deals with these circumstances can often define and determine their round.

There may be only one guy who never got knocked out of his rhythm by a bad bounce of the ball. In fact, the greatness of Seve Ballesteros may be partially defined by his response to having his golf ball wind up in a bad place.

Pine straw? Divot hole? Edge of a pond? The middle of an azalea bush? Burrowing animal hole? Inside a burrowing animal? No trouble for Ballesteros, who could have deleted the unplayable-lie option out of the rule book. For when Ballesteros seemed to be in trouble, you knew he was probably about to create another one of those great shots that wind up on a highlight reel.

The great champion Ben Crenshaw once said, "Seve plays shots I don't even see in my sleep."

Ballesteros was Pixar Studios, Disney and Industrial Light and Magic all rolled into one. He didn't just have imagination; he was imagination. He was Larry Bird and Magic Johnson with balata. He was unflappable and nearly unstoppable.

"Seve is probably the most creative player who's ever played the game," Tiger Woods told USA Today. And that's coming from a guy who has a pretty nice on-course creative streak of his own.

Ballesteros is back in the news this week because he's being honored at the Memorial Tournament his lifelong contributions to the game. Ballesteros won't be at Muirfield Village to accept the award; he's still back home in Spain, where he continues to fight the brain cancer that was first diagnosed in 2008 and has required four surgeries and four rounds of chemotherapy.

Ballesteros will be honored for his success on the course; he won five major championships and 50 times on the European Tour. He'll be honored for his success in eight Ryder Cups, where he helped the Europeans catch and surpass the United States, and restore the competitive aspect to the biennial event. He'll be honored for helping inspire thousands of people around the world to watch -- and play golf.

But most of all he'll be honored and remembered because of his imagination. There's no way you could watch Seve play golf and not at least once say, "Can you believe he did that?"

The imagination was born from learning to play the game by hitting rocks on the beach with a homemade 3-iron. Maybe we've got in wrong in America. Instead of giving the kids the best equipment and the best golf balls and putting them on pristine courses, they should start with yard-sale clubs and on hardpan fairways. It certainly worked out well for Ballesteros, who once said, "I'd like to see the fairways more narrow. Then everyone would have to play from the rough, not just me."

Ballesteros won his first Masters in 1980, becoming the first European and the youngest player to win at Augusta National. But perhaps his signature round came at the British Open in 1988, when he shot a 65 in the final round at Royal Lytham to deny Nick Price. During an 11-hole stretch that day, Ballesteros kept escaping from the deep rough and conjuring up one magical shot after another around the green. During those 11 holes he had two pars, two bogeys, six birdies and an eagle. He nearly chipped in from behind the green on the 72nd hole.

"I knew at the time I won the Open in 1988 that I had reached some sort of peak, that it was a round of golf that I would think fondly about for the rest of my life," Ballesteros said.

It turned out to be his final major championship, but it was hardly the end of his contribution to the game. He personally mentored another young Spaniard, Jose Maria Olazabal, and proudly watched him win two Masters. He was instrumental in launching the Seve Trophy in 2000, a Ryder Cup-style competition that matches players from Great Britain and Ireland against a team from the European continent.

There's no question that Seve is one of the greatest players in the game's long history. He's won everywhere the game is played and he's done it with style and panache. But it's not just the victories that we remember the most about Seve, it's how he played the game. We continue to celebrate his wonderful imagination and how it taught us to look at golf through a different lens.

In 1983, after Ballesteros won his second Masters, Crenshaw said, "He's the most imaginative player in golf. Seve's never in trouble. We see him in the trees quite a lot, but that looks normal to him."

And it's still unforgettable today.

Stan Awtrey is a freelance columnist for PGATOUR.COM. His views do not necessarily reflect the views of the PGA TOUR.