What has the Pedreña green got that gives so many winners?

7 May 2011 was a sad day for Spanish sport, the day that brought us the death of the winner of three Augusta Masters, two British Opens and three Ryder Cups. It wasn't golf that lost a figure of such might, it was sport and the country as a whole. Severiano Ballesteros, Seve, as everyone knew him, put Spain on the map of elite sport and became one of the most revered figures in his discipline. The Cantabrian left an incomparable legacy that he started to forge that a very early age in the lands of his birth.

Pedreña is one of the eight tiny villages making up the municipality of Marina de Cudeyo and the place where Seve was born, and although it might seem that it was he who led the passion for the green to the others in the area, the fact is that this village of just 1,500 inhabitants has always given great importance to this sport. Even when hardly anyone in Spain knew what this thing about golf was. Just one sign: the village’s Royal Golf Club dates back to nothing less than 1928, and the fact that a village of this size can have a golf club says much about the passion felt by the people from the village and the surrounding areas for this sport.

To say no more, Seve and all of his brothers Baldomero, Manuel and Vicente, were golf players. Although maybe the most important influence in the Spanish golfer's career was that of his uncle on his mother's side, Ramón Sota, one of the best in his field in the 1960s. Sota won four Spanish championships, was sixth in the Augusta Masters in 1965 and won a large number of trophies around the world.

Severiano has died, but the stamp of his brilliance and work are still present in the village in which he was born, which has concentrated a limitless passion for this sport in so few square metres. Every summer, for the past 27 years, the “Trofeo Seve Ballesteros” has been held for all of those called to be the future “severianos”: the children and youngsters who follow the wake of a golfer who managed to have a minority discipline recognised with the Premio Príncipe de Asturias Sports Award in 1989.

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