Bad News out of the Seve Camp

Update: As you've heard, Seve has passed away. A true gentleman, and the Arnold Palmer of the European Tour, Seve will be missed by all.

If you're a fan of golf, and people, you probably love Seve Ballesteros. Unlike a lot of the players these days, Ballesteros carried around a saddlebag so deep with creative golf shots that at any point, he might take a risk that golf fans for years would be talking about, asking each other if that really happened.

Sadly, Seve has been battling brain cancer since 2008, and it seems he has took a turn for the worse. His family is saying that he "has suffered a severe deterioration" in the battle, and that is tough to take for people like me, who have always admired the way Seve played the game.

It was beautiful, but in a peculiar way. There are works of art like the Sistine Chapel that take your breath away the moment you look at it, and then there are pieces like "The Persistence of Memory" that take a few times to totally understand the genius behind it, and to me, Seve was always more Salvador Dali than Michelangelo. This was a man that once hit a golf shot out of a parking lot, and worked his way around a golf course not like a strategist, but as a laid back golfer, that took whatever happened at face value, and rolled with it.

I always respected Seve because he golfed like I wanted to. Most kids wanted to be the next Jack or the next Freddy or the next Trevino, but I always found Ballesteros more of my role model, mainly because we played similar. No, he wasn't the straightest of drivers, much like myself, but he found a way to get it done, no matter the lie or the situation or the trouble that lay ahead.

Bill Simmons wrote last week that there will be 15 more Dwyane Wades before we see another Manu Ginobili, and I feel the same way about Seve. We will see 100 more Tiger Woods types before we see another player like Seve, that had more fun on the golf course than you did watching him, and that was a tough task to tackle.

As his condition worsens, it is important for us as golf fans to remember his brilliance, and what he did for the game. No moment can better show us the legacy of Seve than this video clip. He'd make any shot work, no matter if he had to get on his knees to do it.