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Not everything to do with COVID-19 is bad. If Dave Cannon, the golf photographer, had not had to remain at home during the lockdowns that took place in England in 2020 and 2021 he might not have been able to start this elegant book about Seve Ballesteros – Seve: His Life Through The Lens – never mind compile it and get it printed. As it was, the time when he otherwise would have been travelling to tournaments and taking photographs was spent doing his own research into his library of Ballesteros photographs and putting them together into a book that has the imprimatur of Carmen Ballesteros and her three children, Javier, Miguel and Carmencita.
Cannon began the project in October last year. In December he met Robert Green, the former editor of British magazine Golf World, whose authoritative book about Ballesteros came out in 2012, and the idea for the book was born. Design started in January. They sought and got financial support from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club as well as the European Tour, found a publisher and the resultant book became available for pre-order on 9 April, which would have been Ballesteros’s 64th birthday.
The book contains nearly 300 photographs, some never seen before, all well captioned by Nick Edmond. It is divided into six chapters each accompanied by a 1,500-word essay by Green. “The Ryder Cup” is one chapter, “The Boy from Pedreña” is another, “The Majors” is a third and “The European Tour” a fourth.
To my mind, what makes the book exceptional are Cannon’s own pieces about some of his favourite Ballesteros photographs and how they came about. Cannon’s “Moment in Time” series is exemplary in this respect. For example, now we know how the photo of Ballesteros crouched down on the sand at Pedreña with a stick and a white towel attached to it came about. Cannon tells us of his preparations before taking the sequence of Ballesteros punching the air as he sank a putt on the 72nd green in the 1984 Open – and his reaction when the next day he developed the film and saw the photographs himself. We also learn much more about his photographs of Ballesteros’s near miraculous shot from among trees, over a wall and swimming pool and almost onto the green at the European Masters in Crans-sur-Sierre.
This book is a happy conjunction of one of the best golf photographers who had a close relationship with Ballesteros and a writer who not only knows his golf but knew Seve far better than most. Javier Ballesteros writes a charming introductory piece about his father. Nick Faldo salutes a friend and rival and José María Olazábal pens nothing less than a paean of praise to “A Very Special Friend.”
Cannon describes it as labour of love, adding “my hope is that the book will paint his (Seve’s) life in pictures. His smile shines from the pages.” It certainly does. To buy the book go to www.sevethebook.com.
John Hopkins