SOUTHPORT, ENGLAND | The summer of 1976 has been burned on the British psyche with all the intensity of the relentless sun that singed grass across the nation that long hot June, July and August.
The 1970s themselves were not Britain’s finest decade, of course. It was a hangover following the Swinging 1960s and in 1976 the chaos seemed to peak under a red-hot sun.
British golf, meanwhile, was echoing the country’s rapidly plummeting self-esteem.
The hope of the tied Ryder Cup of 1969 and Tony Jacklin’s double major triumphs of 1969 and 1970 capped the sport’s swinging ’60s.
Then, in the ’70s, British golf hit a wall as individual success dried up and the Ryder Cup team was routinely walloped.
And so to the Open of 1976, a championship of bewildering variety.
The Spaniard led by two strokes with 18 holes to play and had captured the imagination of the British galleries with a wild array of shots that matched an even wilder array of facial expressions.
In qualifying at Formby Golf Club, a crane driver called Maurice Flitcroft, a man who had never played an 18-hole round in his life, carded 121 and made headlines around the world for being “The World’s Worst Golfer.”
European golf didn’t know it but four teenagers who competed in the qualifying tournament at West Lancs Golf Club would generate even more headlines around the world by the end of their careers.
Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer would earn themselves a start in the Open – the former finished in the top 30, the latter missed the cut.
Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam would fail to graduate to the Open itself.
Both were still amateurs, but Lyle would, that July, defend a minor professional trophy he had won a year before at Hill Valley Golf Club. By the end of that year Woosnam was living in a caravan in the car park at Hill Valley and working there as an assistant pro.
Meanwhile, in the Open itself, a fifth European teenager by the name of Severiano Ballesteros announced himself to the world.
Two years earlier, when just 17, he had recorded the first top-five finish of his European Tour career in the Italian Open.
There, on a course clinging to the edge of the Venice lagoon, he had peered through the mist at the previous year’s U.S. Open champion, Johnny Miller.
He would later claim in his autobiography that he had not been too impressed with the American and his mop of blond hair.
Now, peering through the smoke that drifted across the Royal Birkdale links following a couple of fires that had started amid the torridly hot conditions, Ballesteros shook his own mop of black hair and prepared to play the final round with Miller.
Sometimes his eyes peered at the ball like a bird of prey. Other times he narrowed those eyes down the fairway, focussing on the flag like an assassin.
Sometimes he smiled widely, inviting the willing galleries to join him in the joy of being in contention. Other times he was coy about the attention.
The final round didn’t go to plan. Miller was supreme, carding a round of 66 to complete a six-shot victory. Ballesteros needed 74 blows and shared second with Jack Nicklaus.
But those fires were not alone in being lit that week at Royal Birkdale 50 years ago.
British galleries had discovered a golfer who would lead European golf on a journey that would end in the kind of glory no-one walking the fairways that week could have imagined.
It would involve Open glory, Masters glory and Ryder Cup glory.
Last Thursday morning, on a stiflingly warm train heading towards the course, the Open spectators were packed together like Tokyo commuters.
One joked that we were embarked on a recreation of 1976.
“I was there in ’76,” said one elderly man who had taken a seat offered by a younger gent.
“You were there?” gasped those of us around him.
“I was there,” he said.
“You saw Seve?!” we asked.
“I followed him on the Friday,” he said.
“And what was it like? What was he like?” the voices cried.
The man paused. “It was great and he was great,” he said.
In truth we’d all been hoping for more. Some of us even tried for more.
But it also didn’t seem to matter – an old man’s contented smile said it all.
Read “The Legend of Seve” from Second Wind.
Matt Cooper
Top: Seve Ballesteros during the 1976 Open Championship
R&A via getty images