Something special is happening at the moment. It is not only golfers who are wishing that the health of Seve Ballesteros would improve; it is sports fans. And not only men but women as well.

Ballesteros caught the imagination of the public for a number of reasons. One was that he carried himself magnificently. He behaved like a champion and with his coal-black hair and smouldering good looks, he looked and dressed like one, too. He was perfectly cast as one of the true heroes of his sport in the same way as Pele and Bobby Moore were in football and Muhammad Ali was in boxing. There was nothing incongruous about them or him.

Ballesteros often said that his true fans were in Britain. He once pointed out that, whereas he could walk down a street in Madrid and not be recognised, in Britain he would quickly be surrounded by well-wishers. They will all be hoping that the man who is lying in a hospital bed in Madrid with a suspected tumour on his brain can get out of yet another tight corner. After all, he has got out of more tight corners than almost any golfer in history. Why not one more?

Ballesteros did not just burst on to the world of golf. He arrived with the force of a brick being hurled through a window. He was dashing, temperamental, talented, chauvinistic, xenophobic and wilful. Though there were inevitable comparisons with Arnold Palmer, the great American, Ballesteros was like no other golfer we had seen on this side of the Atlantic, certainly no one in the past century and probably not like any golfer in the 19th century, though Young Tom Morris might have run him close.

Jack Nicklaus was a straighter driver and Tiger Woods a more prolific winner of major championships. If I had to nominate someone to putt for my life it would be Ben Crenshaw. But if I had to put my house on someone getting out of greenside rough, clearing a gaping bunker the other side of which was a flagstick set on a down slope and stopping the ball close enough to sink the ensuing putt, then I would unhesitatingly summon Ballesteros.

Times Archive, 1980: Ballesteros claims his first Masters

The 23-year-old won at Augusta with a four-stroke victory over Jack Newton and Gibby Gilbert

• Ballesteros takes Open with a final flourish, 1984

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I did not see his recovery from a car park on the 16th hole at Royal Lytham in the 1979 Open, which he would go on to win, his first major championship, after which Hale Irwin, with whom he had played, sneeringly referred to him as the "car park champion". Nor did I see his shot from out of a glade of trees, over a high wall and a swimming pool and on to a small green at Crans-sur-Sierre in Switzerland. Those who did talked about it in the way you expect of people who have seen a miracle or a ghost.

But I did see him hit a one-iron shot from a bunker in the 1983 US Open at Oakmont and that sent shivers of excitement down my spine. And I will go to my grave believing he hit the greatest single golf shot I have ever seen.

That was from a bunker on the 18th hole of his singles against Fuzzy Zoeller in the 1983 Ryder Cup at PGA National golf club in Florida. Ballesteros, who had been three up with five to play, was level with the American. Things were not looking good for the Spaniard. A whistling Zoeller was well down the fairway in two strokes, while Ballesteros had smothered his tee shot into thick rough, about 60 yards in front of the tee, and then, heaving at his ball with those powerful shoulderss, moved it 40 yards into a bunker.

From there he selected his three-wood and aiming left to avoid the lip of the bunker, hit the ball so cleanly it flew to the edge of the green perhaps 230 yards away from where he got down in two to halve with a startled Zoeller.

Ballesteros respected golf fans in Spain but loved golf fans in Britain. For them he could do no wrong. The way that he always showed his feelings appealed to a race of people who were taught to conceal theirs. That his golf was a confection of brilliant strokes mixed with an occasional very ordinary stroke made him human. If he hit a wild drive it did not matter. They knew he would probably follow it with a breathtaking recovery shot.

One memory from a dark and dank afternoon at The Belfry in the 1985 Ryder Cup will suffice. Ballesteros was over the back of the par-five 17th, not by much, but enough to be in longish, clinging grass. Tom Kite, his opponent, was on the green in three. To gasps from supporters of European persuasion, Ballesteros fluffed the delicate chip he was attempting, the ball moving only half its intended distance, from the thick rough to the fringe of the green. No matter. He holed his next chip.

Ballesteros put the pride back into European golf. He proved that golfers born in Europe could become the best in the world. Tony Jacklin, the Englishman, became the first European since the Second World War to make a serious impression in world golf by winning two major championships between July 1969 and June 1970 but Ballesteros led the generation that followed, winning his first major championship, the Open, in 1979, and his fifth and last, the Open, in 1988. Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam, the British golfers, all followed in winning major championships, as did Bernhard Langer, the German.

Ballesteros regarded the Ryder Cup as if it was a medieval crusade, he and 11 others from Europe against the US. His contributions to the event were enormous, as a player between 1979 and 1995 and then in 1997 as a winning captain of the first Ryder Cup held in Spain. His energy, drive and commitment in that event had to be seen to be believed.