Severiano Ballesteros always had a sense of occasion. As the European Tour and its guests gathered in London for its annual media lunch yesterday, arguably the Continent's most famous golfer was discharged, somewhat unexpectedly, from La Paz hospital in Madrid.

Ballesteros, the winner of five major championships and 87 titles around the world, had been admitted to hospital in the second week of October and had the first of four operations after a brain tumour was detected. There had been no previous indication that the 51-year-old Spaniard would be allowed to leave hospital at this time.

“This is wonderful news,” George O’Grady, the executive director of the European Tour, said. “Seve is such an important person to us in terms of what he has done for us, for golf in Europe, indeed for golf around the world, that to hear this unexpected good news a few weeks before Christmas is specially heartening.”

A statement from La Paz hospital read: “The patient Severiano Ballesteros has been discharged by the department of neurosurgery. He will continue to have outpatients treatment in the department of radiotherapy and medical oncology.”

The world of golf has been dominated by talk of recovering players in the past months. In the United States, the speculation centred on Tiger Woods, the world No 1, who is rehabilitating after surgery to his left knee and who is expected to resume playing competitively in the spring.

Yet Woods’s travails were overshadowed by Ballesteros and his health since news of his brain tumour broke after he collapsed at Madrid airport on October 6.

Before Ballesteros went in for his first operation, on October 14, when a sizeable part of a tumour on his brain was removed, he thanked his fans for their support and said he was facing the biggest challenge of his career.

Since then he has had three more operations, the most recent — a cranioplasty — last week, when fluid was removed from his brain and a valve was implanted to repair a bone defect in his skull.

After the latest operation he was visited by friends, who reported that he was in good spirits. “He is moving freely, he is making big progress,” one said. “His memory is fantastic. He remembered every shot he played with José María Olazábal in the Ryder Cup. The right side of his body is 100 per cent, though the left side of his body and his left leg are a little lazy. He even joked that he is working on a new book. I tell you, he was in good spirits.”

Ballesteros won the Masters in 1980 and 1983 and the Open in 1979, 1984 and 1988. He registered 20 points out of 37 matches in the Ryder Cup and captained Europe to victory in the competition in 1997, when it was held outside Great Britain for the first time, at Valderrama in Spain.

Last night the prognosis for Ballesteros was unclear. A friend of the golfer said yesterday that she understood he had been due to be released for the Christmas period on December 15 and that he would have to keep returning to the hospital for radiotherapy. “I hope there is nothing significant in the fact that he has been allowed out early,” she said.