At Kingsbarns golf course yesterday morning, I saw one of the most remarkable sights I have come across in 50 years of playing and watching the sport. My eyes widened in admiration at seeing Manuel de los Santos, 25, a one-legged man who plays without the help of an artificial limb, boom 300-yard drives from a tee and chip with the deftness of Severiano Ballesteros.

Wait until he putts, I thought to myself. He won’t be able to stop himself from wobbling. Guess what? Had you not seen with your own eyes that he could hold himself so steady you could not have moved him if you pushed him, you would not have thought it possible that he was balancing nearly 80 kilograms of bodyweight on one leg while swinging his putter in a silky-smooth stroke.

Golf is a game of balance. You transfer your weight to one side on the backswing, to the other on the downswing. It is a game that requires one’s base to be stable to allow the moving parts of the upper body to do their stuff. Bob Torrance, the distinguished coach, believes the legs to be the all-important part of the golf swing. “It’s no good having arms like Popeye if you have legs like Olive Oyl,” he growls.

Yet on an exposed course where the wind was present during the first round of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, here was a man with the narrowest of bases hitting the ball crisply, powerfully and much more accurately than many two-legged golfers.

“I am not sure about technique; I prefer to watch the ball flight,” Gavin Dear, one of De los Santos’s professional playing partners, said. “All I can say is that Manuel is in control of all aspects of his game. He strikes it great, he putts well. Sometimes you see guys who don’t rotate on the backswing, he rotates. His ball flight says he is a good golfer. I had heard he was a quality golfer and now I have played with him I can see that he definitely is. I think he may be the best three-handicapper I have ever seen.”

Blind men play golf and so do one-armed players. Most one-legged golfers have a prosthesis to help to support themselves. I have seen Ballesteros hit a ball over 200 yards from on his knees and a trick-shot artist drive a ball from a four-foot high tee. But until yesterday I had never seen a man play golf on one leg entirely unaided, and to be honest I would not have thought it possible that it could be done so well by someone who took up the game seven years ago only after losing his leg in a car accident.

De los Santos, who was born in the Dominican Republic, was a promising baseball player until that accident. Having moved to France with Elena, his wife, he turned to golf in April 2004.

Now consumed by the old game, he hops to the address position and takes a couple of hops after he has hit the ball to disperse the force with which he has hit it. He easily drops almost to the ground to retrieve his ball from the hole or to push his peg into the ground. He hops around on the greens having handed his crutches to his caddie.

“Many amputees play golf, but with a prosthesis,” Elena said. “Manuel has a very, very strong right leg from his baseball and a strong back, too. He has very, very developed arms from walking six or seven miles in a round of golf on a pair of crutches. I think he is resistant to pain. He is mentally as strong as he is physically strong.”

Hugo Corvet, a friend from Paris, began golf at the same time as De los Santos. “I remember one day I saw him practising in a bunker first thing in the morning,” he said. “When I left at the end of the day he was still there, still in the same bunker. He has so much will.”

His physical strength comes from doing 100 crunches each day to reinforce the core muscles of his body and from walking everywhere on crutches, often carrying his golf bag or another bag. Other than that, he does nothing other than hit balls — 2,000 a day when he started the game, maybe 200 daily now.

He taught himself using Tiger Woods’s instruction book to help him. “Tiger Woods is my hero,” De los Santos said. “I love Tiger Woods. I play against him on his PlayStation and I win all the time. When I play golf I don’t think about my handicap, I think, ‘Punch the ball, punch the ball, punch the ball.’ ”

Wind is less of a problem for this remarkable man than rain. “Rain is his enemy because it can make him slip,” Elena said. Steep downhill lies are difficult, too, because he cannot take up a stance and likewise certain lies in a bunker would be close to unplayable. Yet even today’s expected bad weather does not dampen his enthusiasm. “I am so happy to be here in Scotland,” he said. “I am very happy when people come to look at me. I can feel their love for golf, the respect they have for the game.”

You watch this man and you admire his athleticism and his unyielding spirit, and a part of you is humbled. “He is so strong, his forearms are like thighs,” Richard Bland, his professional playing partner, said after the two men had combined to be six under par and in 44th place after the first round, with De los Santos going round in 76 for four over par. “He is an inspiration.”