It was moving to watch Peter Alliss interviewing Seve Ballesteros on BBC TV and see the Spaniard standing on the balcony of his house in Pedrena, northern Spain, looking out across the beach on which he learned to play golf.

On that beach all those years ago Ballesteros hit shots with balls he had found on Pedrena's golf course using a rusty old iron that he put into a bucket of water each night so that the hosel would swell and the head would not come off. He went on to win five major championships and the hearts and minds of many spectators, not only in Spain or Europe but around the world.

Johnny Miller, Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino all contributed to the programme. Nicklaus told how when he telephoned Ballesteros recently, "he said he had just played nine holes and he sounded really excited".

Here, though, Ballesteros was limping, dragging his left foot, able to see only partially through his left eye. "Where are you, Peter?" he said at one point when Alliss was only a few feet away but on Ballesteros's blind side. Ballesteros had a slash of a scar on the right side of his shaven head, a relic of the operations he has had to remove a cancerous brain tumour that was diagnosed late last year after he had collapsed at Madrid airport.

We saw Ballesteros removing his shirt and his baseball hat to lie down on a bed and be given radiation treatment during which his head was clasped by what looked like an instrument of torture devised by his countryman Tomas de Torquemada in the 15th century.

Ballesteros explained that the breakfast bar in his kitchen was shaped like a putter. He said that he had earned enough money to be able to live very well. He thanked the couple who look after him, reminding us that, now that he is separated from his wife, he lives in the big house alone. He sounded sad at this. He pointed out that the two green jackets he had on display were taken from Augusta National against the wishes of the organisers of the Masters.

He ran slowly and unsteadily around the pool in his house, always to the left in order to try and develop the failing sight in that eye. Then you saw him walking along the beach, his left hand more or less still by his side and you remembered the photographs of him taken 35 years ago, emerging from the same sea, the sun making his coal-black hair gleam with vigour, that famous smile on his face.

Oh Seve! What have they done to you? Your hair, your walk, your golf swing, your eyes.

Yet this is a story that has a happy ending because were it not for the skill of the Spanish doctors Ballesteros could be dead or far more disabled than he is.

"I am the luckiest man alive," Ballesteros said to Alliss. "This thing that happened to me is a very little thing compared to other people who have tougher times. They didn't have the opportunity to live life so intensely and as well as I did.

"I am sure that some people will feel sorry for me or maybe cry when they see this programme. I do not want people to feel sorry for me. I have had so much luck and so much fun for so many years. I feel very happy and a very lucky person because throughout my life I have had so many great moments and I feel that I live two or three more lives than the average person."

He said he hoped to be well enough to play at St Andrews in next year's Open and no-one could deny him such a wish. It was there that he won the last of his three Opens. But be warned. The man you could see in nine months' time will bear little resemblance to the man who inspired so many memories. Prepare to be shocked.