A golf champion gives advice for life from his own game.
(Severiano Ballesteros, Las Claves del Golf para la Vida, La Esfera de los Libros, Madrid 2006).

p.35. Let’s suppose you’re at hole 5 in a golf course playing an important tournament. What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about how this game will figure in your playing history? about the new record you can break if you win at several championships this season? Nothing of the kind. You are just thinking of your next stroke. Before coming to the game you have planned your victory and could even imagine yourself receiving the trophy and attending the celebration after the game. But at the moment when you’re about to play your swing, you are not thinking of anything else except the next stroke, which must be according to the strategy you have planned for this particular hole. The next stroke is a link in a chain, and the chain is better the fewer links it has. When you are playing, you must think only of this one stroke. Your whole agenda is at this moment restricted to this stroke. With this example I just want to say that the only way to gain an international trophy and get a ranking is to intensely think of the next step. Nothing else. The summit is reached only little by little, stroke by stroke.  

38. This means that success at sport is in no way different from success in any activity in life: making of it a gentle pleasure. The day we realise that we are playing with gentle pleasure without any hurry, that what we are doing is just an extension of what we are thinking, that day we reach the summit. The best player in the world is the one who is most relaxed at play and experiences the greatest joy in it.

59. BEING PRESENT [Chapter title]

61. St Andrews in Scotland is the oldest and most prestigious golf links in the world, where a golf champion becomes a master in the history of golf. My turn to play there, in The Home of Golf as St Andrews is rightly called, came in 1984. It was not an easy tournament. My last and only chance came right in the 18th hole if I could get a birdie. Hundreds of thousands of persons where watching the event on TV, while about 50.000 people were present. I could not miss. Everything depended on me at that instant.

There was I, with the ball at twelve feet from the hole. I crouched down, checked directions, verified the irregularities of the green at that spot, and was tempted to think of my childhood, how I learned to play, my tournaments as a caddy, my premiere as a professional, my whole career. But none of those remembrances was going to be of any use at that moment. I couldn’t start to imagine what it would mean for me to win my next British Open; I had thought of it before coming on to the grounds, but at this moment that was no motivation, just the opposite, a pressure that would stiffen my body. I decided to open my senses. I listened to the sound of the wind on the trees, even of the sea that was close by. I could smell the fragrance of the newly cut grass in the manicured grounds, mixed with the salty smell of the coast, very similar to the one of my young days. I was finding a sensorial kinship between these grounds and the Real Golf of Pedreña where I was born. I rubbed my hands together in order to increase the sensitivity of my fingers: that was going to be the hardest stroke in my whole life, given its consequences. But that was not the issue at the moment. I had to avoid both the remembrance of the past and the projection to the future, however alluring it was. The only way for the right putt was to keep the eye on the ball, its right trajectory, the round sound it makes when it falls right on the hole. 

Now then, I hardly remember what came next. I stood up, placed my legs as my instinct and my experience were telling me, and after a try in the air I hit the ball… which very obediently, as though on rails, went straight for the hole. I could begin the celebration: I had won the British Open of St Andrews on the last hole.

There is not for me a way to play golf except the best the present moment and my own practice can give me at the time. Whatever you do, do it to the full.  

79. Each man – be it a thinker, a sportsman, an artist, or a simple worker – has the right and the duty to attain excellence.

87. “The more I practice, the more lucky I am.” Gary Player.

138. One of those friends my sport has brought me close to is the great Argentine player Roberto De Vicenzio. Good Roberto, besides being a great player, is a man of great goodness. Just an anecdote to reveal his personality. After winning a tournament he collected the cheque and was entering his car in the parking lot when suddenly a desperate looking woman approached him and told him her only son was dying of a terrible disease and could only be saved with a costly operation which she could in no way afford. She didn’t have to plead much, because Roberto immediately endorsed the cheque he had just won and gave it to her. A friend who came to know of it told him: “I’m sorry to tell you that that woman is a fraud. We have seen her several times around here taking advantage of people like you who believed her.”
“Then the child is not  dying?”
“Of course not.”
Then De Vincenzio breathed relief and said: “That is the best piece of news I’ve heard today.