This will be the biggest battle of my life

Times – Severiano Ballesteros, who was left fighting for his life after having a brain tumour diagnosed last October, has spoken publicly for the first time since having four operations to remove the malignant growth discovered after he had collapsed at Madrid Barajas Airport.

In the first of a two-part interview conducted exclusively by Olga Viza for Marca, the Spanish daily sports paper, Ballesteros — who undertook a fourth round of chemotherapy last weekend — said that the public response to his battle against cancer has touched him deeply. He had no idea, he said, quite how popular he was.

And in a poignant reference to the five major championships he garnered in a nine-year period between 1979 and 1988, the most iconic of all the European golfers said that he now wants to win a sixth. Not a golf title, however, but his battle for life.