Jack Nicklaus' Memorial tournament is one of the premier events on the American tour and each year the event honours one of the games great champions.

This week the honouree is the magical Spaniard, Severiano Ballesteros, the man who by force of his personality and the extraordinary virtuosity of his golf game brought the game - and the professional tour - to life in Europe. There were others, of course - Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam, Sandy Lyle, Jose Maria Olazabal and the German Bernhard Langer - but it was Ballesteros who showed his contemporaries that winning serious championships was possible.

And between them they were the dominant force at Augusta from the time of Ballesteros' first win in 1980 until Olazabal's triumph over Greg Norman in 1999.

Sadly Ballesteros lost his game in the middle of the last decade and in the end of his playing days he was a shadow of his former self. He was always capable of some wild driving and in the end he was both short and crooked but in his prime he was a much better driver of the ball than his critics suggest.

Some players make a career of driving the ball straight down every fairway - Graham Marsh was a fine example - but when Ballesteros was playing well he could hit every imaginable shape and trajectory to take advantage of the hole he was playing and the conditions he was encountering.

'‘I played a lot of golf with Seve,'' said European Tour player Bill Longmuir, ‘'and I never considered him a poor driver of the ball - far from it. He always had an extra 15 yards up his sleeve if he needed to reach a par five in two shots and those who think of him as a bad driver of the ball simply did not watch him play enough golf.'

Tragically, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour late in 2008 and he survived four major surgeries but it seems we will never see his play again. The growth of the Senior Tours in America and Europe would have given a new generation a chance to glimpse something of what made him the most magical of players and that is a real sadness.

He wasn't the best player of the post-Nicklaus era but for me he was unquestionably the best player to watch play a tournament round. Way back in 1978, I walked almost all of his 72 holes in the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Melbourne and he played amazing golf on a course perfectly suited to his skills. Alister MacKenzie designed courses that tested a player's imagination and he gave them plenty of space to drive into but asked them to decide for themselves which part of the fairway was best to hit in order to earn the clearest line into the flag.

Ballesteros is the only man to have won at Augusta, Royal Melbourne and over The Old Course at St Andrews and to have won on MacKenzie's favourite course - St Andrews - as well as two of the best three courses he ever designed (the other is Cypress Point) is perhaps the true mark of the greatness, and the diversity, of his game.

Tiger Woods is back in action this week and he will be anxious to get his game into some sort of manageable state. His driving is as unreliable to say the least and it will be fascinating to observe how he handles the challenges of the coming months. A decade ago he won the U.S Open at Pebble Beach by 15 shots and, weeks later, The Open at St Andrews by eight. In a few weeks, the two championships return to those historic venues but his form is seemingly as far from those extraordinary levels as one can imagine.

This week though is about the most magical of players and those who watched Ballesteros at his best saw one of the truly great golfers.