In this video, we sit down with David Cannon, golf photographer and author of the new book 'Seve: His Life Through The Lens', to go through 8 incredible photos he has captured of Seve during his career and the story behind them all. David shares some great insight into what Seve was like to photograph and the relationship he had with the great man. We also learn about the new book and what it was like to go through the process of making this book, including getting access to some never-before-seen photos of Seve's family life away from the course.
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00:00Yeah, number eight. So, you know at Augusta, you're not allowed to run. I was in my usual
00:10afternoon studio, which is from behind the second shot into 13, because the light's beautiful on
00:16that hole and it's a lovely sunny afternoon. And I saw Seve hit the shot. You know, sometimes you
00:23look at a player and you see the body action afterwards. And I thought, hmm, there's a chance
00:28that's gone into the water. And that year, they let the water run fairly shallow, but some years
00:34that it's deep. And this year, it was particularly shallow. So there was a chance of people playing
00:39out of the water. And I just thought, there's just a chance that he's gone in this water. So,
00:44you know, doing my Olympic walk, as I call it. And I was lucky enough to get across the crossing on 14,
00:49because that's the other thing that we're outside the ropes at Augusta, you can't go inside the ropes.
00:53So you can often get caught at spectator crossings, because players coming through.
00:58But luckily, right in, got up the back of the grandstands. We have a, you know, you can get to
01:04the back of the bleachers, as they call them in America, through access at the back for media.
01:11Got there at the top, absolutely out of breath, sweating like a thing. And, you know, to see Seve
01:17sitting on the bank, getting his shoes and socks off. And I think just, you couldn't have written
01:22it, really. You look at that very, very closely at that sequence. Hawkeyes will notice that near
01:27the end of it, you'll just see the ball descending, rather look, it's not coming out. It didn't go
01:33forward. It went up, but not forward, sadly. So it came back at his feet, and I think he had to drop
01:39the next one out. What a guy to watch, because he'll take these shots on. Probably this book will
01:44not have happened without COVID and lockdown, because I wouldn't have had the time to devote
01:50to it, to get it done in such a short period of time. And, you know, obviously, I've remained
01:59friends with Carmen, his ex-wife, but she's always been a really good friend. And Javier,
02:05because he plays golf, he's met my son, they got on quite well. And yeah, we've kept in touch
02:13all the time. You know, I've often had lunches in London and stuff like this. And, you know,
02:1910th anniversary was coming up of his passing. And I just saw a chance, an opportunity just
02:26to do a book that would celebrate his career in pictures, basically. And I would not have
02:34got this project off the ground without, A, the publishers getting interested. And most
02:39of all, without the RNA, and then the European tour backing me. So it's been done in three
02:44months. And I spent hours going through archives and the Getty archive has been incredible because
02:52we have got so many collections on there. We've got Phil Sheldon's collections on there, Peter
02:57Daisley, all the guys who were shooting in the 70s and early 80s. But I've, you know, got pictures
03:04that I've used in the book. And I've tried to use pictures from other photographers as
03:10much, you know, because I think the book is about great images of Seve. So we've dug into
03:15some other archives and having the help of the RNA and then the European tour, it's meant
03:20that we've been able to afford to buy pictures in from outside. And so hopefully it's going
03:26to give people a full and lovely view into his life. Another thing, of course, is the
03:32family have given us access to some beautiful family shots. I always said that Seve's smile
03:37was the most magnetic smile I've ever seen in a subject. And if you see these, when you
03:43see these family pictures, which no one's seen other than the family up till now, they are,
03:49they shine, they literally light up the pages. And yeah, what an amazing treat it is to be
03:56able to use those pictures. I try to do what I call a moment in time in each chapter. But
04:01they're basically my stories behind pictures, which are quite fun, I hope, to make it interesting.
04:08And then Robert's essays as well. So there's some good reading in it as well. It's not just
04:12pictures. People loved him. Bottom line, that's the way I'd put it. People love
04:18watching Seve and they love the way he played the game of golf. They love this passion. They
04:23love everything about he gave to the game of golf. And for me, that's the thing that shines
04:31so much. That actually, we lost the 93 Ryder Cup, but this was on Saturday morning. And Seve
04:40hadn't been playing very well that year as a whole. But again, he's teamed up with Oli and
04:46I think they, they won the two matches on the Friday. And this was the Saturday morning.
04:52And they won again. And for some reason, Gallagher thought his back wasn't holding up or Seve
04:58had said to him, you know, he's really struggling with his back and he didn't play him in the
05:02afternoon. And, you know, we lost by one point. What can you take from that? But the world will
05:11never know. But that picture, I just love that picture because the people in the background,
05:15you know, behold the birdie at that moment. And yeah, that was Seve. That was the reaction
05:20you always got. Yeah. The whole story is pretty amazing because that tournament put it into
05:25context. He had just birdied. I think it was six holes in a row. Well, certainly from the
05:3113th. So 13, 14, 15, 16, five holes. He'd birdied in a row. And he'd got to within one shot of the lead.
05:39And he stands on the 18th tee, which is to a, a slope that is really slopey fairway. It's a
05:45really tough tee shot to stay on the fairway anyway. And sure enough, off to the right. And, um,
05:54I mean, I thought, I, I thought it was going to be out of bounds, but it wasn't. It was six foot
05:59from a concrete wall, which surrounds the swimming pool in Crom. And, um, there was, I, I, I went
06:09with him. A lot of people just ignored it. Even the TV crews didn't ignore it because they thought
06:13he's only going to chip this out. And if you notice, there's not a TV camera in sight. There's
06:18no video of this shot ever. The only, only video of it is the ball landing just short of the green.
06:24But then he, he, he gets on his knees. He's snorting. He's kicking the ground as he does,
06:31you know, pointing to a gap like that. And, um, Billy Foster, his caddy, he told me what he teached,
06:39he tells the story probably better than I do. But, um, he, there's a great little YouTube video of
06:45what Billy said at the time. And, um, you know, he, he reckoned it was the size of a dinner plate,
06:51the whole, the savvy was aiming for. And literally he almost, almost on his knees. He's down there,
06:57he's crouching. Billy walks by me. It's got his bag. He's been sent off. And I'll be,
07:01now I'm going for this, you know, Billy's been trying to persuade him to chip out for the last
07:05five minutes. And, um, sure enough, there's a big explosion of pine needles and everything.
07:12No, no, I was waiting for the ball to hit the concrete wall and come towards me because the
07:16geometry that it was, I thought I could be in quite a bit of danger here because the angles are,
07:19so I was at a right angle to him and, uh, just waiting. There's that six seconds,
07:25whatever. One of the things I learned from TV cameraman is that the ball is in the air for
07:29six seconds. They hit a full shot, basically a tee shot, whatever shot it is, roughly six seconds,
07:35the ball is in the air. You could count, there's a little pause and then a big roar, you know,
07:41obviously he's got close to the green or even on the green. So I run around and you see the ball's
07:46just short of the green. And unfortunately I, I didn't get quite far enough around the green
07:51before he's playing his third shot. So I was playing catch up basically. And, um, you know,
07:56he chipped the damn thing in for a birdie. Unfortunately, Barry Lane spoiled the story
08:01by birding 17 and 18, so 16 and 17. And he, you know, he didn't win. He lost by a shot,
08:07but it's one of the most incredible golf shots I've ever seen. You know, he was always fine with me.
08:13You know, I had occasions when he'd let me lie down behind him and shoo all the other photographers
08:18off literally. So, you know, I had very, very good relationship with him, not by pushing myself
08:26at him, but I think it was just mutual trust. And, you know, cause I was around a lot following him,
08:32but I was still doing football at the time. So there was, you know, I actually, when you look,
08:38I didn't do that many tournaments that Seve played in. I did the majors and the, and the bigger ones,
08:44but all the sort of regular European tour events, I was probably usually being sent off to do football
08:48at that stage of my career. I remember those, um, world match plays so fondly. Anyway, just,
08:56you know, I actually got a lovely picture of him on the tee on the par five, uh, par three fifth.
09:03And, uh, he put it in the bunker just left of the green. And, um, that bunker shot, you know,
09:09bunker shots can be ordinary, but it's very difficult to get what I call nicely framed
09:17bunker shots, you know, where the player's in the right, the ball's up to,
09:21up to the other side. And so it's, um, fills the frame nicely. Background's lovely.
09:26I'm always very keen on backgrounds to try and get as much out of focus. So you really isolate the
09:32subject golf. I keep on saying to people, you know, golf is one of the best spectator sports because you
09:38can get close to your heroes. You know, you can be eight feet from Tiger Woods playing a golf shot,
09:46name any other sport you can get so up close in person with the great stars. You can't really.
09:52So even though you've got to walk a long way and you've got to, you know, be clever where you wait,
09:57this sort of thing, I think golf's the best sport. It's the greatest partnership in Ryder
10:02Cup history. No one will get close to what they, they went up. What is it? 12 points out of 15 or
10:09whatever it is. I think they've got in, in, in it, in all their matches. No one will touch that.
10:14And if you actually look at Seve, he won three pounds, three points out of four with Manuel Pinero
10:20when he played with him in 85. So Seve and fellow Spanish players were incredibly strong chemistry,
10:28basically. And, you know, from the word go, the chemistry with 87 when Lazabel first played and
10:35things like Oli holding that putt in that Saturday morning, I think it was in 87 and Seve knocked it
10:41four and a half feet past, you know, and then Oli hold it again. And he just saw the sort of the
10:46chemistry between them on the 18th screen. And it was like, you know, in that picture, it was so lucky
10:54that jumping on the shoulders because the Americans were playing at the same, you know,
10:58around about the same moment that that happened. And they did it once. And I thought, damn, it's a
11:05bit of a messy picture because the caddy was standing right behind him. And the caddies sort of started
11:10walking on, they were still standing in the same spot. And then Oli did the same thing again. And I
11:15got this lovely clean background. So it was a much nicer picture. But the Seve hit his second shot,
11:20if you look at it, Oli's got a putter and Seve's got his nine iron or whatever it was, eight iron.
11:25And Keele Island's got these really slopey greens. Yeah. And you can't actually see the ball on the
11:32green sometimes. And he could just see over the top. And if he stood on his shoulders, he could see
11:36where the ball was and it was on the green, you know. So that's all he was looking for. I'd always,
11:41I said to Robert Green and Richard Simmons, I said, look, the only way to do these Seve
11:47instructions is to try and do it at home. Yeah. And he was happy to have us come to his home.
11:53So I think we had three articles to do on the instruction. And, you know,
11:58Seve gave us the morning basically to do it. And it all went really well. We had a good time doing
12:04it because I tried to make it, you know, challenge him. I always thought the best way to do the
12:08instruction was to try and give him challenging shots, bunker shots, try and hold this or try and
12:14hit one that lands, you know, with a nine iron, try and play with a nine iron low at this sort of stuff.
12:18And he was great. And once you got him doing that, he was electric. He'd just show off basically.
12:24And so then we're having lunch in the clubhouse and just chatting away. And I said, Seve, you know,
12:31one of the things I'd love to do is go to the beach to see where you hit balls as a youngster,
12:36you know, that, you know, you want to go, we go, it's afternoon. Yeah. And it was like,
12:42as easy as that wasn't planned at all. It was literally, and you know, five minutes later,
12:47he comes out of the kitchen with a soup can in the golf club. He grabs a napkin from the table.
12:53He said, come on, off we go into his Range Rover, drive down to Soma Beach, which is a beautiful beach.
13:00And, you know, we were lucky in every sense, because we've got onto the beach and it was low tide.
13:04So the tide's out. So it's perfect, basically. And it's blowing 30 miles an hour, freezing cold wind.
13:11It's February. So it's early February. So it's pretty cold in Northern Spain at that time of year.
13:16But he was like a kid, literally. And, you know, he went off into the bushes on where he's parked this car
13:23and came out with a stick. And then he gets on his hands and knees and he cuts the hole out with his
13:29soup can, sticks the stick in, ties the napkin to the top. This is my hole.
13:36I said, I learned to putt for Augusta on this green, you know,
13:40he said, because they're so fast, rock hard sand. And it was like a billiard table, basically.
13:46So he did a few putts and then he started hitting shots down nine iron and then a three iron down the
13:50beach. And amazing, basically. I couldn't, we couldn't believe our luck. And he just let him hit shots,
13:56basically. I mean, the day was, without a doubt, the best, most memorable day of my life, basically,
14:02in golf photography. The final putt, yeah, I mean, what can I say about that? It was,
14:10you have to be lucky in this game. There's no question you have to be lucky. And I actually,
14:17you know, he got that amazing par, beautiful par on 17. Still one shot behind going up 18.
14:24Basically, he knew he had to birdie 18. And the second shot, he left 15 feet short of the hole.
14:32And if you look at the video, it's amazing how long that putt took to roll into that hole,
14:37because it literally, it was missing. And it just hovered on the edge. And then it fell in. And of
14:44course, when you're photographing, all you've got is just Seve in the pit, in the camera. You don't
14:49know if that ball's going in the hole. So the only thing that's going to give you the clue that that
14:53might be going in the hole is the crowd, or the player reacting. And you know, he reacted in a
15:00massive way. And luckily enough, I had a premonition or whatever it was, you know,
15:04roll of film, 36 pictures is all it was in those days. You think you can hit shoot 1000 pictures
15:11on something like that. Now with digital cameras, we had 36 pictures to deal with a camera that runs at
15:17five, six frames a second, you got about six seconds of ammunition, basically. Luckily,
15:23I had a fresh roll because, you know, the best picture, the really nice picture, the fist pump
15:28picture was very, very near the end of the sequence. If you look at it on the, you know,
15:34it was very close to the end. And I think just after that, I ran out to film. So I didn't actually
15:39manage to get any pictures of him hugging his caddy and walking off the thing because I've literally
15:43run out of film. So I'd say 1984 was I, you know, I don't, I don't like to think I peaked then. But
15:50it was, I had two pictures that year, there was that picture. And then two weeks later at the Olympics
15:56in Los Angeles, I got my famous picture of Carl Lewis, the pan shot of him running, which those two
16:03pictures, I mean, I can't, you can't quantify how much, how many times they've been used and what
16:11they've done for my career really. But certainly for me, that St. Andrews moment was,
16:18that got me going as a golf photographer, well, and truly, I, you know, I couldn't decide. I like
16:23this one as the golfer. Yeah. Because I think this is a, this is a golf picture. You know, this is
16:30a chap, a player, absolute peak of his swing. The light's lovely. The fact he's just on an upslope
16:37makes his body go into that wonderful shape and the sun and the, the hair. And this is where I'm
16:45going to come to what I think is one of the most significant things about photographing in the 80s
16:50was that a lot of golfers did not wear hats. And if you look at a picture, the first thing you're
16:57drawn to is the eyes of the subject. I learned this very early in my sports photography, you know,
17:03career that you, you had to get the eyes in focus. If you don't get the eyes in focus, the picture
17:10doesn't work. When you, when these golfers are wearing big visors and big shadows under their
17:14eyes, you don't see them. You don't see the subject. And, you know, I had that, that, those lovely
17:20pictures of Seve, Jack Nicholas in 86, no hat. The only person who got away with wearing a hat was Greg
17:28Norman with the big straw hat, which was, you know, it used to be kind of light and it was part of his
17:34character. But the Navy jumper, there's something about the Navy jumper, isn't it? It's like iconic.
17:40And that, you know, that logo, the Slazenger Panther logo is iconic logo. And yeah, so
17:48that's been great. I mean, it's been fantastic fun photographing him basically.
17:53Yeah.