Langer: Without Seve's tip I may never have won

LONDON - Without a putting tip from the late Seve Ballesteros 31 years ago Bernhard Langer may never have gone on to win two US Masters and countless tournaments around the world, the German great said at the 140th British Open in Sandwich.

The two contrasting characters represented, according to Langer, "fire and ice" and formed a golfing equivalent of the tennis rivalry that existed between excitable American John McEnroe and the cool, undemonstrative Swede Bjorn Borg.

In 1980, though, the German had yet to record his first European Tour victory and was in the grip of one of several putting crises while Spaniard Ballesteros, who died two months ago at the age of 54 after a long battle with brain cancer, had won the British Open a year earlier.