Golf: Ballesteros caught in a time warp at Baltusrol: It will be a matter of timing for a struggling Spaniard when the US Open starts tomorrow

WHEN I left home one of the last things I saw was the last episode of Cheers. When I arrived in New Jersey one of the first things I saw was one of the first episodes of the superior Boston bar saga. It looked just the same. So, too, to Seve Ballesteros did Baltusrol, the venue for the 93rd US Open Championship, which starts here tomorrow.

The last thing Ballesteros wants is a feeling of deja vu. When the US Open was last held at Baltusrol in 1980, the Spaniard was the warm favourite. At the age of 23 he had won the Open the previous summer and the Masters at Augusta that spring. At Baltusrol, humiliation awaited. On a flight from Madrid to New York, Ballesteros asked Dudley Doust, who chronicles the story in his book Seve: The Young Champion (Seve wanted to call it 'Born to Win'), a series of questions about the course. Are there many trees, are the greens big, is the rough deep? Yes was the answer to all three.

'I am weak with the flu,' Ballesteros said. 'I should not be going to the US Open. Something bad will happen.' He did not know how right he was. The first thing that got up his nose was that his brother, Baldomero, caddieing for him, was not allowed into the clubhouse dining room. Then Ed Barner, Seve's agent at the time, insisted that he should attend a cocktail party in New York City on the eve of the championship. Ballesteros refused and the next day shot a miserable 75.

In the second round, he was disqualified without hitting a shot after turning up late on the tee. Nobody seems to know exactly why. Did he fall or was he pushed? In a new biography by Lauren St John - called simply Seve - Joe Collet, then Barner's assistant and now Ballesteros's agent, says he handed the draw to the Spaniard and there was no confusion about the tee times. On the morning of the second round Collet was horrified to see Ballesteros wandering out of a restaurant.

'You're off in a few minutes,' Collet told him. 'No I'm not,' Ballesteros replied. 'I don't go off for another hour.' Ballesteros jumped into a courtesy car, rushed to the course but by the time he reached the first tee he was seven minutes too late. His playing partners, the Americans Hale Irwin and Mark O'Meara, were on the first fairway and had just hit their second shots. John Laupheimer, the United States Golf Association official on the first tee, had no option under the rules but to disqualify Ballesteros. Had Ballesteros arrived before the American pair had hit their second shots he would have incurred a two-stroke penalty but could have played the round. There is a rumour, scurrilous no doubt, that Irwin hurried his second shot, thus sealing Ballesteros's fate.

One version of events is that Baldomero was supposed to have checked the starting time and that he misinformed his brother. Baldomero's response to this was: 'I know how to read.' A distraught Ballesteros pleaded, in vain, for a reduced sentence. In a rage, he returned to his hotel and booked a flight out that day. In a vain attempt to avoid reporters and photographers, he left the hotel by the back stairs. 'It took him quite a while to admit that maybe it was his fault about the tee time,' Collet recalls. 'I kind of got blamed. In fact if it wasn't for me he would never have got there at all.'

Other observers believe the whole affair may have been stage managed. Ballesteros, after all, was 12 shots adrift of the eventual winner, Jack Nicklaus, after the first round. There was a theory that he was exacting revenge on the USGA for the lack of privileges afforded to his brother. For weeks afterwards, Ballesteros was haunted by the experience. His sleep pattern was disturbed and the nightmares usually had a theme of missed tee times. It was much later that Ballesteros said of Baltusrol: 'It was my fault. I was stupid. But I felt like a dog which had been kicked.'

If Ballesteros was in a slump then he is in a deep depression now and unless there is a radical improvement to his game, he will make another premature exit from Baltusrol. 'I hope the scores aren't too low this week,' he said. 'Coming into the US Open I wanted to play good.' He is not playing good or anything like it. He has missed five cuts in nine tournaments in Europe and his warm-up for the US Open was cut short at Westchester last weekend. In the Buick Classic, he was on the leaderboard midway through the second round and proceeded to play so badly he missed the cut. In the first round tomorrow, Ballesteros - he plays with Curtis Strange and Larry Nelson - tees off at 9.10am. That is Eastern time. He is unlikely to forget it.