LUXURY LIVING SPORT u u
At the height of his success as a professional golfer, Manuel Piñero won two World Cups, the 1985 Ryder Cup, nine European tour titles and five Spanish championships. He describes Seve Ballesteros – with whom he won the 1976 World Cup – as the player“ who did more than anyone for European golf”, but Piñero himself is an icon of the sport, in Spain and internationally.
Now aged 64, Piñero must look back at his career with immense pride. He admits that golf has enabled him to live“ an incredible life” of the sort he couldn’ t possibly have imagined when he was growing up.“ My education is from the‘ university of life’ and golf gave me that opportunity. I have met extraordinary people through golf – heads of state, prime ministers, Richard Nixon, the King of Spain and his grandfather, Bing Crosby … With my background, through golf, with the opportunities I have had, even today I can go almost anywhere in the world,” he says.
But he says all this without a hint of conceit – something that surely comes from the lessons learnt during Piñero’ s childhood in rural Extremadura, and from parents who never knew such luxury.“ I never heard them complain about their life or their hardships or ever say a bad word. They never argued in front of us,” he says.“ My mother, who is now 90, cannot read or write, but my parents were the best teachers of life. They were always looking forward and teaching us to be positive. Life will always give you a chance to look forward.”
It is a spirit that must have driven his father to take 10-year-old Manuel, his two brothers and their mother away from their home near Badajoz to start a new life in Madrid.“ From birth to six I grew up in the middle of a forest, in a wooden house with no electricity or water. Later we moved to the village and then to Madrid with the aim of having a better standard of living,” says Piñero.
Except the family had nowhere to live in Madrid, so they stayed in an abandoned house with a well. The following year, his father bought a plot of land and built a house by hand,“ stone by stone, with the help of cousins in the construction business. As luck would have it, this house is now in one of the wealthiest areas of Madrid,” Piñero says.
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