AS You walk along the seventh fairway at the Royal San Sebastian Golf Club there is, among the tall trees, a magnificent new home of understated opulence. It was meant to cost around £400,000, but as the finest possible building materials replaced those in the original plan, the cost rose to nearer £700,000.

It is by the standards of Fuenterrabia, the village that houses the golf club, a palace. Sadly, for the last 12 months, it has become a fortress - Fortress Jose Maria Olazabal, where the young Spanish maestro spends most of his days seeing only his family and closest friends.

This week is the anniversary of the last time that the 1992 US Masters champion, one of the best players on the world scene, touched a golf club in anger.

A year ago he was playing in the Trophee Lancome, at St Nom la Breteche, when the problems that had been troubling him for over nine months, finally became too much to bear. He would play well for 10 to 12 holes, be well under par, and then drop shot, after shot as his concentration was destroyed by the sheer pain in his feet.

He had rheumatoid arthritis, he was forced to drop out of the Ryder Cup team and he has not played competitively since. Now, a year later, there is considerable doubt as to whether he will play tournament golf again.

Certainly he has no intention of resuming his career in the foreseeable future, apart from a possible appearance in the Perrier Pairs competition from October 17th-20th in Bordeaux in which, because it counts neither for Ryder Cup or European Tour rankings points, he would be able to use a motorised buggy.

Ironically, Olazabal has no problem, no pain, at all hitting golf shots. What he cannot do is walk between them, at least not for the four to five hours that a round on the European Tour commonly takes. Towards the end of that time the Spaniard is in such pain that he cannot think about anything else.

He has spent the last year practising almost daily at the driving range at San Sebastian, sometimes staying there for three to four hours. Then he will retreat to the putting green that lies beside his parents' 250-year-old Basque farmhouse overlooking the ninth green.

Twenty paces from the putting green and he is at the kitchen table, for lunch, for dinner, whatever. In his formative years he spent hour after hour on that practice green, learning the short game skills that made him the most formidable exponent of that part of the game since Severiano Ballesteros.

Now he is back there chipping and putting between treatments, not knowing when, if ever, he will be back on Tour and back to the major championships he loves so dearly. "He has been at his worst this year," says his manager Sergio Gomez. "During the majors he knows he can win them and cannot bear the thought that he is not there.

To get there Olazabal has tried every treatment and never will be, a problem. In only 10 years on Tour he has won over £3-million in Europe alone, with a similar amount coming from the rest of the world, with endorsements doubling the total. He has been able to afford the finest specialist consultants in the world.

He was told by the Mayo Clinic in America in September last year that he would be reasonably fit again in five to six months, a deadline long since passed, and as conventional medicine has so far failed to find a cure, Gomez and Olazabal are looking elsewhere.

He has received thousands of letters - they are still coming in at the rate of 10 per day - and he has tried several recommended diets, has drunk special mineral water from Scotland and recently went to Germany for a fitting for some special shoes.

"We have tried almost everything," says Gomez. "As a last resort we might go to what people call charlatans." He means people, like faith healers, who work outside regular medicine, and says: "We know people who have been healed, even of arthritis. There is nothing we are not going to try."

Olazabal is not totally confined to Fuenterrabia. He does some golf course architecture and recently went, by helicopter, to Andorra where he is designing a course. "He gave a clinic and, instead of laying a stone, he planted an olive tree," said Gomez.

He also went into the nearby hills, as he has done every year, with his father and a group of friends, to shoot quail. "Usually he misses the first day or two of the season because he is playing in the World Series in America. This year be was there from the start, but be came back in a bad temper. There were not many quail and be was frustrated because he could not hunt properly because of the pain.

Olazabal has loved these outings in the past; they are the reason he decided against playing the US Tour on a regular basis, they are a part of his heritage and of his present, and since he realised that even this part of his life is threatened he has become more depressed than ever.

"He will have to make a decision soon," says Gomez. "He cannot carry on like this all the time. He will not take painkillers, but maybe he should realise that there is always going to be some pain and try to play golf with that pain."

But Gomez is helpless before a strong-willed, stubborn Olazabal, who has always been his own man and who has shunned the world's media during these last 12 months.

Before his illness, whenever Olazabal went away his grandmother used to light a candle, place it in an alcove by the front door and pray for his safe return. Perhaps now the prayer needs to be changed, to enable him to go away again and fulfil himself, doing the only thing that he wants to do.