At a time when spectating fathers are not prepared to subject their sons to the abuse of the crowd at certain English soccer grounds, a father couldn't bear to watch his son in action here at The Country Club on Sunday. After six holes, James Montgomerie had had enough. And this was golf.
In fact this was team golf at the highest level. This was the Ryder Cup, the pinnacle of achievement for professional players from either side of the Atlantic. And Colin Montgomerie's dad could no longer listen to the torrent of abuse being directed at Europe's leading player from behind the fairway ropes.
Mark McCormack, head of the International Management Group, once observed that he could learn more about a person during 18 holes of golf, than through the most probing of interviews. Golf, he believed, revealed an individual's true character, warts and all.
I wonder what McCormack would have made of the extraordinary behaviour of the 12 US players as they generated something akin to mass hysteria among their supporters during the climactic stage of the Ryder Cup. And what of those supporters themselves?
Eric O'Brien is a former Boston-based Irish surgeon who has been a member of The Country Club since 1973. Now retired, he lives in Ireland where he is also a member of Portmarnock GC, but travelled here for the big event and to support the John Durkan Leukaemia Trust. "America is inclined at times to be ugly, and this was ugly America on the golf course," he said.
Yet curiously, the local media didn't see it that way. "The team (US) didn't just defeat the Europeans . . . They moidered da bums," wrote columnist Bob Ryan in the Boston Globe. "They knew what was at stake and they reacted with all the emotional savagery of a Rockne-inspired football squad. This wasn't golf. This was tourist abuse."
Ryan concluded: "Believe this: anyone who was privileged to be at The Country Club yesterday, will never look at golf the same way again." Indeed. Except that I would hardly consider what we witnessed on Sunday to have been a privilege.
O'Brien was right: the behaviour of the Americans was ugly. Yet we shouldn't have been surprised, however distasteful the spectacle. The recent history of the Ryder Cup tells us it was always likely to be that way, until the trophy was regained.
It will be recalled that after the Americans had gone through a similar drought through defeats in 1985 and `87 and then a tied match in 1989, we had the unsavoury confrontation at Kiawah Island in 1991. Coinciding as it did with the Gulf War, the occasion was used by the home side as a mirror of that conflict, with certain of their players, notably Corey Pavin, wearing army camouflage caps. And they won. Everything returned to normal when they retained the trophy at The Belfry two years later under the dignified captaincy of Tom Watson.
Instead of the Gulf War, which the then US skipper used to fire up his troops in 1991, the current captain, Ben Crenshaw used different but comparably powerful imagery when preparing the side mentally last Saturday night. According to Phil Mickelson, US Republican presidential candidate George W Bush read them an inspirational quote from William Barrett Travis, a soldier who had fought at the Alamo.
"He was going to fight to the end," said Mickelson. This, along with a video compilation of inspirational messages from other athletes, apparently helped set the stage for Sunday's remarkable comeback. And it had the American players so fired up that we saw a side to their character which even Mark McCormack wouldn't have recognised - the normally robotic David Duval pumping his fists towards the galleries and 40-year-old Tom Lehman prancing around a green in a take-off of teenager Sergio Garcia.
Ultimately, there was the unseemly display on the 17th green. Though American papers acknowledged that Crenshaw apologised for this gross breach of golfing etiquette, they made no mention of the fact that he first had to be asked by a British scribe if he regretted what had happened.
I have never seen worse behaviour from players and supporters at a golfing event. In terms of the traditions of a game which Crenshaw professes to treasure so dearly, it exemplified the huge price that is being paid in the name of trans-Atlantic golfing supremacy.
One can only hope that sanity and sportsmanship will return to the matches, now that the Americans are in possession of the trophy once more. And that the more sober surroundings of The Belfry in 2001 will help towards establishing an appropriate build-up towards the Irish staging at The K Club in 2005.
Meanwhile, I leave you with a fascinating observation from John Kerry, the junior senator for Massachusetts, who watched events at The Country Club last Sunday. After suggesting that golf and politics are similar, Kerry said: "They are a reflection of character and the effort to try to maximise your best instincts and control your worst." Unwittingly, he got the situation just right.
