At 24, Tiger Woods may have progressed beyond the age where you'd describe him as a wunderkind, but he is surely the only competitor in the Open Championship commencing today whose mother accompanied him around the course in practice rounds this week.

A rather famous video clip exists of the three-year-old Woods demonstrating his golf swing on the old Mike Douglas television show, and in separate interviews earlier this week both Woods and Sam Snead recalled the first encounter between the two nearly two decades ago. Since Sam is now 88 years of age, we're inclined to go with Tiger's version of the episode.

Though a golfing legend, Snead was even then getting on in years. (Though in roughly the same era I had seen him match his age in a match against Tommy Bolt at the Newport Country Club in Rhode Island.) Apparently the conditions of his appearance at the Calabasas Country Club in California called for him to play with a new set of playing partners every two holes, and Tiger, who was then five or six, had been entered (by his parents, naturally) to play the final two holes.

The 17th was a par three, and Tiger laughingly recalled that he couldn't hope to clear a brook fronting the green. Improvising even then, he instead attempted to deliberately land his tee shot on a cart path in the hope that the bounce would carry the creek. Instead, the ball hit the bank and rolled back into the creek bed, coming to rest on a bed of pebbles in midstream.

Tiger had surveyed his lie and, with all the bravado of Van de Velde climbing into the Barry Burn, wading in to play his shot he heard Snead shouting from behind him. Tiger didn't say so, but one suspects that Sam's tone was none too gentle.

"Hey, kid, what are you doing?" Snead demanded.

"I turned around, looking dumbfounded," recalled Woods. "I mean, I was just going to hit the shot, but he says `You can't play that. Just pick it up and drop it and let's go on.'

"Well, I didn't like that very much. I remember just turning around, looking at my ball, and I said: `I've got to hit it. I don't want to drop. It's a penalty.'

"So I hit a seven iron right out of there and onto the green and, all wet, two-putted for my bogey. I made bogey-bogey and Sam beat me by two, par-par."

We'd only be guessing here, but somehow we suspect that the five-(or six) year-old Tiger Woods didn't up and say "Hey, Dad, I'd like to play golf with Sam Snead today!"

All things considered, given the attendant pressures that must have accompanied a youth spent as a child prodigy, you'd have to say that Tiger emerged a remarkably well-adjusted fellow. Consider how things might have turned out had Earl and Tilda Woods been hockey parents.

A couple of weeks ago, just before I left the United States, a couple of hockey dads got into a fatal altercation outside an ice rink in Reading, Massachusetts. Apparently one of them was serving as the referee in a youth game when the other took exception to the way he was calling the game and stormed out onto the ice. The two briefly exchanged blows before officials from the rink separated them and ordered the interloping parent from the arena.

He departed, but waiting outside in the carpark, and at the conclusion of the match the two went at it again outside. This time the player's father quickly got the upper hand, and after knocking the other fellow down gave him a few kicks in the head for good measure. The referee was transported to the hospital in a coma, and died a few days later.

Although the winner of the fight outweighed the deceased by a 100 lb, subsequent testimony indicates that neither was an unwilling participant in the brawl. As shocking as it may have been, it's surprising that it doesn't happen more often.

Earlier this summer I completed a stint as a coach for my 12-year-old son's Little League baseball team. My decision to volunteer for this post was inspired in part by the certain knowledge that if I didn't do it, some other parent surely would. While watching a game the previous season I had watched one of Teddy's 10-year-old teammates reduced to near tears when, after taking a called third strike, he had been on his way back to the dugout when the coach - who happened to be his own father - glared at him and muttered "you suck!".

As recent developments at Wimbledon would illustrate, American parents don't have a worldwide monopoly on this sort of behaviour, but you'd have to say that, given our mindset toward organised youth sport, it is more prevalent in the US than elsewhere.

A few years back my son enrolled in a junior golf programme at my club. After several weeks of tutelage over the summer, the kids, broken down by age group, participated in their first tournament. In Teddy's category, the eight and nine-year-olds played a three-hole competition. There were, I believe, eight participants. The top three finishers would receive trophies, and all the others medals.

Teddy knew he was up against at least one and probably two better golfers that he hadn't a hope of beating, but, given the make-up of the rest of the field, his chances of winning the third-place trophy were excellent. What he hadn't reckoned on was the decision, fateful as it turned out, to allow the accompanying parents to mark the cards of their own children.

After Teddy struggled to, I believe, a seven on the second hole, a par three, I was surprised to hear the mother of two fellow competitors report that her son had taken five. I hadn't really been paying attention, but it struck me that this figure seemed to have been terribly generous, so I quietly monitored the progress of her offspring on the par-five finishing hole.

Her son took 20 strokes to complete the hole, her daughter 23, but she returned a score of 12 for each of them. This latter bit of generosity allowed her boy to win, by a margin of three or four strokes, the third-place trophy. As much as I might have liked to punch her out in the carpark, I kept my counsel and did not complain.

"If you're going to play this game for the rest of your life," I tried to console my son, "you'd better get used to things like that."

Teddy came home, threw his medal into a drawer from which it has never emerged, and he didn't set foot on a golf course for the next four summers.