The official marshals' handbook said beware of streakers and hooligans clicking Canon Sureshots but those of us carrying the "Quiet Please" signs at the 2002 Ryder Cup knew where the real trouble lay.

Colin Montgomerie, the story went, had never met a golf course marshal he did not want to humiliate. So we stood by the greens and the fairway crossings in our red jackets and armbands watching European golf's one-man thunder cloud approach and waited for the storm to begin. And waited. And waited . . .

"He's on something, right?" whispered David Branson, as a laughing Montgomerie invited a fan to step out of the gallery, handed him a pitching wedge and invited him to "see if you can do better". He did, and still professional golf's most infamous misanthrope kept smiling.

"Some kind of drugs, right?" Wrong, though the mistake was understandable. Branson, a lawyer from Washington DC and one of the 50 or so Americans who had signed up for The Belfry's volunteer army, had spent years watching another Montgomerie - the under-achiever who came close but never won, the superannuated Scottish sulk, the 19th-hole boor whose response to defeat in a matchplay tournament in San Diego this year was to tell one spectator: "At least it means I won't have to stay in this fucking country another day."

Luckily a different Montgomerie turned up at The Belfry - lucky for the fan pulled from the gallery and given his 10 seconds of glory on the back pages, lucky for marshals like Branson and me who left the midlands with our dignity intact but most of all lucky for Europe's captain Sam Torrance who, it is safe to say, would never have lifted the Ryder Cup but for the man he called "the rock of my team".

"I saw a different Montgomerie that week," Torrance said the other day. "He was happier and more contented on and off the course than I had ever seen him."

There are few people around the world of professional golf who think Montgomerie is a fool - about as many, in fact, as think he has been permanently transformed because of events at The Belfry.

He changes mood more often than most professional golfers change drivers. One day he is Mr Gregarious in the press tent, the next he is in a huff with the hacks over some piddling story on page 63 of the Daily Mail newspaper.

One week he announces he is on a diet, the next he is trying to put on weight. One month he is never going to play in America again because they are all a shower of tanked-up hooligans, the next he is in the executive lounge at Terminal Four waiting to board a flight to Fort Lauderdale.

"I have mellowed a bit. I know I have done some bloody stupid things and been very rude to people who have not deserved it," Montgomerie himself said last week. "That 'other' guy wasn't me." He has, of course, said that many times in the past. Indeed he said something to that effect long before, at one hour's notice, he stood up a journalist who had flown 5,000 miles for a prearranged interview.

I point out these contradictions and mood swings not to belittle Montgomerie, or because I was the journalist who flew 5,000 pointless miles, but to say that these are the things that make him so appealing, if not as an interview subject, then as a sporting personality.

He is smart, he is silly, he is charming, he is rude. Everything is context. In a world populated by sponsored logos Montgomerie is a basin of red paint thrown across a corporate boardroom. Let me quote one weary regular of the golfing world's interview rooms: "Ten minutes of Monty is worth four hours of Tiger."

But we are here not just to celebrate the man. There is his golf - brilliant for most of the last decade but never better than during one glorious September weekend at The Belfry.

Every European fan who was at the 2002 Ryder Cup has a favourite moment. For some it was the fist-pumping Sergio Garcia winding up, then beating, Tiger Woods during the Friday fourballs; for others it was Paul McGinley throwing himself into the lake by the 18th green on Sunday afternoon.

But for the purists it was the moment just before eight o'clock that morning when Montgomerie drew a three-wood 300 yards down the left side of the first fairway, chipped on and rolled in the putt: one up, against Scott Hoch.

It is well known that every member of the European team would have paid good money for the chance to take on and beat the congenitally arrogant American.

Less well known is that Montgomerie would have elbowed them all aside to get to the front of the queue. The two men had history dating back to the singles at the 1997 Ryder Cup at Valderrama, when the exuberance of the victorious captain Seve Ballesteros in conceding a putt on the last hole denied the Scot a victory. The Spaniard was not around to save Hoch this time.

Thirteen holes after that first birdie Montgomerie rolled in another, dropped his putter to the ground and with a gunslinger's swagger, walked over and shook his opponent's hand. He might as well have slapped Hoch across the cheeks with a golf glove for all the difference the handshake made.

The only consolation for the American was that he was not the only one in red, white and blue to be humiliated by Montgomerie that weekend. In the company of Bernhard Langer, the Scot won 4½ points out of five over the three days - a staggering reversal in form over the previous 12 months when he had not won a tournament anywhere in the world.

Sports psychology is better left to the five per cent-of-the-winner's-cheque professionals but even an amateur can safely make the connection between the brilliance of Montgomerie's game that weekend and the brilliance of his smile. Nothing lifts a golfer's spirits like a 65 or closing out a matchplay opponent with holes to spare. It had been a long time since the Scot had played well enough to do either.

Matchplay, which offers golf's purest form of competition, has always been his favourite game. "The rock of my team" was clearly the role he had been waiting for to revive his reputation. It probably helped, too, to discover that he was still held in high esteem by the British sporting public, despite the moods and tantrums.

What less forgiving observers - the majority of American golf fans, for instance - have thought of as petulance, the British galleries long ago decided was something else. The former European Ryder Cup player David Feherty called this something else an "unembraceable human frailty. He has this soft side to him and he lets it show. And the public loves him because of it."

There were other, more pragmatic reasons that contributed to the revival: the fact that Torrance paired him with the stoic Langer; a new caddie, the equally stoic Andy Prodger; and a return to his old coach, Denis Pugh.

There was also renewed stability to his hitherto turbulent private life, the details of which were laid bare in his recently published autobiography.

In the book Montgomerie details the many personal failings leading to the temporary breakdown of his marriage to Eimear, not least of which was his remarkable similarity to The Fast Show character, competitive dad.

"I didn't throw a wobbly over losing at snakes and ladders," he confessed. "I could have done. I mean, I would be pleased for the kids if they won but I would be disappointed with myself, that is true. It's the competitiveness, it is inbred in me."

The 2002 Ryder Cup, Montgomerie now says, was not quite make or break for his golfing career, "but it was close. I needed to know whether or not I could cope with it all mentally. It ended up being close to the best I have ever played."

Since that weekend he has won two tournaments, the prestigious Volvo Masters in Spain and a tournament in China, as well as a couple of top-five finishes in what the pros like to call their "silly season". For silly read lucrative.

Last week he was in California for Tiger Woods's annual charity event, where he picked up $200,000 cheque and a sneaky feeling that the most significant change of all was in the offing.

"I do feel more relaxedplaying over here. I enjoyed playing in America now," he said. "And you know what: I think I'm getting more respect from the crowds in return."

Colin Montgomerie, American hero? Now that really would be a stunning transformation.

NOTE: Lawrence Donegan's memoir of life as a Ryder Cup marshal, Quiet Please, will be published in the spring by Yellow Jersey Press.