This will no doubt come as a surprise to you, but it is not often that Dermot Gilleece seeks my advice on golfing matters. I share your surprise. I understand the game as much as it needs to be understood. There are holes and there are balls, and the latter have to be placed in the former.
In addition to this command of the finer points of the game, I have also mastered the vocabulary to, as we golfing journalists put it, a tee. I am aware that a mere difference in one vowel changes a little device for holding the ball into a warm brown beverage from India, just as a brace of vowels alters a container for that beverage into the affable porter who carries one's clubs.
There you have it. Golf is no more than a hair's breadth away from being a tea-caddy; and all in all, I prefer the latter. This doesn't mean I ignore golf. Not at all - not least because it seems to be the last bastion of good old-fashioned male chauvinism, with all this boastful talk of birdies and stroke-play and holes in one. Dear me, couldn't get away with that kind of talk in the old IT newsroom, I can tell you.
Code of ethics
But there is one thing I have always liked about golf, which is that even though the game is played by odd-looking blokes with sweaters designed by the chromatically dyslexic, it has traditionally had a high code of ethics. For some reason or other, players have difficulty getting the ball into the hole, and they silently do it. And silence has always been one of the great and abiding qualities of golf. The other, as vital to the conduct of golf as the hole or the ball, is that something called "sportsmanship". This means you don't jeer at your opponent in defeat, but you shake his hand; in victory, decorum.
For some unaccountable reason, The Irish Times didn't send me out to the US to give Dermot Gilleece a few useful pointers during the coverage of the Ryder Cup, but from what I have heard, the conduct of players and crowds was unprecedented in the history of the sport. If you have not taken the avid interest in events there that I have, allow me to tell you that players were heckled as they prepared to hit the ball, that cameras were clicked, and that US players spectacularly exulted over the defeat of their European opponents. Worse still, apparently, was the subsequent reaction of the US press, which derided the European response as "whining".
This is depressing indeed; for if chauvinism (in the nationalistic sense that M. Chauvin understood) is conquering the sad and palsied disorder that is golf, what now is safe? Can we expect that jeering, nationalistic mobs will turn out at that near relation of golf, tea-tastings? Will lawn-mowing become an expression of nationalist fervour? Will mobs gather outside foreign undertakers, capering with joy at the inferiority of their funerals?
Public rancour
Few sports anywhere are as free of public rancour and partisan bigotry as the one which began its great world challenge yesterday and which tonight sees Ireland play host to the US. Whatever else we can be sure of, we can be certain of this: the US national anthem will be treated with the same respect as Patrick Heeney's lovely melody. This is the rugby way. It is not just a good way, but it is a great way; and more than that, it is the only way. It is the one great jewel which rugby has retained which other international sports haven't.
It is true that in Ireland, that kind of mob-disdain for the foreigner in sport which disgraced Brookline & Stinker last weekend and which has been a feature of English soccer for so long is not a national characteristic. GAA, for spectators anyway, remains a largely rancour-free zone. But in any gathering, there is bound to be the one heckling fool; which is why the finest sporting moment for me last year, the one which sent thrills of pride up my spine, was the complete silence of the Irish crowd during the playing of God Save the Queen before the match against England at Lansdowne Road. No other venue, and no other people, would have shown such respect for that anthem.
Whistling
If golf has fallen to the hecklers, the mobs, then the barbarians are closing in on rugby too, and we have seen their skirmishers in Lansdowne Road, in the shape of youngsters who whistle and jeer as visitors prepare to take a penalty kick or conversion. No such conduct was thinkable five years ago, but it is nearly commonplace today, with the IRFU plaintively issuing reminders that such conduct is not the traditional Lansdowne Road way.
Indeed it is not. A great civilised and civilising tradition, of respect and fair play in all sports, has been on a steady retreat over the decades. Sporting administrators, paralysed by monetary greed or nationalistic pride, allowed their codes to be captured by the mob. How will rugby now be counted? Because what makes rugby rugby is not the way the game is played, but the culture in which it is played. If we lose that, our beloved rugby will, like most sports, become just another fraud at the public's expense.