AMERICA AT LARGE:DR WATSON, I presume? In between Tuesday's practice round and that evening's Champions Dinner at the RA, the runner-up from last year's British Open Championship was feted (along with Arnold Palmer, Pádraig Harrington and non-golfer Johann Rupert) up the street at the University of St Andrews.

That Tom Watson’s honorary doctorate (one he described as “totally undeserved”) was in the field of Law was a matter of some amusement to the five-time British Open champion, who is descended from a long line of attorneys.

Watson’s great-grandfather, Isaac Newton Watson, had been a lawyer, as had his son – the golfer’s grandfather, Raymond E Watson. Thomas’ father, also Raymond, had embarked upon a pre-law course of study until the second World War intervened.

“The war got in the way,” Watson explained. “He used to tell me, ‘Son, that war was the greatest thing that could have happened to me. First of all I didn’t get killed. Second, I would have hated being a lawyer.”

Raymond’s son Tommy was also spared the family business. Although he is a Stanford graduate who as a schoolboy did five years of Latin, Watson said of Tuesday’s ceremony, conducted entirely in Latin, “I couldn’t decipher a damned thing. It showed that my education certainly didn’t merit any honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews.”

Although 27 years have elapsed since Watson’s last British Open win, it is worth pointing out he has won more Open Championships than did Old Tom Morris (more than Young Tom Morris, too, for that matter), but that one year ago at Turnberry, on the verge of his 59th birthday and a year away from being drummed out of this tournament forever, over four days of regulation play he put together a score – 278 – that wasn’t bettered by anyone.

Certainly, in any case, not by Tiger Woods, who had been sent home after missing the cut when Watson’s heroics had only begun to unfold. (And this, remember, was in that comparatively innocent age when tabloid reporters had yet to discover that Tiger had even one mistress.)

That in his dotage the 2009 version of Tom Watson had just enough in the tank for 72 holes and not 73 (and certainly not 76) was evident from the first ball he struck in the four-hole play-off.

Thus it is that the green-garbed visage of Stewart Cink adorns this year's edition of the Players Guide. In some sense, then, Watson was relegated to but a footnote to history.

That is the way he would view it, in any case. Even as the wonderful and improbable Cinderella tale unfolded for the rest of us, it was instructive to note that Watson maintained an unshaken conviction he actually had a chance to win. What seemed equally important to him was that he was able to point to his contending position as evidence reinforcing his conviction that the R&A’s revision of its exemption qualifications restricting the participation of past champions to those 60 and under had been wrong-headed.

As heart-warming as it might have been for the rest of us, in the end Watson’s 2009 Open was, to him at least, “a loss”.

“It tore my guts up,” he said yesterday. “But then my guts have been torn up in this game before.”

But as the year wore on, Watson was reminded almost daily how much his inspirational performance had affected others.

“People our age come up to me and tell me how they couldn’t stop watching last year,” said Watson. “It’s been a wonderful year in that respect, hearing from people who say, ‘I’m the same age as you, and you’ve given me some hope, or the desire to keep at it, whether it’s golf or something else.

“The other thing is that I’ve had a lot of young kids come up to me – and I hadn’t had any young kids come up to me for years, unless it was to say ‘My grandmother loves you’ – but now they say, ‘Hey, Mr Watson, that was great last year at the British Open’.”

An even more important impression may have been the one he made on the R&A. No, that august body did not alter its position on the cut-off date for past champion’s exemptions, but it did adopt a new category providing a five-year exemption for any past champion posting a top-10 finish in the Open.

The new category is sometimes described as “the Watson Rule”, since it has only one immediate beneficiary – the 2009 runner-up, who would otherwise be playing in his final British Open this weekend.

There have been flashes of the Turnberry magic in his 2010 major appearances: an opening-round 67 briefly gave him the lead in the US Masters in April, and at the US Open in June he played the second and third rounds in an aggregate one under par, but he does not appear to be under any illusions about his chances in the 150th anniversary Open that starts this morning.

“My form is not as good as it was last year, to be frank with you,” he said. “I’m putting pretty well, but my ball-striking isn’t quite where it was last year.”

Dr Watson has no intention of overstaying his welcome. What the new exemption does mean is that he can embark on an extended valedictory and take his leave of the game on his terms rather than someone else’s.

“I will probably play Augusta again,” he said yesterday. “I won’t be playing Pebble Beach in the US Open again, I know that. The extent of my exemption goes to 2014 at Hoylake. This is the seventh time I’ve played in the championship in St Andrews. It might be my very last.”