No time for men behaving badly

It may have taken nearly a month for history to explain itself, but at least we now know what all those rowdy fans at The Country Club were up to. Turns out those people who taunted Colin Montgomerie, spat at Mark James's wife and beat up Sergio Garcia's caddie when they weren't chanting "USA! USA!" were merely warming up for the baseball play-offs.

The New York Yankees needed just five games in the best-of-seven series to oust the Red Sox, but if it appears that the Boston team went quietly, the same could not be said of the hometown crowd. Monday night's finale was contested under a heavy police presence after the Boston fans interrupted Sunday night's loss by throwing bottles and other debris onto the field in such profusion that chief umpire Al Clark suspended play and evacuated the field.

The displeasure of the Boston supporters stemmed not only from eight decades of frustration in which New York teams have frequently been the principal antagonists, but from a couple of blatant gaffes on the part of the umpiring crew. In both cases, the respective umpires took the extraordinary step of publicly acknowledging after the games that they had blown the calls in question, which in the end only served to exacerbate the persecuted feelings of the frustrated Boston audience.

In the wake of Sunday night's mini-riot at Fenway Park, Boston Mayor Tommy Menino issued a public apology Monday morning "to the baseball fans of America, citing "inappropriate behaviour" which was "an embarrassment to the city of Boston." Before the day was over, talkshow hosts were ripping the Mayor over the airwaves for having apologised at all, the presumption being that the fans' behaviour was somehow justified and that even if it weren't, the Yankees and the umpires sort of had it coming.

New York's 6-1 win that night was decisive enough for Game Five to be completed without incident. The Yankees move on to Sunday's World Series, while the Red Sox, for the 82nd consecutive time, are left to re-group for next year.

If that episode seems destined to recede into the background, the same cannot be said of the 1999 Ryder Cup and its unseemly aftermath. Last week, I heard from a couple of interested parties - Mrs Frances Hickey of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, whose late husband Frank served as caddie to British captain Ted Ray in the first Ryder Cup at Worcester Country Club 72 years ago and Mrs Melissa Lehman of Scottsdale, Arizona, whose husband Tom was a member of the victorious American side at Brookline last month.

"I was saddened when Frank passed away on June 17th, knowing that he would not be able to watch the Ryder Cup matches," wrote Mrs Hickey. "He would have admired the ability of the American golfers, but would have abhorred their lack of manners and golf etiquette.

"He always referred to golf as a gentleman's game. It seems that the 1999 Ryder Cup matches were anything but that."

Mrs Lehman, on the other hand, feels that I unfairly targeted her husband as the ringleader of the rancorous behaviour of the American team on the 17th green following Justin Leonard's decisive putt there on Sunday afternoon.

"Tom didn't 'lead the charge," pointed out his wife. "If you'll look at the picture in Sports Illustrated you can see that he and I were still off the green when several other players and caddies were already on it."

Mrs Lehman, in fact, made several points, some of them more valid than others. For one thing, she noted that the "USA!" chants weren't the only noise on the course that day.

"Everywhere I went I kept hearing people singing `Ole! OleOleOle!"' she said. "That certainly wasn't an American chant."

True enough. But to the best of my knowledge, the "Ole" people never did it in the middle of Tiger Woods's backswing, or when an American player was lining up a crucial putt.

Another of Melissa Lehman's claims - that when Garcia sat down in the middle of a fairway during a Saturday four-ball match he did so to put off his American opponents - strikes me as a bit silly, if not downright paranoid. It seemed clear to me at the time that Garcia's was a spontaneous and good-natured gesture in response to the taunts of the crowd, and had nothing to do with gamesmanship or devious match strategy.

Mrs Lehman also took issue with my characterisation of her husband's subsequent expression of contrition as "sorry, but not too sorry."

"Tom was just as sorry as could be," she insisted. "If you look up the dictionary definition of `contrite,' that was Tom after the Ryder Cup. The minute he got home he hand-wrote three letters of apology, one to Jose Maria Olazabal, one to Sam Torrance, and one to Mark James."

I also heard from Mrs Lehman's husband. "If you want to write a column calling me an `asshole' and an `idiot' that's your right," said Lehman in a phone call, "but you have a responsibility to get your facts straight. I didn't set foot on the 17th green when I hugged Mark O'Meara after his putt, and I certainly didn't step on Padraig Harrington's line. Ask Padraig if I stepped on his line." It appeared to me that he had, although my vantage point wasn't the best. Several people who had a better view claimed that Lehman had, and O'Meara's body language just before he conceded Harrington's putt appeared to confirm it.

"I thought Mark had already conceded the putt to Padraig," is Lehman's recollection. "It was definitely an embarrassing moment when I realised he hadn't."

Okay, if Tom Lehman swears he didn't set foot on the green following O'Meara's putt, I've got to believe him. But in accepting his version of the episode I think he also has to accept my contention that having been a participant in one premature celebration at the 17th makes him doubly culpable for engaging in another only moments later.

Call me a curmudgeonly traditionalist if you will, but to my mind end-zone gyrations, sackdances and congratulatory chest-bumping have no place in the world of sport. I don't like it when a soccer player whose goal has just cut a 3-0 deficit to 3-1 pulls his shirt over his head and comports himself as if he's just single-handedly won the World Cup, and I am particularly disgusted when golfers behave that way.

But if I'm going to criticise people for surrendering their manners to hot-headed emotion I suppose I must be consistent. If Walter Hagen and Ted Ray, the original Ryder Cup captains, would never have tolerated this sort of behaviour on the part of their players, neither would Grantland Rice or Bernard Darwin have called them "assholes" and for that I should apologise.