TODAY, more about winning and losing, the nature of sport and sportsmanship, the importance of taking part.

Above all, the need to win golf games.

Greg Norman says he is not all that upset after "choking" in the last round of the US Open, squandering his six stroke lead and eventually losing to Nick Faldo by five shots.

"Choking" happens when you lose your "bottle". Basically it means you fall to bits as your game falls apart, or vice versa. It is experienced only by grown men at the highest levels of competitive sport in front of a large live audience and millions of people watching on television all over the world.

When it happens in golf, the game becomes in media parlance the "cruellest game". If it happens in Wimbledon, tennis then takes over as the cruellest game. Strict rotation is adhered to so that every game gets its turn. So far, choking has occurred in all sports except draughts, leapfrog, parcheesi and dwarf throwing.

Anyway, the post choke Greg Norman says: "My life's not over yet. . All of this is just a test. I'm a winner. I just didn't win here. I'm not a loser in life, I'm a perfectionist. If I wanted to be a brain surgeon, I could."

I hope Greg does not become a brain surgeon. I would not fancy having him "choke" in front of the theatre nurse just as he ties the clove hitch in my rhombencephalon after playing a blinder for the first two hours of the operation. The embarrassment would be too much.

But the great thing about sporting disasters is that they let the sports psychologists out for a run. These are the people who extol the value of "mental exercises" and insist that games are won "in the head".

There are now more books about sports psychology than about individual sports. How to Hit the Ball is not at all as popular in the bookshops as How to Hit the Ball In Your Head.

I talked to eminent sports psychologist Ernest Pigeon and told him how I had won in my head the US Open, the Wimbledon final, the World Bowls Pairs Championship (on my own), the Grand National, the Austrian Grand Prix and the Women's Grand Slalom Event in Kirchenwald. Why was I not performing so well on "the ground"?

Ernest said I was playing my opponents when I should be playing the course.

This is a very popular concept in sports psychology. In golf it means that you think of nothing but avoiding par. In tennis all you have to do is "keep the ball in court" and success is assured.

It is (arrant) nonsense. Look at the US Open shenanigans. Nick Faldo was not "playing the course". Nor was he playing just any opponent, but a man with a small polar bear perched on his head, wearing a see through black stetson and a shirt like an upset stomach, a man who is apparently happy to be called the "Great White Shark".

Perhaps Greg is dressed differently in his head. Of course, in US golf events, a "maverick" player is a European in slacks and shirt who refuses to engage with the crowd.

One sports psychologist, who specialises in preparing golfers, says that the player who has the mental discipline to win is the one who is able to shut out all feeling for his opponent - even better if he can pretend his opponent does not exist at all.

But look, why pretend? Why not just go out without an opponent and play the course. Then success is practically assured. A bonus is that even if the course does manage to win it will not hug you in public.

This doctor also suggests to players a long pre shot routine which leaves them with no cognitive capacity to worry about the opponent.

This is fine. But Nick Faldo's pre shot routines are very different. They are so notoriously long and boring (he is regularly cautioned for slow play) that the opponent usually gets extremely upset, with obvious consequences.

Which partially explains what happened to Greg Norman on Sunday. It wouldn't have happened if Faldo was just playing the course. A golf course does not get upset, it just lies there. The lie is all important in golf, but even more so in sports psychology.