It was heart in the mouth time as Bob MacIntyre lined up that final putt at the Ryder Cup on Sunday.
Cousin Bob, as I like to call him, because my mother was a MacIntyre, and I can therefore claim membership of the clan — it means you become part of an extended family.
I haven’t checked recently with Ancestry.com, but I reckon I can boast kinship with Scotland’s best golfer, especially after he sank the all-important putt and sealed a European win.
I liked the way he celebrated victory with a handshake and a decent hug. Nothing too elaborate. We MacIntyres are a modest clan, with much to be modest about, so we don’t overdo things.
History suggests we fell foul of the overbearing Campbell clan at some point in our history, and found ourselves deprived of land and forced to pay tribute consisting of a snowball in summer and a white bull calf.
Snowballs are hard to find at that time of year, so the MacIntyres tended to congregate around Ben Cruachan, the highest mountain in Argyll, where the snow tends to stay.
Per Ardua is the clan motto; it means you have to get through troubles in life, which Bob doubtless mutters to himself whenever he finds the bunker.
Striding down the fairway, he blew a kiss to the baying fans who lined the course. It was probably the most effective way of responding to the chorus of abuse directed at the European players.
Golf, we once assumed, was one of the more genteel sports, where a well-directed drive off the tee was greeted with polite applause, and a hooked iron shot merited little more than a groan of sympathy.
The Ryder Cup, of course, has long attracted a highly partisan response from fans on both sides of the Atlantic, and European crowds are not much better than the Americans, but when derision takes the form of four-letter words hurled at Rory McIlroy, just as he is settling into an approach shot, then the whole concept of sport as a unifying activity is dealt a mortal blow.
Should we worry? Were spectators ever fair-minded in the way they distributed approval or disdain? I doubt if Roman crowds politely applauded a gladiator in the forum as he polished off an opponent, or called out “bad luck” whenever a lion got the upper hand.
Bear-baiting in the Middle Ages or bare-knuckle fighting in Victorian times must have been pretty ferocious occasions, and of course no one who has been to an Old Firm game will have left thinking “that seemed to go pretty well, all things considered”.
It was, however, disconcerting to see New York spectators consumed with something approaching hate as they hurled vitriol at the Europeans, and it was hard to believe that politics did not have something to do with it.
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When Donald Trump announced to the crowds at Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them,” he was not only deepening political divisions, he was actively encouraging the idea of revenge, and since he and his supporters rarely disguise their contempt for Europe’s liberal societies, it was perhaps inevitable that spectators at the Long Island course last weekend felt entitled to let rip at European golfers taking on their American rivals on American soil.
There is another thing going on here. Social media is itself the source of extremism, whatever side of the political spectrum it comes from, and sport is not immune. Vocabulary is coarsened, exchanges tend to be couched in violent language since that is what catches attention.
The idea that instant access to online platforms encourages debate and the exchange of ideas has long been disproved. The harsh reality is that contributors only like opinions that reinforce their own prejudices — the others they reject out of hand.
Political leaders have a role here. Instead of abusing their rivals, they can join the argument. Rather than deploying the language of hatred as Trump tends to do, they can meet opposing ideas head on, subjecting them to the cool of logic rather than the heat of contempt.
Take Nigel Farage and the Reform Party. He has racked up support — not least in Scotland, where his standing in the polls is remarkable — because he proposes a set of policies which, however wayward, appeal to the idea that the present political establishment has lost touch with the electorate.
To attack him personally as a bigot or a racist is counterproductive, because it suggests that those who turn to him are themselves extremists. Far from winning them back to the fold, it positively alienates them.
Thus, when Anas Sarwar calls Farage “a pathetic and poisonous little man that doesn’t care about Scotland, and doesn’t understand Scotland” he is simply descending to the politics of abuse, playing directly into Farage’s hands. It implies that those who currently support him are themselves the “pathetic and poisonous” ones; and when he goes on to claim that “Scotland will utterly reject you”, he has to confront the uncomfortable truth that the polls suggest otherwise.
Far better, surely, to unpick Reform’s policies, to demonstrate their inherent weakness, and to challenge Farage directly, particularly perhaps on his strategy to reduce immigration, because it is in practice no more workable than those he attacks in other parties.
The argument against him might take a bit longer to deploy, it might lack the rasp of an instant soundbite, but it would have the effect of steadily undermining the appeal of a party which pretends to offer solutions rather than explaining how they would be put into effect.
Think of it like lining up a putt as Bob MacIntyre did last Sunday. You weigh up the ground ahead, see where the run of the green takes you, then strike towards the hole. Per Ardua is the theme — it’s worth the trouble.