But I’m not going to apologise for being excited.”"I’ll take the blame,” Leonard interjected “I shouldn’t have run off the green. I should have just calmly walked over to my team-mates, which would have been very hard to do. So if you’re looking to point a finger, please point it at me. And I do apologise for that.”"I’d like to stick in my two cents’ worth,” Steve Pate said. “It was a little bit out of line, and we’re sorry it happened, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome.”No European thought it had, but that was not the point. Leonard went to some lengths to explain that he had run off the green to the side, and that he and his colleagues had not committed the cardinal sin of crossing the line of Olazabal’s putt.

But they had crossed their opponent’s line of thought in such a way that they might have done less damage had they dug a trench between his ball and the cup.They were showing emotion, which is what the mass media require of today’s sportsmen and women. Golfers are coming under the same pressures as anyone else, and they are beginning to oblige. Tiger Woods, who pumps his fists at every small success, is worth tens of millions more than David Duval, who hides his emotions. And Woods’s excessive gestures – excessive, that is, by the game’s traditional standards — are catching on. Just watch the way young Sergio celebrates.This is what the sponsors want, because it creates an image that sells shoes and shirts.

And it will change the game at the highest level, for better or worse, just as Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe changed professional tennis.When the golfers were back in the clubhouse, and the celebrations were in full swing, Ben Crenshaw took Justin Leonard aside in the locker room and told him the history of the 17th hole at the Country Club. About how Francis Ouimet, the 20-year-old local amateur, had finally caught Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, the English professionals, with a 20-foot putt on the 17th at the US Open in 1913, and how Ouimet, accompanied by a 10-year- old caddie, had sunk another putt of similar length at the same hole in the play-off to earn himself a historic victory and a parade back to the clubhouse on the shoulders of the crowd.The emotion of the thought had Crenshaw in tears, not for the first time over the weekend. He was also thinking about his own father, who died earlier this year and who had followed him around the Country Club in 1968, when Crenshaw competed in the US junior championships as a 16-year- old. He could still see his father, he said, walking the 1st and the 18th, where the old trotting track had stood.Great memories The stuff of the most beautiful sporting legends. And now Crenshaw, who sent his men out in shirts bearing sepia- tinted photographs of their predecessors, has bought himself a new place in the game’s history.Sadly, however, posterity’s verdict on the legacy of the 1999 Ryder Cup may involve more than just the oft-told tale of a heroic American comeback.Leading article, Review, pages 3.