Yahoo: A person regarded as crude or brutish. (American Heritage Dictionary).

The Ryder Cup disorders. The Phoenix Open’s pistol-toting fan and notorious overboard partying. Stars Greg Norman, David Duval, Mark O’Meara, Phil Mickelson and especially Colin Montgomerie’s ugly and heavily-publicized confrontations with spectators. Plus innumerable other player/official vs. galleryite brouhahas over recent years that never made headlines.

Call it the yahooing of sport’s last bastion of gentility.

Or the price we pay for the simultaneous opening up and down- marketing of golf accompanying the Tiger Woods phenomenon.

Or, as the philosophers might suggest, simply a consequence of the dumbing down inherent to a society’s gradual but inexorable leveling up.

Whatever, tournament golf as it’s been practiced and enjoyed over the better part of the past century clearly has a problem - and one that, in this writer’s opinion, the people who run it aren’t doing enough about, or in most cases even acknowledging exists.

That problem, in a word, is alcohol. While booze isn’t the only factor, in our view it’s by far and away the biggest one.

A blue-collar yahoo attending almost any top pro golf event these days can drink at his own expense - yahoos are invariably male - if not all day long, then for the greater part of the day. With the advent and ever-growing expansion of tented business entertainment at tournaments, the white-collar yahoo can imbibe freely not just in dollar terms but often even more so time- and quantity-wise.

When you consider that there are between five and 10 million males loose in the U.S. who are unable to stop guzzling excessive quantities of its second most noxious legal drug (after tobacco), wherever they may be and whatever they may be doing, the scale of the potential for trouble becomes pretty scary. Assume that a sizable proportion of them know little or nothing more about golf than the name Tiger Woods and the yahoo war-cry You da man! and it becomes downright frightening.

And the solution?

As with so many social evils, the almighty dollar is the major obstacle to any quick drying of the game. Public liquor sales represent income to tournament promoters, either directly or through concessionaires. Corporations insist a liberal flow of alcohol is indispensable to successful wooing of clients and customers. Those factors alone almost certainly guarantee that things will have to get worse on tournament golf’s abuse/altercation front than they presently are before serious steps towards a true fix are taken.

Our guess is that, if and when that time comes, the United States Golf Association - as still, despite its recent tented-village extravaganzas, the most idealistic and least mercenary of the game’s governing bodies - will take the lead in order to protect its premier contest, the U.S. Open. In fact, Pebble Beach this time around, with the public spigot opening around noon and closing at 4 p.m. on practice days, at 5 Thursday and Friday, and at 3 on the weekend - plus extra security personnel mingling with galleries - is at least a small move in that direction.

Sooner or later, though, the game, if its traditional character is to be preserved, is going to need bolder ones.

Ken Bowden