While Woods and his management decided to keep their powder dry, Mickelson's mentors, Dave Pelz and Rick Smith, were both insisting that all was sweetness and light with the world's two best players.

"They like each other a lot.

They do, and that's great for golf, " gushed Smith. When asked what the difference was playing with Fred Couples at the Masters, in contrast to being paired with Woods, Mickelson said it might be the "amount of conversation".

In the end, it was left to David Feherty to call a spade a shovel. "They don't have a relationship, they don't even know each other, " said the CBS television analyst. "You can go through the social niceties, but when you compete against someone at the highest level in any sport, you can't be friends."

Tom Lehman, he of the erstwhile commitment to become a playing captain at the K Club in September, has been banging the drum about the importance of good putting if America are to prevent Europe from winning a fifth Ryder Cup out of the last six.

He want as far as to admit that he had "putted very poorly" over the past few months. One American writer suggested that if Lehman was to qualify, and if he decided to play, his putting stroke would be the "worst natural disaster to hit the US since Katrina".

Jackie Burke, a former winner of both the PGA Championship and the Masters, was close to the action at Oakland Hills two years ago as one of Hal Sutton's assistants. Now, the 76-year-old veteran obviously had Sutton's ear, but in the end appears to have failed to have influenced America's hapless captain, and in his recently published book, he reveals what he would have said to Chris Riley who asked to be rested for the Saturday afternoon foursomes.

Riley had complained of fatigue and of being unfamiliar with the foursomes' format, and Sutton bizarrely agreed to his request for some R&R. "If Chris Riley had told me he'd no experience of foursomes, I would've told him, 'It's like this, he hits and then you hit it.'" If the breaks appear to have fallen Billy Mayfair's way, Mark Calcavecchia's caddie, Eric Larson, is also celebrating a new start. Larson, who was on the bag when Calcavecchia won the BellSouth Classic in 1995, is only in his fourth tournament after completing an 11-year prison term for cocaine trafficking.

Calcavecchia, who was forced to withdraw during the second round, had always promised Larson he would get his old job back once he was released from jail. "A lot of other people in life don't get second chances, " said Larson, "you have diseases or a freak accident or what have you. I'm fortunate to be in this position."

The wonders of modern medicine have allowed Billy Mayfair to recover from surgery for testicular cancer just over a fortnight ago, and to take his place in the field.

There were plenty of good tidings for Mayfair especially when he came in with an opening round of 69. It later emerged that Phil Mickelson . . . a good friend of Mayfair's from their days together at Arizona State . . . had flown from his home in San Diego to be with Mayfair during his operation.

Maybe the goofy smile, the incessant autograph signing of golf 's ultimate family man is not a charade after all.

The question of whether or not performance-enhancing drugs have infiltrated golf seems to be on the agenda at every major championship these days. This past week, Ernie Els stuck his head above the parapet and insisted that any allegations of doping were "ridiculous", Fred Funk said golf was "self-policing". However, Colin Montgomerie suggested that he was all for testing despite denying emphatically there was any problem.

Meanwhile, Dick Pound, the head of the World AntiDoping Agency, cast a more jaundiced eye over the sport.

"It all sounds so familiar doesn't it? It's the old 'We don't test because there's no problem' idea, " said Pound. "Look at the way the body shapes are changing in golf. Are all of these drives landing so far down the fairway just because the balls and the equipment are better?"

If professional golf is confident it has no problem, it has nothing to fear from opening its doors to the doping controllers. At the elite level, the sport is awash with money, so are golfers claiming they are better human beings than track and field athletes and cyclists?