Brian Viner: When golf shows its sentimental side

St Andrew's has enabled golf's greatest player to take his leave in its most hallowed arena

There are currently nine golf courses upon which the Open is staged, four in England and five in Scotland. The venerable, 145-year-old competition moves between them, usually alternating between north and south of the border, and five years ago the blazers of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, golf's ruling body everywhere in the world apart from the United States, decided that they would bring the Open back to St Andrews in the summer of 2006.

However, they then realised that Nicklaus would be ineligible; the exemption offered to former champions runs out when they pass 65. So those R&A blazers did a splendid thing, and chose to give St Andrews the Open a year earlier, enabling golf's greatest player to take his leave of the game's finest tournament in its most hallowed arena.

It is hugely heartening to find such unashamed sentimentality in the ruthless, billion-pound industry that is modern sport. And better still to find that sentimentality is sometimes rewarded. There was sentiment aplenty in Sebastian Coe's pitch to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore last week, and it helped to bag the 2012 Games for London.

Occasionally, it is true, sporting sentimentality gets overblown. Indeed, golf provides another example of this in the form of the US Masters at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, the first of the golfing year's four major championships, in which past champions have traditionally been permitted to compete for as long as they wish.

This April, as the septuagenarian 1970 champion Billy Casper creaked round in 106 shots, 34 strokes over par, the veneration accorded to Augusta's golden oldies was at last exposed as foolish and embarrassing.

Still, too much respect is better than too little. And, by and large, sport can teach society a thing or two about respect for the old. If only by wheeling out its past masters for some desultory applause before turning back to the deeds of the young and virile, sport at least gives grandparents the chance to turn to their grandchildren and say, "now there was a player". And youngsters the chance to think, 'Blimey, so that fat old geezer with the thinning grey hair once played golf, or football, or cricket, like a god?'

In what other walk of life do the elderly get such recognition for things they achieved three, four, five even six decades ago? War heroes don't, that's for sure.

But that is not to say that sport has an unblemished record, either, in honouring its old. Or even helping them. I recently got an e-mail from a reader who informed me that the father-in-law of an acquaintance of his had once been a top-level football referee who officiated at all England's major grounds. Recently this man has become seriously unwell with a very rare condition called sclerosing cholangitis, which is, in the words of my correspondent, both "life-limiting and life-threatening".

So the man's son-in-law decided that the least he could do was try to raise funds for research into this disease, and because of the football connection, wrote to every league club asking them to donate items which might then be auctioned. Hull City, Barnsley and Derby County were among those which came up trumps, whereas two of the wealthiest Premiership clubs declined on account "of the costs involved".

I resist the temptation to name the guilty clubs here because my correspondent's acquaintance nobly decided that he didn't want to cause them any embarrassment. But it shows that there is an emotional vacuum in football, and shows, too, that there is no point honouring the large fry if you leave the small fry to rot.

Happily, some sports have more soul than football, and golf, I believe, is one of them. There are doubtless those who believe that the hoop-la surrounding Nicklaus is ridiculous, a contrived distraction from the more important business of who actually wins this Open. Then there are those who believe that the business of who actually wins this Open is itself a meaningless triviality, and can scarcely believe that Nicklaus, a professional golfer from Columbus, Ohio, has just become only the third living person, after the Queen and the Queen Mum when she was still with us, to be depicted on a Scottish banknote.

I take a different view of the handsome new fiver issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland, that it is the royals who should be honoured to be in such distinguished company, not Jack Nicklaus. But I'm glad he is being forcibly retired from the Open. One only has to think of the boxer Mike Tyson to realise that nothing in sport, or for that matter in life, is so undignified as not knowing when to stop. Nor, conversely, is there anything more dignified than stopping with dignity, especially when you'd quite like to carry on.

b.viner@independent.co.uk