James Lawton: Woods shows Montgomerie how to live with defeat

It is hard to believe after the agony of his Muirfield that it is just five years ago that Colin Montgomerie, who will be 40 a few weeks before next year's Open, was tartly advising a new young professional named Tiger Woods that mere talent meant little without the reinforcement of hard-won experience.

A few days later Montgomerie was walking in the shadow of the 21-year-old as Woods marched to a record-breaking Masters victory, and if we needed to locate the genesis of the Scotsman's latest, and perhaps most troubling despair, Augusta is probably the best place to start.

There, the underpinnings of the self-belief that had accrued so massively with his mastery of Europe were not so much attacked as ignored as irrelevant by a prodigy plainly irked by what he considered to be the patronising attitude of an unfulfilled player so many years his senior.

At the weekend the dichotomy of attitudes had reached full circle. Having spent five years showing Montgomerie how to win, Woods now gave a master-class in the handling of defeat. Woods provided the latest confirmation of the old Hemingway theory that while the world breaks everyone sooner or later, some are made strong at the broken places.

Woods, after an 81, shot 65. Montgomerie followed his 84 with a 75 on a morning of soft sunshine and the gentlest breeze, and a gut-wrenching statement that he would be taking a two-week break from the game because, as he put it, "he couldn't handle it anymore". "It" was not the frailty of his own competitive nature, but the treacheries, real or imagined, of the British media, one whose final cut may be to regard him as not some ageing and volatile curmudgeon, but a rather sad case of someone who has consistently mistaken verbal movement for genuine action of the mind.

"Jaysus," said one Irish observer of Montgomerie's latest turmoil, "he's more than ever one of those fellas who when you ask them the time tell you how to make a watch."

Montgomerie's Achilles heel has plainly always been his tongue. It has thus far proved uncontrollable. Now it is employed in blaming the press for all his troubles. The special absurdity of his behaviour is that he is supposed to be engaged in a game that is largely played against yourself.

The great golfers shape their own environment of thought. Nick Faldo is doing it in his mid-forties, and with much more engaging effect than in the days when his strength of mind had carried him to a magnificent plateau of achievement. The winners, the ultimate winners of the majors, into whose company the conspicuously sane Ernie Els has made another understandably hugely celebrated stride, mostly do it rather than talk about it.

Lee Trevino was one exception, but his playing ethos was of course shaped by the need to hustle on public courses in Dallas, his willingness to crank up the odds by employing a Coke bottle as his club, and the need to wash out his clothes each night in the motel launderette. Trevino used words, pithy, biting words, for the support of an idea of himself which he needed to win: Montgomerie's words have never done more than illustrate the rising damp in a shaky building.

Maybe, at a rather late hour, Montgomerie has finally reached the only point from which he could make serious self-appraisal. The point of rock bottom, that is, because there has rarely been a more profound example of the brittleness of his nature than his most -recent performance. In the old days, his riotous 64 on the second day would have been greeted as another roll of thunder on the road to an inevitable major triumph. But, on this last occasion, it provoked more a sigh about what might have been than any serious speculation on his chances of winning.

In the climactic moments of the tournament which 24 hours earlier had cut adrift both Woods and Montgomerie, the psychologist employed by Els and the other sudden death play-off contender, Thomas Levet, busied himself in front of the television cameras, though disturbingly in that it had been delivered just a few minutes earlier, he couldn't quite remember his advice to the winner, Els. Who, you wondered, might help Monty? Perhaps Sigmund Freud on the top of his form.

In the great man's absence, Montgomery might be best served by a break rather longer than two weeks. Certainly, he seems unable for the moment to deal properly with the pressures and the variables of the game which has the capacity to break the spirit of even its greatest practitioners.

Of all the memories you take and hoard from the business of covering sport, one of the most unforgettable is of spending a few hours beside Jack Nicklaus on the practice range of the course he built – and christened Muirfield in Dublin, Ohio. It was in 1979 and Nicklaus was in a downward spiral of form which many thought, with the rise of such stars as Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, briefly, and Tom Weiskopf, even more briefly, was terminal. Nicklaus worked through to the last of the light, occasionally offering a ruminative aside. Once, after a particularly adroit piece of work, he muttered, "Goddamit, in the end this game can drive you crazy. How can you play a shot as good as that and still wonder if you'll ever be able to win another tournament?" When he said that Nicklaus was Montgomerie's age. He was undergoing a new fitness regime. He was working slavishly. He had no quarrel with the press, which after its initial coolness when he first challenged the icon Arnie Palmer, had no choice but to lionise him for his achievements and respect the professionalism of his dealings with them.

Seven years later he won the Masters. A few years ago he nearly won it again while working on a hip badly in need of surgery. Such is the kind of model of behaviour Montgomerie must find, at this critical point in his career, if the rest of his life is not to be awash with angst. There is certainly no shortage of choice in more contemporary figures. Nick Price, whose challenge looked so promising on the day Woods had a rare collision with the gods, has combined an enduring passion of the game with an understanding of the ebb and flow of real life beyond the fairways. Faldo, despite a body of work which would surely satisfy all but the very greatest of golfers, has allowed the wider rhythms of that life to infiltrate his thinking on the game about which he remains obsessed. Els, seven years younger than Montgomery, but buoyed by the ballast of two US Open wins, has found his reward for working so hard on the challenge of operating in the eye of the Tiger.

Supremely, there is the example of Woods himself. On Sunday he focused on the need to heal wounds and get out of town with his head up. He was asked by a radio reporter when he knew it "had gone".

"When what was gone?" asked Woods in some puzzlement. "When the tournament was gone," he was told. Woods said that a tournament was gone from you only when you had played your last shot. Meanwhile you remain unseparated from your pride and your responsibilities as a professional. Deep down, you have to suspect, Woods was almost certainly disappointed by his handling of the East Lothian tempest.

He said, convincingly, that he played every shot through that crisis from the bottom of his heart. But perhaps not from the full depth of his golfing brain. He said he was flying home to get into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and just walk outside. But wherever he strolled, you knew surely enough, it would not be too far from the lessons he had learned on the blasted fairways of Muirfield. His would be the reflections of a thwarted winner. Montgomerie's, alas, threaten to be another exercise in shifting blame.

His one chance now is to abort as quickly as he can the whole arid process. It has, after all, carried him to the coldest place in any walk of life – the point of ridicule. He owes himself, and his extraordinary talent, a lot more than that.