I took a tumble recently during my weekly game of 8-a-side fitba and have ended up with a slight niggle in my shoulder.
It’s not what you’d call agonising pain, more accumulatively irritating, like sitting on a budget airline flight while a hyperactive toddler behind you continually kicks the back of your seat for the duration of the journey.
Anyway, somebody suggested it may be a mild case of frozen shoulder, which at least is a refreshing change from the cold one the sports editor gives me on a regular basis.
Talking of general well-being, I was leafing through an old book the other day called Physical Training for Golfers which was written back in 1937 by a gentleman called Lieutenant Stark and promoted the idea that proper exercise and lifestyle is beneficial to good golf.
It remains an eminently sensible and enduring philosophy and one that I continue to be a dedicated disciple of as I absorbed Stark’s pearls of wisdom while slumped on the couch shoving two Lorne sausage baps down my thrapple.
The pioneering Stark advocated many things including “controlled breathing, bowel clearance and energetic towelling.”
Funnily enough, those are the three soothing exercises I tend to perform once I’ve finished writing this column. But not necessarily in the same order.
Before his book was published, Stark played a key role in preparing the GB&I team for the 1933 Ryder Cup at Southport & Ainsdale.
GB&I would win a thrilling affair with the final putt on the final green of the final match. Presumably, those three important procedures documented earlier were required amid such a nail nibbling finale.
We can only wonder what Stark would’ve made of the build-up to the modern-day Ryder Cup?
With the 45th transatlantic tussle hurtling towards us like the meteor that obliterated the dinosaurs, Luke Donald, his European players and backroom team have arrived in New York for a two-day reconnaissance mission and bonding session ahead of the showdown at Bethpage Park in less than a fortnight.
The Ryder Cup these days, of course, is such a meticulously planned operation, it would make the D-Day Landings look like a great act of spontaneity.
You may, though, be slightly stunned at Europe’s latest addition to the armoury; virtual reality headsets bawling abuse at the users.
Now, if you’re anything like me and struggle to operate a device more high-tech than a pumice stone, then you’re possibly already thinking, "what the Dickens is virtual reality?"
In a nutshell, it’s a virtual experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Yes, you were probably going to say that once you’d had a slurp of tea.
The headsets have been given to each European player to simulate the sights and sounds they may confront at boisterous Bethpage, desensitise them to potential verbal volleys and prepare them for, well, anything.
“You don’t want to know, it’s not for publication,” said Rory McIlroy when asked what hostile hollers and heckles were programmed into his headset. “You can go as close to the bone as you like.”
What a time to be alive, eh? There will, no doubt, be some of you thinking that if golfers need to “desensitise” themselves to potential insults before playing in a competition, then the world has truly lost the plot. But here we are.
Excessive? Perhaps, but in the no-stone-left-unturned preparations for a Ryder Cup in this day and age, nothing should surprise us.
During Paul McGinley’s lauded tenure in 2014, for instance, the Irishman had a tank of yellow and blue fish plonked in the European team room, while a painting of a rock being lashed by the waves of a tempest, accompanied by the message, “we will be the rock when the storm arrives”, was held up as a coup de maitre in the arts of nurturing passion, focus and resilience.
In this game of fine margins, of course, there’s a fine line too between perceived masterstrokes and madness.
Had Europe lost, McGinley’s little touches with the fish and the rock could’ve been used as ammunition for relentless ridicule.
If Europe lose at Bethpage Park this month, the jubilant US lot will probably hack into those headsets and programme them to blare out the ditty, “you can stick your virtual reality up your a***.”
What fun and games there could be.
We all know that the Ryder Cup has grown ever more tribalistic and jingoistic over the years. There’s been the War on the Shore in 1991 and the Battle of Brookline in 1999.
That particular showdown 26 years ago plumbed new depths in terms of behaviour and, in these increasingly fevered times, all and sundry are working themselves into a fankle about Bethpage Park being just as bad.
Mark James, the European captain at Brookline, was asked during a TV interview at the time about the taunts, jeers and hisses from the partisan galleries.
“Basically, it's personal abuse,” he said. “I can't mention the words on air, unless you're putting me on the Playboy channel after midnight."
Those unmentionables have probably been dug out of the archives and are now playing through Rory McIlroy’s virtual thingamajig as you read this.
When it comes to over-analysis, hype and hysteria, no event in golf generates quite as much ballyhoo as the Ryder Cup.
The phoney war rumbles on. Virtual reality may have grabbed the headlines over the weekend. The real thing, though, will soon take centre stage.
