Waking up in a field in Dumfriesshire on a fine morning having spent the previous night singing along with Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford for the second time in eight months there was, strangely, a warm inner glow.

Arriving at the Wickerman Festival last Friday evening, just in time to see the best band of the seventies - (with apologies to The Jam who ran them a mighty close second) - had fitted perfectly with the mood generated the previous weekend.

Precisely a week earlier I had been among a handful of journalists to follow the last nine holes of his last Open Championship of a man who has done more for the event than any other in my lifetime and while it was not how it had been planned somehow that ending, as late afternoon gave way to evening, then near total darkness on golf’s most famous links was perfectly evocative.

Tom Watson does not know me from Adam but he has been a huge part of my sporting life and that walk drew me back 40 years to a time when it took around five minutes to assess the contents of every stall at the Open’s tented village.

My dad had taken me to Carnoustie on final practise day and I have a clear memory of seeing a young man with hair brimming out of a flat cap, reading his name on the side of the bag on which he was sitting sucking a piece of grass and asking who he was. Dad had never heard of him either, but five days later that 26-year-old was Open champion.

Two years later, after a week’s golf at Kirriemuir during a family holiday in the Angus Glens, I cycled home at a rate of knots on the Saturday morning, almost killing my house-sitting grandfather on erupting into the house demanding that the golf be put on, just as what would go down in history as “the Duel in the Sun” got underway.

The outcome for me, back when the Golden Bear was the king of golfing beasts, was the wrong one, but nine years late, covering an Open for the first time, my perspective changed forever.

Jack Nicklaus, in the summer that he shocked the golfing world by winning a sixth Masters title aged 46, had given a full press conference and had been perfectly civil but a bit chilly and, in truth, not quite what I had hoped.

Amid rumours that all was not great in his life, written off by the aficionados just three years after his fifth Open win and back at the scene of his most famous triumph, Watson was meanwhile not deemed worthy of a call to centre stage and instead offered a smaller audience a chance to chat in a neighbouring portakabin.

As the junior I was sent along and, after a very pleasant little conference, headed off with a pal for a bite of lunch, leaving Watson addressing a group of youngsters. We were returning to the press centre some 45 minutes later when I noticed that the gathering remained.

“Is that Tom Watson still there signing autographs?” I wondered aloud. Since realising it was and with no disrespect to Nicklaus’ status as the greatest golfer to have played the game, I have watched every re-showing of the 1977 Open very differently. My favourite golfer now comes out on top every time.

Of course there was also 2009 and Turnberry once more, bridging a gap of around 16 years since my previous attendance at an Open.

On its eve I had decided to follow Greg Norman in the first round since he had won there when I first visited the venue.

However on returning to my base for the week no sooner had I walked in the door than my host Ron Evans observed: “That’s some three-ball tomorrow, covering the generations... the 16-year-old Manassero, Sergio Garcia and Tom Watson.”

Plans were hastily rearranged and I spent the next day, then two of the following three watching the astonishing campaign that would become the greatest near miss in the history of sport as a veteran in his 60th year took on his sport’s young guns and matched the best of them over 72 holes.

So that most recent Friday evening on the Old Course was about paying homage to a great golfer who also seems, from a distance, to be a great man.

Millions around the world have had similar experiences of cherished memories intertwined with the fates of teams and, albeit rarely covering a 40 year timescale, individual sportspeople. To consider them as role models is crass and unreasonable, but like the musicians who provide soundtracks to lives they can affect us in ways they cannot begin to imagine.

The late, late press conference at which the five time Open champion, who had been considered a sideshow 29 years earlier, apologised for rambling to a full house in the media centre as he reviewed a peerless Open Championship career was, then, watched through the moist eyes of a deeply grateful 12-year-old.