Where do you stand on hair? If you’ve got plenty of it, you probably couldn’t give two bald coots for the particular question that’s just been posed. If that’s the case, then you can just carry on slurping your tea while nonchalantly sweeping your hands through that thick, lush, fertile mop that’s so densely forested you could probably recreate the Battle of the Bulge in its copious, Ardennes-like foliage.

If you’re anything like me, however, the slow, irreversible thinning in the crown area of the napper is cause for much mystified muttering and strained, contorted mirror-peering. I mean, hair grows in the most unlikely airts. You slice, clip and chop it off but back it comes, like some zombie in a horror movie that simply refuses to die. But why can’t that tangled, robust growth that sprouts in gay abandon under, say, the oxters not flourish on that increasingly balding bit of the bonce? Alas, it prefers, instead, to beat a hasty retreat from the scalp before deciding to regroup, rearm and establish a sturdy beachhead in the nose or the lugs. It’s utterly pointless. Rather like this meandering introduction. But there is purpose to these haverings on hirsuteness.

Unless you’ve been cocooned in a bathysphere over the last year or so, you’re probably aware of Andrew ‘Beef’ Johnston, the burly, burger-chomping English golfer, European Tour winner and recently acquired PGA Tour card-holder who has a beard of such abundant majesty it looks like he has some large woodland creature coiled around his chin.

Back in ye day, facial decoration was, well, par for the course in this Royal & Ancient game as whisker-laden wizards of the links battered away with the cleeks, the mashies and the brassies before retiring to stare earnestly at a primitive camera. The very first Open at Prestwick in 1860, for instance, saw the bearded Willie Park stave off the bearded Old Tom Morris by two shots. Park came to the last facing a testing putt of some 30-feet across a bobbly green. He had two putts for the win but holed his first one as he finished with a triumphant flourish, despite the remorseless, distracting rustling of Auld Tom’s considerable growth billowing in the Ayrshire breeze.

Fast forward to the present day and a bearded golfer seems to cause as much pointing and open-mouthed gawping as those bristly ladies at a PT Barnum freak show. Speaking on the radio the other day, the likeable, laid back Johnston said that some folk had told him that his unshorn fizog was “bad for golf”. Cue flabbergasted snortings. When it comes to hooplas over trivial matters, golf remains in the pantheon of greats. Last year, the European Tour made the decision to allow players to wear shorts in practice and pre-tournament Pro-Ams at events in warmer climes. The relaxing of the laws was hardly revolutionary but the welter of coverage this fairly modest development commanded simply highlighted golf’s on-going image problem. Hamstrung by the wide-spread perception that the game and those involved in it are stuffier than an AGM at the Guild of Taxidermists, the fact a fundamental change still managed to generate such earth-shudderings remains mystifying. To a younger generation thinking about getting into the pursuit, the palaver over something as hum-drum as bare legs, or indeed beards, must leave them asking ‘just what the heck are we getting ourselves in to?’

From Doug Sanders, the ‘peacock of the fairways’, to the late Payne Stewart, who would wear the liveries of a variety of American football teams, golf has a curious history of flamboyant colour combined with conservative head-shaking and cleanly-shaven chin-strokings of disapproval.

While images of ruddy-faced Muirfield members shuffling out of the clubhouse the other day, and talking themselves into the realms of self-parody when asked about the issue of allowing women to join, continue to cause reputational damage, golf, in the upper reaches of both the male and female scene, is headed by a series of colourful, charismatic, captivating and charming players of whom we should be grateful for.

Some of the more fusty traditionalists – and there is nothing wrong with good honest traditions in this mind-mangling world – will say that standards are continuing to drop, those cherished traditions are being eroded and it’s all simply a lack of professionalism. It is only beards and shorts that we are talking about here, though, but the fact we are talking about it at all – and writing a ruddy column on it - illustrates the stifling sense of lingering pomposity that still surrounds golf.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more important issues to deal with. Like trying to disguise that bloomin’ bald patch.