They often say that things were much better in the old days … unless you lived in the really old days when it was all dark and plague-ridden and you’d scavenge around the medieval streets in your fraying tunic looking for odds and ends to add to the communal gruel.

In this Royal & Ancient game of golf, we like nothing better than a good look back to the times of yore. Whether it’s cooing over brassies, mashies and jiggers or oohing and aahing at Bobby Jones’s storming of the impregnable quadrilateral, we are never done immersing ourselves in nostalgic reflection and thumbing through the archives like a cataloguer at the British Library.

The problem with history, of course, is that you get so caught up in the past, you forget to appreciate the present. In his role as television commentator, analyst and all round examiner of dimpled ba’ activity, Frank Nobilo is well aware of that. Given that golf tends to be a slow burner, as opposed to other crash, bang, wallop sports that happen in a short and sharp frenzy by comparison, there is plenty of time to have a meander down memory lane yet Nobilo believes there is too much emphasis on what's gone before.

“We were doing commentary in Hawaii recently and there was Rickie Fowler in his high-top shoes and joggers and we as commentators sounded about 100 years old,” said the 55-year-old New Zealander, who was speaking during a stop-off in St Andrews where he was attending the R&A’s Tournament Administrators and Referees School. “Golf has become a history lesson, especially on the broadcast. Of course, it has this illustrious history which we cherish but I think we have to change the way we talk about the game. A lot of other sports talk up the way the game is today. Tennis, for example, is doing great. The game has changed, it has had the same technological boom as golf, the players are more athletic and, in my view, it’s terrific to watch. That’s what we have to do in golf. Often when we discuss golf it’s all ‘this is wrong’ or ‘the architecture is wrong’ or the ‘ball goes too far’ but if we want to entice young people into it we have to change the way we talk about it.”

With the likes of Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day and Rickie Fowler at the vanguard of an exciting, engaging youthful movement in the men’s game and Lydia Ko leading a sprightly charge in the upper echelons of a flourishing women’s scene, you couldn’t wish for a better posse of fresh-faced talents to take the game forward. Nobilo, who won 15 tour titles during his own playing days, insists we should appreciate them for who they are and not for who they could be. “In the men’s game we have four very healthy young men at the top but we need to talk about them instead of making constant comparisons,” he added. “Every time we see one of them we compare a swing with Bobby Jones, or Ben Hogan or Jack Nicklaus and I really don’t think that comparison does us any favours. Where does that come from? Oddly enough it was Tiger Woods. The closer he got to Jack Nicklaus’s record of majors even Nicklaus himself admitted that it made him relevant again. So every time Tiger played in a major it was ‘will he get closer to Jack’s record?’ We kept turning the clock back 30 or 40 years. The romantic part of the game is that we think it’s great to dig it all up and say how it was. We have to look at the youth and what they want. They are following today’s role models not the ones we grew up with. I’m 55 and we are trying to educate the kids of today on the role models we had. That’s the crazy thing about it.”

Having retired from professional golf due to injury back in 2003, Nobilo is now a well-kent voice on American tele – as well as McIlroy’s PGA Tour video game - but the transition from hitting balls to, ahem, talking balls took a bit of getting used to. “You’ll have someone who was good at the game and the expectation is that they’ll be great at announcing,” he said. “But it’s a completely different job. I wish I’d worked as hard on my golf as I do on my broadcasting.”