It was hard to know what was going through Tom Watson's mind as Phil Mickelson launched his scathing attack on the American team captain at Gleneagles on Sunday evening.

It seems unlikely that a man with so much to be proud of would have felt humiliated. He may have felt bewildered at how a senior figure (one who admitted to not having done so ahead of the event) was now casting doubts over his methods. More than anything he looked resigned at the end of a week that has probably left him questioning American golf's core values.

Watson had grown up in a world where Americans enjoyed near-supremacy, rather than mere superiority, in his sport. From his birth until his own first major only Gary Player and Tony Jacklin had denied the home contingent victory in a US major. Here in Britain his own five Open Championship wins contributed to a run of 12 American successes in 14 years.

Even in 1993, the first time he had captained a US Ryder Cup team, it seemed that the European successes of the mid-to-late 80s had been little more than a blip.

On his last playing appearance, at The Belfry in 1989, the match had been halved; the Americans then reclaimed the trophy in 1991. So his biggest task when telling his players, 21 years ago, that Europeans may have invented golf but that Americans perfected it, was to try to re-establish some dignity after the unpleasantness of Kiawah Island, rather than addressing any concern about whether his country's golfers had lost their competitive edge.

In the intervening years, while Watson demonstrated just how tough his generation had been as he remained competitive way beyond what was previously considered feasible, a massive change in the balance of power had occurred.

Now it was American players who sounded like some Brits of the 70s in appearing pleased to make it on to the team; Mickelson, now a loser in eight of 10 match appearances, boasted about never having needed a wild-card selection. Watson's one current major winner and clansman, Bubba, made pre-match comments that in one sense stated the obvious, that professional golfers must accept that they will lose more often than they win, but which would have seemed utterly alien in the context of this match to contemporaries of the captain such as Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Ray Floyd, Lanny Wadkins and Tom Kite.

Mickelson's betrayal, then - which contrasted with the captain's dignified observation that they have different philosophies and that the player was entitled to express his - can only have confirmed to Watson that there is something about the current generation that he does not get. That is reflected, too, in the attitude of the supporters who seemed to have travelled for the party as much as for the prospect of seeing America win.

With one colleague even observing that there were similarities between the USA followers and the prevailing mood of the Tartan Army, or Murrayfield's Six Nations Championship school reunions, perhaps this is a form of self-protection.

However, where Scotland has now confirmed itself to be no more than a small part of a bigger country, Americans do not see the world that way and such attitudes are unlikely to be embraced by a wider population that retains a strong view of how their nation should portray itself.

Inevitably, then, as has happened before following European runs of success, questions were being raised on Sunday as to whether this may be bad news for this vast circus of a competition.

If Americans no longer see team golf as a platform on which they exhibit their superiority and cannot find a way of doing so, might they regard it as no longer relevant to them? Might they, in turn, start to seek to reduce the attention given to the Ryder Cup rather than allow themselves to acknowledge that there is a sport they regard as important but in which they cannot be dominant?

The reality would seem to be good news from a European perspective all round, with one American commentator - who understandably did not want to be named, given the importance of the sport to his livelihood - explaining that in terms of getting over this defeat his countrymen will have much less in common with Tom Watson than with some of his players.

Comparing it with football's World Cup, in which the majority of Americans took great interest on a novelty level until their own team's exit and thereafter very little, he suggested that few would even have bothered to watch Sunday's singles once they saw the score on Saturday.

No real threat there, then, to the Ryder Cup's status since next time around there will be plenty of excitement in the build-up from those hoping to generate some additional interest in the short term should the USA win.

Either way, though, within days the public's attention will return to baseball and American football as, rather than waste too much time worrying about how to win something that is two years away, they focus upon the team sports they invented as well as perfected, leaving golf's well-regarded individualists to contemplate their differing philosophies.