This correspondent has been called many things down the seasons but when I heard someone mutter the phrase, ‘look, there's that bastion of The Herald’ I took considerable offence. It was the sports editor who made the utterance, mind you, as he leafed through the dog-eared sheets of parchment that make up the annual appraisal and are scribbled with the kind of downbeat tidings you’d tend to find in the death notices. “Nick … it is Nick isn’t it?” he wheezed. “From observing your efforts throughout the season, it is clear to me that you are doing the work of two men … Laurel and Hardy.”

It’s nice to feel wanted eh? Back in the day, when that fusty, cornball gag in the previous paragraph may have raised a chuckle instead of withering groans about it being as antiquated as a stovepipe hat, there were some golf clubs that would have preferred Laurel and Hardy chaotically careering about the clubhouse instead of junior members.

Here in 2015, you’d like to think the times have changed. Yes, there remain the various, sturdy redoubts that are as stuffy as a taxidermist’s garret but there are many, many good, honest clubs around the country that are all-embracing and forward-thinking.

Your first experiences tend to be crucial in shaping views. In those youthful, carefree times of yore, when the biggest worries in life centred around a snapped Subbuteo figure and the crushing inability to perform a decent wheelie on a BMX, this scribe’s memories of playing golf as a junior in my home town of Langholm are all good … apart from the actual execution of the shots themselves. As far as my hazy mind can recall, there were no stern lectures about this, that and the other, no pedantic clock watching about teeing off at this time and not that time and no finger wagging about playing here, there and everywhere. It was, by and large, a case of clatter on freely and enjoy it at a small club with a small membership.

For others, the recollections of golf in their formative years are slightly different so here’s a quote for you to mull over. “The secretary at the time called the junior section ‘an insidious growth’.”

Now, this is not just some anonymous spouting. It was said last week by Marc Warren, Scotland’s highest-ranked male golfer on both the European and world order, as he reflected on his junior days at East Kilbride Golf Club. “I don’t go back to the golf club I grew up playing at because off all that,” he added. “We had a strong junior section at East Kilbride and we were treated quite poorly. Obviously it’s changed days, but what happened then leaves a really sour taste. That was what it was like then at some clubs, with some being overly stuffy. We had three, possibly four, international players coming through our junior section. Now I think only two of that section are members. They were lost purely because what happened. The point is how easily you can be put off (the game). It’s totally unnecessary.”

Warren’s blunt assessment certainly raises some eye-brows but it’s hardly a unique tale. There will be numerous golfers of a certain age who have similar recollections of times when juniors were, preferably, not seen let alone heard. There was no agenda to the particular line of questioning aimed at Warren and it was not part of some mischievous quest for a retrospective naming and shaming of a Scottish golf club. It was merely thrown in during an informal press gathering at the launch of the merged governing body for Scottish amateur golf last Thursday. Given that the experiences Warren was reflecting on would have been from maybe 15 to 20 years ago, you’d like to think that the attitudes that the former Walker Cup player was lamenting have changed. As ever in the free press, the good folk at East Kilbride Golf Club have a right to reply.

Negative perceptions of golf hang around like the whiff of a pair of jiggered shoes in the bottom of the locker. Getting the merger of the Scottish Golf Union and the Scottish Ladies’ Golfing Association pushed through after much debate and dithering was an important, obvious and long overdue step in this on-going crusade to improve the game’s image in the wider sense. In many ways, golf has never been more accessible with plenty of sterling work being done at clubs and facilities throughout the land to encourage growth. In a frenzied modern age, where speed and convenience are demanded and instant gratification and a fast-track to success are almost viewed as basic human rights, the game of golf, and its virtues of patience, dedication and self-discipline, is an easy target for those scatter-gun snipers obsessed with fuddy-duddy stereotypes. There are many out dated relics still evident in golf but here’s hoping that some of the experiences that Marc Warren claimed he had as a junior continue to be consigned to the past.