Last weekend's Ryder Cup was the first I had covered since the 1989 event when Gordon Brand Jr made his debut.

The following year, courtesy of Raymond Jacobs, this paper's then golf correspondent, and the similarly esteemed Jock McVicar of the Daily Express, who between them knew everyone there was to know in the sport, I was introduced to a 15-year-old boy, his dad and his grandfather during the Scottish Boys' Championship.

My apologies to Stephen Gallacher if my memory is playing tricks on me, but my recollection is of feeling some surprise that this member of such a famous golfing family was saying that he had not taken the sport all that seriously up to that point, explaining a handicap of 3 when many in the field were scratch or better.

Whether or not that is bang on or not, it is fair to say he has improved since then. That recollection added a certain poignancy to the act of following him around on the opening morning of last weekend's Ryder Cup.

Even so, it was a sobering thought that Gallacher, now in his 40th year, was Scotland's first Ryder Cup rookie this century - the first, indeed, since Paul Lawrie and Andrew Coltart, two other players I spent a fair bit of time reporting on in the late 1980s, made their debuts at Brookline in 1999. And that in spite of millions of pounds of public money having been ploughed into golf in the interim.

So much so that the Scottish Golf Union, run back in 1990 by the late Ian Hume with a couple of office staff, now lists 36 staff on its website. To what end, you might reasonably ask, as we hear of club memberships continuing to decline while there is no evidence of improvement at elite level in Scotland?

This is not to pick solely on golf, which is merely one example of the ridiculously disproportionate growth of sports administration that has occurred in inverse proportion to the overall decline in Scottish sporting success and participation.

When, for example, I first covered rugby in between Scotland grand slam successes, the Scottish Rugby Union was run by around half a dozen people and, as well as being successful on the pitch, supplied around a third of British & Irish Lions touring squads and captains for successive Lions tours. The grassroots game was also vibrant. The SRU is now a vast empire, paying some individuals more than the entire staff would have received in 1990. How is the sport faring on the international stage, pray tell?

I do not know the infrastructure of football as well but am given to understand that, some 16 years after the national team last took part in the finals of a major championship - its sixth World Cup finals appearance in seven attempts - the Scottish Football Association also has a vastly different workforce and wage bill compared with that time.

All of which brings me back to the discussions in this section ahead of the referendum and how we should completely rethink how we spend on sport, as well as health, education, social welfare and civic issues, to name but a few.

As things stand, we have created an environment in which very few youngsters are given an opportunity to demonstrate any aptitude for the vast majority of sports and we then throw money at them in order to try to maximise their talent, as well as justifying the existence of armies of administrators.

My own view is that we would do much better to cut down on the bureaucracy and focus on creating facilities for every youngster to be exposed to the widest possible array of opportunities for them to discover what they are good at before we take any sort of steps towards honing that talent.

On which note it was encouraging yesterday to have a brief chat with Craig Reedie, arguably the most vaunted sports administrator currently representing Scotland on the global stage as a member of the International Olympic Committee, who was back in Glasgow because the national badminton centre he set up more than 30 years at Cockburn was being renamed in his honour.

As our conversation broadened into wider matters, he made a point which reminded me of articles I wrote more than a decade ago when exposed to the proliferation of state-funded sports schools in Sydney.

"If you want to take it into Olympic terms, I can remember going down to the Gold Coast before the Sydney Games - because we were going to hold the British team there - and the girl who ran sport on the Gold Coast asked me which of their 23 50-metre pools we would like to use? They were all attached to schools. Guess where Australia gets most of its medals," he observed. "So the principle's there. If you build reasonable facilities and make them available, and then coach them properly and develop them, you'll end up with good players.

"Scotland can be a pretty grim place for sport in the winter, so indoor sport properly organised in warm conditions would seem to be pretty attractive. School sport I think is really important."

School sport is, in fact, the only way we are ever going to maximise what talent we have and the sooner we invest in it properly, with money saved by ending the process of giving valuable public funds to the sporting empire builders, the better.