I was leafing through a wonderfully smug Sunday newspaper magazine – you know, the kind that’s full of self-satisfied essays featuring people who have given up their £400,000-a-year job in the city to open an organic honey boutique in Bigbury-on-Sea – and there was an article about self-help concepts that we should all embrace.

In order to combat the stresses and strains of modern living, the piece suggested that we take time to immerse ourselves in hygge, which is the Danish art of cosiness, or dabble in a bit of fika, which is the Swedish art of the coffee break. It also implored us to indulge in the act of niksen, which is the Dutch art of doing absolutely nothing.

“Well, at least you’ve got that down to a fine bloody art,” grumbled the sports editor with a wearied sigh. These lifestyle trends must be catching on. One reader, for instance, wrote in to tell me he couldn’t give a fika about my Tuesday column. Or something like that?

Anyway, it’s been quite a lively weekend in the world of golf. But when is there ever a quiet weekend in golf these days? Perhaps the game could just embark on some of that aforementioned niksen and do sod all for a bit?

The scenes emerging from the PGA Tour’s Waste Management Open in Phoenix have certainly caused a bit of a stooshie. Footage from the notoriously rowdy event showed wild drunken capers, fighting, public urination and brassed-off players confronting gobby onlookers. And that was just in the media centre. The stuff involving tanked up spectators was even worse.

The Waste Management Open has always branded itself as golf’s biggest party; a raucous, bacchanalian occasion where the game bursts from its traditional straitjacket and lets its hair down. And various items of clothing too.

By the end of a week of outrageous, frat-boy tomfoolery outside the ropes, the Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale must have reeked like Noah’s Ark.

Tournament organisers have cultivated this type of boisterous atmosphere for years so it was inevitable that it would all come home to roost eventually. As someone noted, the Waste Management Open didn’t just jump the shark, it drank it too.

When you see Zach Johnson, a man who’s usually as calm as the painting of the Haywain by Constable, remonstrating with boozy punters you know things have gone over the top. One player called the whole palaver a s***show.

Since Waste Management came on board as headline sponsor in 2010, the Phoenix Open has raised over $120 million for local charities. The attendance at the event is colossal too.

There’s a lot of good stuff there and, with all these things, it tends to be the minority who take it to the limit and beyond. The reaction to such antics from true golfy folk is usually one of pearl-clutching and pious, fuddy-duddy indignation.

The Phoenix shindig is something of a unique occasion that reaches out to a different audience; the kind that golf, often too desperately, bangs on about attracting. Grow the game and all that. Oh, and alienate your core audience while you’re at it. Sorry, I’m clutching at those pearls.

The notion that golf is as stuffy as a taxidermist with blocked sinuses tends to get hurled out with the empty beer cans at a Phoenix Open.

In some ways, it has the potential to blow away fusty old stereotypes and change the perception of the game – “hey Hank, this golf is fun, man” – and perhaps some who experience it may just be tempted to pick up a stick and give it a go? In that regard, it can serve a valuable purpose.

On the flip side, of course, it can just be another example of a sporting event descending into a boorish abyss populated by swaggering, gurgling, hark-at-me imbeciles who are just there to guzzle and guffaw themselves into a stupor. You get plenty of them at a Ryder Cup and an Open Championship too. We’ve all experienced the pesky rascals.

Such behaviour is not just contrary to golf’s established and cherished codes of conduct and etiquette, it’s a sign of what’s increasingly acceptable - or at least tolerated - in sporting audiences these days.

It wasn’t like this in the good old days. Then again? Back in 1870, when the dash and vigour of Young Tom Morris stirred the public’s imagination and he became the game's first superstar, The Open attracted a vociferous gathering of spectators to the links of Prestwick.

According to the newspaper reports of the time, many of the onlookers were "clearly completely new to the sport" and "decidedly unruly in most part." Sound familiar? The uncouth golfing halfwit is not a new phenomenon it seems.

In some ways, the images from Phoenix at the weekend perfectly illustrated the current state of men’s professional golf at the minute; hideously overindulgent.

The other day, Jay Monahan, the bigwig at the PGA Tour, unveiled details explaining, in tedious length, how around 200 players will become equity partners and will split nearly $1 billion among them as part of the circuit’s massive new deal with the Strategic Sports Group.

All this on-going talk of excessive amounts of money and obscenely rich folk getting obscenely richer is giving me a headache. Like a punter who got sozzled at the Waste Management Open, my hangover is kicking in.