Everyone is supposed to love Sandy Lyle. Top man, all-round good egg, dear old Sandy. Except here at The Open, you could hear the hiss of the whispers through the wind and the rain. It was Sandy the quitter, Sandy the bottler. Yes, when the going got tough, the tough got going. Straight back to the clubhouse.

Second only to 'cheating', 'surrender' may be just about sport's dirtiest word. Think of how Roberto Duran's reputation as the ultimate boxing warrior lies forever sullied by the thought of how he turned his back on Sugar Ray Leonard during a bout and uttered the immortal "no mas" - 'no more'.

Think of how Paula Radcliffe, maybe the bravest and most determined athlete it's been my privilege to see, was slaughtered for pulling out of the Olympic marathon in Athens when gold was clearly lost. Think of how Niki Lauda quit in the Grand Prix which was going to decide the 1976 Formula One championship because he thought the track was too wet.

It didn't matter that the machismo of Duran had been punctured beyond endurance by Leonard's taunting. Nor did it matter that the British team doctor believed Radcliffe could have died from her exertions if she'd kept pushing. And so what if Lauda had only a couple of months returned to racing after being given the last rites after his nightmarish Nurburgring crash?

No, to their blind critics, only one thing mattered. They had started so they had to finish. Anything less was betrayal to themselves and their sport.

Yet at least Duran had been worn down by a physical pummelling, Radcliffe by illness and exhaustion and Lauda by psychological scars. So what was Lyle's excuse for trudging off the course after 10 holes? That he went into "total meltdown"? Ah yes, that would be the meltdown that comes on a horrid day when you're wet through and cheesed off at averaging a bogey per hole.

It's a decision which he may find harder than he thinks to live down. Golf is remarkably proud and protective of its ethics and standards. Some things are simply not done, old chap, and even if the Scot had flounced off like this during a monthly medal, he could have been sent to a new club. In Coventry.

Only this was different. This was golf's greatest tournament, to which practically every player - with the exception of stay-at-home Yank Kenny Perry, naturally - should want to kill to be part of. Lyle, as a former champ with an exemption to play, would know that better than anyone.

Even if he'd fibbed that he'd been beaten by injury, it might have been a wee bit more pardonable than to just openly declare he had "chucked it" because "once you get beyond that point of being able to make 75 or 76 it was senseless to carry on". What? In the first round, 64 players in the 156-man field shot 77 or more. Some tournament it would have been if they'd all done the same as Lyle and the other refusenik, American Rich Beem.

It's why many of those who'd flocked to watch their golfing heroes at close quarters - braving miserable conditions - were entitled to proclaim, as one unhappy blogger told the BBC: "Stuff the spectators paying £55 each ... hang your head in shame, Lyle".

The alarming thing was that he wasn't the only one to do a runner. Beem, the 2002 US PGA champion, made an equally swift departure after covering the first nine holes in 12-over and offering no official explanation why, despite suggestions that he had suffered a finger injury.

Peter Dawson, the R&A's chief executive, called it "disappointing" and noted: "If we all stopped work when things got a bit tough, we would never get anything done." Yet it was a tame scolding of a man who offered no public apology even though he has previous. He was disqualified on this very course after the second round in 1991 because, having missed the cut, he couldn't be bothered to finish the hole after shooting out of bounds.

Doubtless, there will be many who will argue on Lyle's behalf, saying it's fair enough that a 50-year-old seen-it-all pro should pull out of an event which, as he claimed, might have taken him "three weeks to recover from".

Indeed, Simon Dyson chipped in: "Don't blame him one bit".

That's the easy line, the thought that a champion of Lyle's stature can be forgiven anything and, anyway, it wasn't a big deal because he's only a ceremonial player in the Majors these days. And how could we accuse a man who played with such grace under pressure to win the Masters two decades ago, with that seven-iron from the bunker at the last, of lacking moral fibre?

But ultimately, it wasn't about courage or being a quitter. It was more about lack of respect for the value of the Championship which made him a star back at St George's in 1985. So when Dawson dismissed the idea of any punishment, it's a pity he didn't tell an old champion that seeing that he clearly wasn't bothered about battling for The Open any more, then perhaps The Open ought not to bother with him either.

Don't think that Lyle won't suffer a form of punishment, though. Maybe it will be from the blazers who think this is not the sort of thing they want from a prospective Ryder Cup captain. More likely, though, it will just be the note of sad disillusion from a fan club which could never have believed their good guy would behave like this.