Is this the end of civilised sport as we know it?

Should we be worried? True, apart from the ticketing and seating arrangements, little really distinguishes the courts at Flushing Meadows from any town centre on a Saturday night. But we’ve known this for a long while. As The Onion, America’s leading satirical news source, pointed out just the other day, it’s been 35 years now since spectators at the US Open were barred from operating leaf blowers in the stands.

New York has long been a place where tennis is assumed to be a ­spectacle that life doesn’t need to sit in quiet awe of or even really pause for – a reasonable and healthy attitude, you could argue. It’s only a game, and all that.

But then there was the viral furore over the millionaire CEO “snatching” a player’s cap “from the hands” of a child. That did feel dark, at first sight. Two things here, though: first who knew that match-worn Kamil Majchrzak clothing items were hot? Making a note to check my attic.

Secondly, we’d have to concede that, certainly in baseball, undignified squabbling over stray mementoes between people who ought to know better is as old as America itself. There’s a highlights reel on YouTube specifically devoted to “sports fans stealing balls from kids” – a veritable video flip book of adults tearing memorabilia from their tiny, defenceless hands.

It lasts more than three and a half minutes, was posted seven years ago and ranges right across the 21st century.

Again, then, nothing new here ... except maybe a growing sense of this stuff catching on and affecting the conduct of the game itself.

“The crowds are kind of crazy,” Jessica Pegula, the American fourth seed said this week. “They kind of get everyone riled up.” Some claim to have detected a newly intemperate mood in 2025: net cords unashamedly unacknowledged, body shots struck with fresh abandon, sneaky underarm serves gleefully adopted even against impaired opponents, “animated discussions” between players after matches.

To that extent, it does seem ­legitimate to wonder whether ­tennis as we know it is really safe in America any more, if it ever has been, or whether a certain amount of ­obligatory ­degradation and a lingering sense of nastiness are, under the current administration, simply the tariff that sport has to pay these days in order to get through customs.

Ditto golf, maybe. Luke Donald, announcing his European team for this month’s Ryder Cup, was already anticipating “a bear pit” – again, a familiar metaphor in this context, if never quite the right one. With bear pits, the dangerous item was ­traditionally the thing being looked down on by the gathered crowd, i.e. the bear.

At Ryder Cups, the menace tends to be coming from the people looking on. I’m no expert on military manoeuvres but I believe the term we’re looking for here is “a bear pincer movement”.

Anyway, Trump, it seems, will be in attendance at the Ryder Cup on day one, and maybe his presence on and around the greens will have a calming effect.

Or maybe it will be like all the other times at the Ryder Cup in the US, except just a little bit more extreme and a little bit more worrying, and a little bit more likely to infect the players, in keeping with our sense of things in these gradually coarsening times. You guess.

Meanwhile, those of us who love football and regard it as the increasingly isolated bastion of proportionate behaviour, by its participants and its spectators alike, can only note with anxiety where the lion’s share of next summer’s World Cup is set to take place.

Is it too late to do anything about that? We lost golf to America ages ago. We’re apparently losing tennis. We draw the line at losing football because after that there will be literally nothing left of civilised sport.

Feature image: Eurosport