As the virulent criticism of American attitudes expressed through these pages last Sunday by Paul Casey continued to generate headlines several days later, with players assembled for the golf World Cup in Seville offering reactions that fuelled the controversy, I had to agree with those who suggested that Casey might have been more frank than sensible. Coming from a resident of Arizona who expects to earn money on the US Tour, his harsh words seemed to be a verbal equivalent of booby-trapping his own house. Yet there can be no argument over his claims that the inhabitants of the great nation I have considered a vital part of my life for 40 years can be stunningly, infuriatingly insular.

My most treasured example was provided in the backstretch barn area at Belmont Park racetrack in New York 20-odd years ago by a 5ft 7in, 18st trainer called John Campo. Becoming a brilliant handler of thoroughbreds (winner of the 1981 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes with Pleasant Colony) had not taken the harshness of his city streets boyhood out of Campo’s conversational style. But it was his merciless insistence that in racing only America counted, his dismissal of every European horseman as a fraud, that made our meeting unforgettable.

I tried to halt his derogatory bombardment by mentioning Vincent O’Brien, my idea of the greatest trainer who ever lived. “He wouldn’t win three races a year with the kinda crows I got out in most of the stalls in that barn,” said Campo. “I tell ya, you got some bullshit guys in Europe. I got two horses back from them clowns over there. One had a pulled stifle and they didn’t know it. The other couldn’t run worth three dollars. Give those characters some of these crows that can’t walk, let them try to train these things.”

John Campo was the Godfather of American insularity.