You learn more about a person in adversity than you do in victory. If that is true then Colin Montgomerie revealed himself to be a man of courage and dignity at the conclusion of his second round in the US PGA Championship.

Montgomerie had spent five hours on a golf course he described as the most difficult he had ever played and almost every step he took was painful, not the pain caused by an injury, but to his pride. He wasn't just playing poorly; he was playing really badly and every weakness that could be exposed in his game was.

He came up the 18th with his head bowed. Jim Furyk, one of his playing partners, was also having a bad day and Aaron Baddeley, who was playing well, must have wondered what was going on. Above Montgomerie as he approached the green was a scoreboard and that was the reason why he was looking so depressed and downhearted.

It gave out the sombre news that Montgomerie was 20 over par for his 35 holes of this championship. When he holed for a par on the 18th, his 84, 14 over par, equalled his highest score in a major championship. It was 17 strokes more than the best score of the day, 67s by Ben Curtis, the 2003 Open champion, and Justin Rose, the winner of the 2007 Order of Merit, and he was 21 strokes behind JB Holmes, the 36-hole leader.

To his credit Montgomerie, 45, did not try and dodge the questioning reporters. He did not look very happy but he stopped and talked to them. "I had a bad start and kept it going" he said, attempting some humour. "The set up is as difficult as any I have ever played. It is the most difficult I have ever known. The US Open [last June] was the best set up for the major championships in 2008. The US Open had it right. When you score what I scored then most of it was horrifying.

"All in all that was the most difficult day I have spent on a golf course since Muirfield in the Open of 2002. I was not conscious of much of what was going on out there. I couldn't have been."

Montgomerie's failure to reach the last two days of the last of the four major championships has ended any chance of his getting into the Europe Ryder Cup team at Valhalla, Louisville, Kentucky, next month. He has no chance of being selected by Nick Faldo, the captain, and even were he to win the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles, the last qualifying event, then he still would not have earned enough points.

So what we saw on a sunlit evening in Michigan was the end of a distinguished Ryder Cup playing career, the end of eight successive appearances during which he has won six and halved two of his singles, the end of an era during which he has been a right royal nuisance to the Americans in this biennial competition. Montgomerie's Ryder Cup record is one to be proud of. As is winning the Order of Merit in Europe eight times in all, seven in a row starting in 1993 and the eighth coming in 2005. His only involvement in the Ryder Cup from now on will be when he captains Europe in a forthcoming match, as he surely will.

The end of his time as a force in the Ryder Cup had to come at some time and when it did he handled it with some dignity. He stood in front of an oak tree a few yards away from the 18th green of the course that had treated him so brutally and he spoke quietly and with some dignity. Not everything in his career has become him but this did.