Poor Adam Scott. He surely cannot know the curse he has called down upon himself by turning his back on the Olympics.

Minimally, Scott should expect a fate worse than befell him at Royal Lytham in 2012, worse than Jordan Spieth at this year's Masters, worse than Jean van de Velde at Carnoustie in 1999, worse even than Greg Norman's many calamitous end of days. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that at Troon in July, Scott will be swallowed up a greenside bunker at the Postage Stamp and never be seen again, leaving behind only a charred tee peg and a strangled cry of "fore", dying on the wind.

Everyone knows that the Olympics are The Most Important Thing On Earth, and have been ever since Moses came down from Mount Olympus bearing those five golden rings all those millennia ago. Everyone knows that no sportsman or woman in any endeavour can have any loftier ambition than to win glistering Olympic gold. Everyone knows that this sacred Olympic ideal is held at and fiercely and jealously guarded by an imperial court of grandees and potentates who claim lineage back to Zeus himself, whose power transcends all others, and who are quite fond of a bit of high-glister gold themselves, incidentally.

And still this insolent Scott, this heretic, this infidel, claims never to have dreamed of competing at the Olympics, instead dwelling all his miserable lifetime on lesser baubles called majors; have you ever heard anything so coarse? You could hear the coughing and the spluttering clear across Amen corner.

Never mind that golf has just been readmitted to the Games after a 112-year hiatus in which hardly anyone gave it a second thought, chiefly because everyone also was fixated on the majors and thought them plenty prize enough for golfers and were happy to leave the Olympics to those for whom the Olympics really were nirvana. A quick purge and a long stretch of "re-education" will fix that. Young Scott will soon see.

But what's this? Another schismatic? Louis Oosthuizen's not off to pay homage to the Rio gods, either. He also is concentrating on this frivolous British Open frippery. Well, what can you expect of South Africans, remembering how they struggled to find anyone both genitally unambiguous and with a full set of limbs to run for them in London? But here also is that outcast Vijay Singh, sending his Brazil apologies, as if the Games were take or leave? Really, this is intolerable behaviour, major.

Australians are especially potentate-ious and and grandee-ful and readily bow and tug forelock to anyone who once got up and down an Olympic pool a couple of times, or pottered about in an Olympic rowboat, or toddled around an Olympic 400-metre track, and will see this mutinous uprising for the putrid thing that it is. It's time for the Anzac spirit to rise again (but only after our day off).

Egad, it may be too late. It doesn't seem to matter out there that Our Dawnie worked three jobs a week to get to the Olympics and all she got for it was that silly flag, and had to climb a flagpole in the middle of the night to get it anyway, and is a bit urinated off that Scott has put his country on hold, as she tells it. I mean, how un-Australian. But others seem to want to concentrate on the fact that Scott represents his country with impeccable good grace and no little skill every week, as if that matters, and in the moment of his greatest triumph, at the Masters three years ago, let forth this exclamation: "C'mon Aussie." Loser!

Next, we'll have people wondering what tennis is doing at the Olympics, since it also has four much-coveted and hugely popular majors, and only a small minority of players care about Olympic tennis and no one can for the life of them remember who has won tennis medals the way they remember Wimbledon winners, although you have to presume Serena has and something sticks in the odd spot of memory about Nicolas Massu, and all the while tennis is draining Olympic resources and keeping squash, for instance, out of the Games.

People will wonder why soccer is an Olympic sport, since it is an under-age event, except for the over-age players, and few of the major soccer countries bother to try to win it, and Cameroons won the gold once won and didn't even enter a team the next time, and that World Cup thing seems to work quite well in its own way.

They'll wonder about basketball as an Olympic event, since it exists mostly for the US to take the mickey out of the rest of the world, since it was not always so that the US team deigned to stay among mere athletes, seeing themselves as in the first rank of potentates and grandees, which rather offends the Olympic ideal, and in any case Olympic basketball does not matter to followers or fans nearly as much as the NBA.

Hell, people might even wonder if the whole Most Important Thing On Earth has become a bit too important, and a bit too big, and a bit too costly, and a bit too unmanageable and only a bit noble and not at all godly, and then the potentates and grandees will have no choice but to act and suddenly the treasonable Adam Scott will be as sorry as Johnny Depp. Or sorrier.