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Tiger Woods hasn't played in the Ryder Cup since 2006.

NEWPORT, Wales - Stewart Cink will be a veteran for the United States team at the 2010 Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor, which begins Friday. But he still remembers when he was a wide-eyed rookie, as five of his teammates will be this week. His Ryder baptism came at The Belfry in Sutton Coldfield, England, in 2002.

Cink had qualified for the 2001 Ryder Cup team, which ended up being the '02 team because of Sept. 11, which meant he had a year to think about playing golf on the game's biggest stage. If that weren't enough, Cink began to fight the yips during the 2002 season. When the Ryder Cup finally arrived, Cink was paired with Jim Furyk for a Friday alternate-shot match against Padraig Harrington and Paul McGinley. Furyk teed off on the first hole, meaning Cink would commence his Ryder Cup career with a short-iron approach into the green.

That seemed easy enough, in theory.

"My first shot was an 8-iron from perfect 8-iron yardage out of the first cut," Cink said. "Had a nice little cushion under the ball. It was as easy a shot as you could imagine, and I got behind the ball and took my line and everything, and had to ask myself: What's my pre-shot routine again? I forgot what to do. I forgot."

So it goes in this biennial, 12-on-12 team competition between Europe and the United States that is widely considered the most nerve-racking event in golf — especially for those who have never played in it.

At the 7,352-yard, par-71 Twenty Ten Course at Celtic Manor, there will be 11 such players — six rookies for Europe, five for Team USA. How they will react under the most extreme pressure in the game is perhaps the biggest uncertainty in an event that has traditionally been almost impossible to predict.

Going into the 2008 Ryder Cup at Valhalla in Louisville, Ky., the Americans had gone 1-5 from 1995 through '06, but the U.S. won decisively, 16 ½ to 11 ½.

At the 1997 matches at Valderrama, in Sotogrande, Spain, transcendent Ryder rookie Tiger Woods lost his singles match, 4 and 2, to the jovial Costantino Rocca.

The 38th Ryder Cup is also sure to bring surprises big and small.

Europe is the betting favorite to win back the Cup because it has a vastly deeper roster of quality players. Captain Colin Montgomerie had such a wealth of options in making his team that he left off world No. 8 Paul Casey and fellow Brit Justin Rose, a two-time winner on the PGA Tour this year.

American captain Corey Pavin would gladly take either of them. Pavin had too few hot players to choose from, and with his fourth captain's pick took a flier on 21-year-old Rickie Fowler. Like American Jeff Overton, who qualified for the U.S. team on points, Fowler has yet to win his first tournament on Tour. They are the first two winless players to make a U.S. Ryder Cup team.

Still, not everyone agrees that the visiting Americans are undermanned.

"Unfortunately, Ryder Cup is not played on paper," Montgomerie said. "These matches are very, very close; remembering that even in our record (18 ½-9 1/2) win in the States in Detroit in 2004, 11 matches went up to the last hole, seven of which Europe one; two halved. Now, if these matches were the other way around, the result would have been different, very, very different. We would have lost."

Pavin's team, which will be trying to win the Cup on European soil for the first time since 1993, boasts four of the top five players in the world. U.S. Ryder Cup players won three of the four FedEx Cup playoff events, most significantly Jim Furyk's triumph at the Tour Championship, which was good enough to win the FedEx Cup playoffs and the accompanying $10 million bonus.

Furyk does not have a stellar Ryder record at 8-13-3, but if he plays rainy Celtic Manor as well as he did rainy East Lake, he'll be one of the stars for the U.S.

Phil Mickelson is among those who believe the PGA Tour's newly designed end-game, a playoff series that keeps the top players active leading up to the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup, has helped the top Americans stay sharp in the run-up to the yearly team events. It's hard to fault the results. Since the FedEx Cup began in 2007, U.S. teams have won the '07 and '09 Presidents Cups and the '08 Ryder Cup.

"I think that [FedEx Cup] did help them in Valhalla, definitely," Montgomerie said. "To play golf and to play golf so well as they did — we'll have to see if it's the same when they have to travel abroad the way they have done."

In other words, has the tide really turned, or was 2008 an aberration?

Both sides go into this week with other big questions. Two of Europe's best Ryder Cup players in Wales won't be hitting any shots. Montgomerie has won 20 matches, tied for third-best all time in Europe, while Sergio Garcia, who will be one of Monty's assistants while taking a sabbatical amid a frustrating slump, has won 14.