LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- It all depends on your personality, really.

Is the American glass half-empty or half-full?

At age 41, world No. 8 Steve Stricker finds himself a Ryder Cup rookie. (AP)

Be thee an optimist or pessimist, the Yanks have mostly been getting their glass kicked for two decades, and an infusion of new blood might be what the sons of Uncle Sam need to stop the European onslaught this weekend at Valhalla Golf Club.

Considering the massacres experienced in the past two meetings, which resulted in record-setting defeats for the American side, sending a few vessel virgins into the Cup, so to speak, might be the best plan in years.

As Phil Mickelson effectively put it, if all you've ever done is fall off the horse, maybe it's time to get some new cowboys.

"Not being a part of the last few U.S. teams is not necessarily a bad thing," smirked Mickelson, the senior veteran on the American roster with six appearances. "The guys who haven't played, they have never lost this event."

You want unbridled optimism? Six of the Americans are undefeated. You know, sort of like the Pepperdine football team.

It has been nearly three decades since the U.S. roster featured more raw meat. In 1979, the Americans sent eight first-timers into the mix, a list that included Fuzzy Zoeller, Larry Nelson, John Mahaffey and Tom Kite, who all won major championships in their careers. The others were Gil Morgan, Andy Bean, Lee Elder and Mark Hayes, who all had exceptional careers.

There might be some diamonds in the rough -- preferably the fairway -- in this group, too. Today's raw rookie could prove to be the next match-play god akin to Sergio Garcia, except in red, white and blue.

"In my view, experience of Ryder Cup is a massive asset," European veteran Lee Westwood said. "But at the same time, there might be a rookie on the American team that's just made for the Ryder Cup, really raises his game for that situation. We've yet to find out."

Besides, maybe we've been looking at this sideways. Maybe the rookies can spur the U.S. veterans to some points. The American regulars, in the parlance of the locals, ain't exactly lit it up. The six Yanks players with Ryder experience have combined to win an almost unfathomable 19 of their 73 matches, a brutal conversion clip. As for Tiger Woods, who isn't here, he's 10-13-2 in his Ryder outings.

And just because the U.S. has been characterized as underdogs doesn't mean the new puppies can't hunt, right?

"You don't know what you've got until you get out there and play with it," said ever-colorful Boo Weekley, a Ryder rookie at age 35. "It's like getting a new pack of hounds and going deer hunting. You don't know what kind of dogs you've got until you run them, so let's run them and we'll see."

Truth be told, puppies they are not. Ryder rookie has a nice alliterative ring, but first-timers is a more accurate term.

"These rookies, and I use that term loosely, I don't know how much mentoring they need," U.S. veteran Stewart Cink said. "These guys have all withstood a lot already to get here. I think being a first-time Ryder Cupper in 2008 is maybe quite a bit different than it was in the '80s or the '70s, because there are so many big tournaments around the world and it's such a world stage anymore.

"Golf is scrutinized more than ever before, and the Ryder Cup is just another event in which you have to really perform well."

The least-experienced players among Azinger's apprentices, Anthony Kim, 23, and J.B. Holmes, 26, have three years of PGA Tour experience. Each has two victories in that span, which doesn't include Holmes' runaway victory at Qualifying School three years ago. Hunter Mahan, 26, has been on tour for five years and played on a Presidents Cup team last summer, where he hit the pressure-packed opening tee ball. Kim and Holmes both had winning records playing in the Walker Cup -- the Ryder Cup event for amateur players -- three years ago.

The other three newbies are 31 or older, including 41-year-old Steve Stricker, who is ranked No. 8 in the world rankings.

"I think that all the rookies that are here, we know how to play," said Weekley, a two-time tour winner. "It's just a new tournament, and we're all here to represent our country and we're going to play the best that we can play and go out there and win. I mean, that's all we want to do, bring it back to the States."

For those with amnesia, the U.S. has lost five of the past six meetings, despite a perceived advantage in firepower. But what has it mean when the cannons fire blanks?

There's been plenty of speculation this week about the possible impact of Tiger Woods' absence, and rightly so. But here's an angle that has largely gone unexplored -- for six rookies on the team, they don't know the difference. They never played in the Ryder with Woods, so if anybody was looking to the world No. 1 for leadership, half the U.S. roster will be gazing elsewhere. Quite possibly, inwardly.

"I don't even know about the past and about the U.S. getting off to a slow start," Kim said. "This is a brand-new team. Like you said, we've got six rookies. We're going to go out there, not worry about if a guy is hitting a draw or a fade. The only goal is to get the ball in the hole faster than the other guys, and I think we've got a pretty good shot at doing that."

No question, at its core, it mostly is a matter of guys playing well with 14 clubs and a ball.

"It's just you against the two guys or the one guy you've got in front of you, and I think that's so neat," Mahan said. "You don't have to worry about the field, you don't have to worry about each hole and playing one shot at a time. I mean, you can just play one hole at a time and just play aggressively and just have fun at it."

Simple, right? But match play is a different animal, the pressure of playing for your country is a teeth-gnashing experience, and having teammates in professional golf is a rare occurrence. So the first-timers will need to make adjustments on the fly.

Pairings could be a dicey proposition. U.S. captain Paul Azinger has repeatedly insisted that he isn't afraid to pair two rookies in the alternate shot or best-ball contests, and with six of them, he probably doesn't have much choice. The first wave of play on Friday morning is alternate shot, where it's often hard for players to find a rhythm.

"It may be a bit more difficult for them, the rookies this time, this Ryder Cup, because it's foursomes, the first part," Westwood said. "If you don't get into foursomes early, it's very difficult to get any kind of form of momentum."

Whatever the format out of the chute, the U.S. has been massacred on Friday morning for years. The last time the Americans had an advantage after the four morning matches on Friday was in 1991. With six freshmen, if you will, that's a daunting notion. In other words, somebody on each team has to hit the opening shot, and it could very well be a rookie. Four years ago at the Ryder matches in Detroit, the team of Jay Haas and Chris DiMarco had settled on their plan for the first tee. By the time they arrived, rookie DiMarco was burping up his lunch and he begged Hass to handle the chore.

How the rookies this year -- Europe has four of them, too -- will react is anybody's guess. Westwood, one of the European horses over the years, vividly recalls his rites of initiation in 1997. Wisely, the European team actually met on the first tee en masse this week to discuss the opening shot in great detail.

"It was very much do as I say, not as I do, because I could not get the ball on the tee in Valderrama in '97," Westwood cracked. "It's quite funny watching it now (in replays). I look quite calm and collected and almost look like I know what I'm doing, and my hands were shaking and my eyes glazed over a little bit and it was obviously a completely different experience to what I had been used to."

It can be an eye-opening baptism, even for players who eventually have become the most decorated stars in the game.

"Your first shot, you know, in the Ryder Cup, it's not like your 72nd hole of a tournament that you're playing well in and you're coming down the last hole because you've played well to be in that position," said three-time major winner Padraig Harrington. "You have a reasonable idea of what's been happening.

"(At the Ryder) you're kind of like, 'Yeah, I've done my work, I'm doing OK, but you're not quite sure what's happening.' " Heck, Weekley said he gags every week from nerves, so he won't know the difference.

"People don't understand -- I look the same, but every week I feel like I want to run off the side of the tee box and puke," he said.

This week, with 10 rookies dotting the two rosters, it might actually happen. Weekley laughed, but did not dismiss that possibility.

"You never know what can happen," he said. "I might shank it, top it. You don't ever know what's going to happen. It's golf. That's what makes this game the greatest game there is to play."

And makes the Ryder one of the greatest events.