The Presidents Cup Has Proved to Be No Contest Stuart Franklin/Getty Images This year's International team has four players from South Africa, including the tournament veteran Ernie Els, above in 2003. Nineteen years after it began, the Presidents Cup remains Ryder Cup Light, as in light on rancor and, more regrettably, light on suspense. In the nine previous editions, the International team has beaten the United States only once, and that was in 1998 at Royal Melbourne. It is telling that the most memorable duel was probably the one that ended in a 17-17 tie in the encroaching darkness in South Africa in 2003, when the captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player decided that Tiger Woods and Ernie Els had played and seen (or not seen) enough. Since then, the Americans have had four victories in a row with the smallest margin being 3 points. Compare that with the Ryder Cup, the other biennial men's team event involving the United States, which the Europeans have dominated in terms of victories in recent years but which has been a magnet for final-day thrills and reversals of fortune. Greg Norman did his outspoken best to add a bit of edge to the Presidents Cup in his two terms as the International captain in 2009 and 2011: trying to instill a sense of collective urgency in his heterogeneous 12-man team and, in 2011, expressing his belief that Woods was past his peak years and a dubious captain's pick. But Norman, who often faltered under major pressure, came in second as a captain, too, as the Americans extended their lead in the series to 7-1-1. "I've played on five teams; I'm tired of getting beaten," Adam Scott, Norman's Australian compatriot, said earlier this year. Scott, the leading man in the international squad and the reigning Masters champion, says the cup is in need of a shift in momentum. "I think the cup loses any credibility whatsoever if they don't start winning soon," Scott said of the International team last month in Akron, Ohio: just a two-hour, intrastate drive from Muirfield Village, the site of this year's cup in Dublin starting Thursday. The Internationals" struggles are in contrast with the rise of golf globally: the emergence of new, young talent from Asia, Australia and South Africa. This year's team features golfers from six countries with four players from South Africa (Charl Schwartzel, Louis Oosthuizen, Ernie Els and Branden Grace) and three from Australia (Scott, Jason Day and the rookie and captain's pick Marc Leishman). Scott, Els, Schwartzel, Oosthuizen and Ángel Cabrera of Argentina have won major tournaments, but the Americans have Woods, Phil Mickelson and four other men who have won majors: Jason Dufner, Keegan Bradley, Zach Johnson and Webb Simpson. At one stage in September, all 12 of the Americans on the team were in the top 30 of the world rankings. That is strength in numbers the Internationals simply cannot match. The Europeans, of course, have been lower in the rankings, too, and still managed to trump the Americans in the Ryder Cup, but the Europeans long took strength from the unity they developed from playing on the same tour together and from the fact that the core of the team was British and English speaking. The bonds to the European tour have frayed in recent years with that tour's relative decline and the exodus of leading Europeans to the PGA Tour, but the close personal bonds and winning habit have remained. The Internationals are still working on their collective identity, and it probably does not help that Scott, Day, Schwartzel and Els are the only four holdovers from the 2011 team and that the 2013 team will include seven rookies, including both of Nick Price's captain's picks: Leishman and Brendon de Jonge of Zimbabwe. "I think it's just as important for each team to come together as a team, regardless of which team," said the Australian Geoff Ogilvy, who was part of the 2011 Presidents Cup but did not qualify this year. But I think it's probably slightly easier for the American guys, one, because they do it more often, and two, because they're starting out all as one country. We end up one country for sure as soon as we get to the tournament. We just become that International team, and we are all part of the same team for sure. But it probably takes more for us, more of a leap for us to become that way than the Americans. The Americans also seem to approach the Presidents Cup as a lower-impact respite from the crucible of the Ryder Cup. Their laid-back captain, Fred Couples, only reinforces the mood swing. Couples is in his third straight cycle as head of the American team, one fewer than Jack Nicklaus, one of the driving forces behind this event.