Wooooo! All the ills of a mighty nation are expressed in a single high-pitched syllable. Wooooo! Not a bass roar of triumph but a mezzo-soprano whoop of derision. Not triumph but triumphalism; not celebration but gloating; not humble gratitude but gleeful disrespect.

We will hear it a lot on the golf course of Valhalla over the next three days as sport's most bizarre competition, the Ryder Cup, unfolds in Kentucky. The United States of America take on the disunited states of Europe. Missed putt? Wooooo! Sliced drive? Wooooo! Ball in the water? Wooooo-ooooo!

The gulf between the US's jingoistic support and golf's tradition of decorum creates an extraordinary tension. The Americans find themselves still (a) apologising for and (b) going into denial about various breaches, not only of golfing etiquette but of acceptably civilised behaviour.

The fact is that the Americans are horribly uncomfortable with the Ryder Cup. In the past three events, all of which they have lost, they have sought comfort by simply not caring about the result; well, if these Europeans want it so badly, they can have it.

In this they took the lead from Tiger Woods, whose “happy as a wet cat” demeanour when on Ryder Cup duty has created a glorious montage of negative body language. There is a deep and terrible confusion that runs through the players: they are all proudly and publicly patriotic Americans, but they just don't get the team thing.

But there is another, still deeper, problem and it affects all American sports. It is tempting to say that it is one of the problems with America, they don't get international sport. They don't get it because they don't do it. The Ryder Cup is the only regular international sporting fixture that has any meaning for most of America.

America is an island culture and its sporting culture expresses its insular nature. Sure, we live in an American world. American “food” dominates the high streets of the world, American “culture” dominates the television and the cinemas. But America doesn't import. It is a selling nation, not a buying one. It is not receptive to outside influences. And in sport, America is the nation that plays with itself.

Hell, if you let other nations in, you may lose, and then where would you be? In 1903, baseball called its seasonal decider the World's Championship Series. Well, anyone can be a world champion in a sport that no one else does.

At the time, the only professional baseball teams were in the US and Canada. That is no longer the case, but the autumnal seven-game decider is still the World Series. Well, the winners of the World Series would certainly clobber any pro team from Japan or Latin America, so what's your problem?

Football is the world's game, America's game is American football. It is a home-grown product and the winners of the Super Bowl will routinely refer to themselves as champions of the world. That's because the world is America, right?

Basketball is an American sport that really has gone round the world. It is played, and played well, in many countries. But when the best American players slouch out of the National Basketball Association (NBA) to play in the Olympic Games, the results are pretty one-sided, as one crushing victory follows another.

The US won a mere bronze in Athens in 2004, prompting some rethinking. It is interesting to speculate about the effect that this will have on the national psyche, but so far the reaction has been simple enough: it's the domestic games of the NBA that matter. The local product has infinitely greater significance than the global one.

True, the US plays “sah-kurr”. The national team have qualified (albeit once as the host nation) for the World Cup finals in the past five competitions, better than England, and, like England, they reached the quarter-finals in 2002. However, the American media didn't make as much fuss about this as its English counterparts.

Sah-kurr doesn't count. It's a game for kids and girls and Mexicans. Defeat at sah-kurr causes no national pain, victory no national rejoicing. It's not a heartland game. If it was, and the US were regularly defeated, what would that do to the hearts and minds of the American people? What would it do to American foreign policy?

Say Americans had continued to play cricket and regularly found themselves playing 11 against 11 in the real sporting world. How would they have fared against the four-man pace attack of the West Indies team of the 1980s? Would they, too, have been humiliated? Would they, too, have been forced to admit that other people and other nations were better than them in something that really mattered?

What if the US had stuck to rugby, rather than inventing its own domestic variant? How would a serious US rugby team - a sport in which you have to tackle without a hat on - have coped if they had been defeated by the great England team of 2002-03?

The England football team suffered a devastating defeat by Hungary in 1953, one that changed the way the nation saw itself. The people were forced to come to terms with the fact that Britain was no longer a power whose very name could make the world shudder.

(Oddly enough, an early intimation of this decline came in the World Cup finals of 1950, when the England football team were beaten by the US; this mattered more to England than it did to the US.) So how would the US respond to a similar trauma - if, say, at the height of the Cold War or at the time of the invasion of Iraq, the nation was undone in its pride by the Brazil football team, the Australia cricket team, the All Blacks? We shall never know.

Instead, American teams continued to win the World Series, save for 1992 and 1993 when the Toronto Blue Jays (honorary Americans, just as Scots become British in times of victory) did so. American teams have somehow managed to win every Super Bowl and every NBA finals series. In competitions without foreign teams, the US have an impressive record.

But every two years, the US does play international sport in something that matters. Woods is a symbol of the greatness of America (and American Express), so how come he's not beating the Europeans all over the course?

The resilience that you need in the rough and tumble of international sport is a foreign notion in America, to the players and to the public alike. Americans don't have the experience of the ups and downs, the good days and the bad days, the rapid transitions from national hero to national villain and back again. They simply don't understand that sometimes a team from another country play better than you and that all you can do is take it.

So the atmosphere at Valhalla will be hideous with whoops. If the US get on top, the place will be incontinent with bad vibes.

Much was made last month of China opening up to the world at the Olympic Games. But the hidden, the self-enclosed, the all-repelling sporting life of the US is still more secretive, still more hermetic.

America comes out before the sporting world only once every two years and simply doesn't know what to do or how to behave. Wooooo!