I LIKE warm beer and hairy-legged women. I drive a car so small, you could park it in the glove compartment of a Hummer. I enjoy funny brown cigarettes in the loo.

That’s because, as of now, I am officially a European.

I have turned European because I’m bloody sick of the US getting the haggis stomped out of it by the Europeans in these Ryder Cup golf matches.

Every two years the Euros dye their hair and smoke their cigars and get drunk and wave their blue Euro flags and beat us like Dickens’s orphans, then sing songs shoulder-to-shoulder and laugh and dance on the clubhouse roof and wave their private parts in our general direction.

No more. I’m a Euro now. Changed my passport and everything. I like real football now, not fat guys in helmets. I no longer see the point in regular dental check-ups. I tan by 40-watt bulbs. I eat tatties and neeps in my flat and see what’s on the telly. Ooh, brilliant! It’s Mr Bean!

I’d been considering turning Euro for a few years now, but on Monday, when the American team was announced for next month’s Ryder Cup at the K Club in Ireland, it ripped me knittin’, as we say down at the pub.

Have you seen the US team? It has all the intimidation power of the Liechtenstein navy. It would have a hard time beating the Winnetka Country Club ladies’ B team. It’s the single worst squad we’ve ever taken to a Ryder Cup, and that’s saying something, considering the last batch got pummelled 18½-9½.

“We’ll definitely be the underdog,” Phil Mickelson says. “You lose four of the last five Cups, you’re the underdog.”

This outfit would be the underdog to a stiff breeze. Or do Brett Wetterich, Zach Johnson, J.J. Henry and Vaughn Taylor make your timbers shiver? It sounds like somebody’s Webelos troop. None of those four have ever played in a Ryder Cup before. Three of them missed the cut at last week’s US PGA Championship, and Henry finished 41st.

Wetterich has missed five cuts in his last eight starts. You look at him and think, was he my waiter at Olive Garden last night? If he wasn’t, he will be soon.

Won’t Tiger be psyched to be paired with him?

That’s the other thing: Tiger. He’s the No 1 player in the world by a light year, the Golfing Gladiator. Until he goes to Ryder Cups, and then he suddenly becomes Dead Man Walking.

He mopes around like a husband in couples therapy, only he talks to his partner less. It may be the only thing he sucks at. His Ryder Cup record is 7-11-2, and no wonder. He wasn’t wired for team play. He trusts nobody.

Why should he buddy up with people he’s been trained to swallow in two bites or less? The hangman doesn’t play on the prison softball team. Lions don’t room with lambs.

Yet every two years all the US players seem to take their Stepford cue from Woods. They all play as though they have to put their shirts back in the boxes when they’re done. Of the 12 guys on this year’s team, nine have a losing Ryder Cup record or no record at all. You know who’s got a great Ryder Cup record on the US team? Tom Lehman (5-3-2), Corey Pavin (8-5) and Loren Roberts (3-1). Only problem is, they’re the coaches!

This thing needs a readjust. We’ve lost seven of the last 10. Can’t they at least give us Canada?

Only eight players on the American team are in the top 50 in the world. The Euros have 10, and they’ve still got two captain’s picks left. They have the same group of partyers that has been popping US corks for 10 years now: Olazábal, García, Harrington, probably Westwood and Clarke. Nothing changes every two years except the site of the execution.

They’ll outplay us and outguzzle us and outwhoop us, and at the end, while the American players are slinking back to their jets, the Euros will be swan diving off the TV tower into a swimming pool full of Guinness.

And I’ll be there with me straw. I’m with them now. I’ve joined the champagne-swilling side.

I’m more European than pay toilets. I wear knee-socks with sandals and drink Beaujolais at 10am and never read a newspaper that doesn’t have a naked girl in it. And if you don’t like it, you can bugger off.

Wait. Excuse me? You say all true Euros love Monty?

(Pause.)

OK, forget the whole thing.

• Rick Reilly has been voted US National Sportswriter of the Year ten times.