Ahead of the 45th Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, there is trepidation and excitement about what kind of atmosphere we can expect.
The most eye-catching story of the build-up was the disclosure that the European players have been practising with the 'aid' of VR headsets, which are being programmed to simulate the crowd abuse they expect to be coming their way in New York.
It's the latest piece of preparatory ingenuity from the ever resourceful Team Europe, the thinking being that the players will become semi-immune to the catcalls and will grow accustomed to performing in spite of the din.
Rory McIlroy told reporters at Wentworth that he was asked by the programmers how far he wanted this highly novel VR experience to go in terms of personalised invective.
McIlroy responded by telling them to spare him nothing and crank it up to the max - a setting we shall refer to as 'Monty at Brookline' mode.
Asked for specifics on what the headsets were saying, McIlroy replied: "You don't want to know. Not for publication."
(The exercise did slightly remind us of Peter Mannion's line on the 'The Thick of It': "Have you ever googled your own name? It's like opening a door to a room where everyone tells you how s**t you are.")
We can assume that Rory has spent the lead-in to the tournament practising while listening to New York accents blaring the word 'WOZNIACKI' into his ear. For Shane Lowry, they're probably reminding him of Offaly GAA's trophy haul at senior level in the 21st century, which is sure to put him off.
If the 'War on the Shore' or Brookline or Whistling Straits were bad, this weekend is being billed as the Galatasaray away of Ryder Cups.
The notoriously loutish New York sports crowd are expected to provide us with an atmosphere akin to Luton v Millwall, circa 1985.
The presence of the President of the United States - whose adoring White House press secretary confirmed his intention to attend on Friday - is not expected to calm down the crowd, notwithstanding his own much trumpeted achievements in the field of conflict resolution.
Two-time US Open champion and the current chairman of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, Bryson DeChambeau has warned Europeans to expect a "tsunami of noise" from the home crowd and bluntly announced that he intends to be "chirping in the ear" of McIlroy should they face off against one another. McIlroy responded this week by labelling DeChambeau an attention seeker.
The Bethpage crowd earned a spicy reputation from the three major championships at the course, the 2002 and 2009 US Opens and the 2019 PGA Championship.
It was back in '02, when the venue became the first public course to host a US Open, that Sergio Garcia received a ferocious barracking from the New York galleries.
Garcia was inordinately jumpy that week and performed so many pre-shot waggles he made Brian Harman look prompt over the ball, which attracted the derision of the crowds.
As Brooks Koepka limped over the line to win the 2019 PGA Championship, playing the last eight holes in five-over par, he was serenaded with cries of 'DEE-JAY, DEE-JAY' as a reminder that Dustin Johnson was on his tail.
Given that Ryder Cups are typically far more fractious and heated than standard golf tournaments, there is considerable apprehension about what lies in store for McIlroy and co this weekend.
There is uncertainty on whether the prohibitive cost of admission - tickets are $750 per day - will tamp down or increase the boisterousness of the galleries, with some suggesting that many loudmouths might be priced out while others foresee an army of Jordan Belfort types giving it socks all weekend.
It was Ian Woosnam - possessor of one of the worst singles records in the history of the competition - who back in Kiawah Island in 1991 made the rather undiplomatic claim that the home crowd's behaviour was due to the fact that "Americans can't drink" and recommended that alcohol not be sold at Ryder Cups in the States.
This certainly wasn't true of him and his team-mates, with the American players reportedly stunned by the quantity of booze the European players were able to 'put away' that weekend and still play the following day. Woosie's call for prohibition has not been heeded, in any case.
Aside from the headsets, the Europeans have been leaning on the inspiration of Novak Djokovic - perhaps surprisingly given that the Serbs would not be renowned as a powerhouse of golf - who has spoken to the players about how to thrive when the entire crowd is willing for you to lose, an area in which he has extensive experience.
As ever, there is no brains trust like a Ryder Cup brains trust.
Paul McGinley, whose preparation for the 2014 Ryder Cup made the planning for the Normandy landings look slapdash, famously invited Alex Ferguson in as an unofficial team advisor, soliciting his thoughts on how best to manage big personalities. Jim McGuinness, who would a few days later step down as Donegal manager, was also spotted inside the ropes at Gleneagles, arms folded and surveying approach shots.
The profile and status of the hangers-on remains unrivalled. We learned this week that Gianfranco Zola is driving vice-captain Francesco Molinari's golf buggy, which isn't the most pivotal of roles, but who knows?
The Americans, by contrast, have tended to look to political leaders for inspiration. In 1999, Ben 'I've got a good feelin' about this' Crenshaw asked his friend, then Governor of Texas, a certain George W Bush, to read out an extract from a letter from the US commander at the Alamo, refusing to surrender in 1836. The pay-off line in this instance was 'Victory or Death'. Crenshaw's team would mount an improbable comeback to win 14 1/2 to 13 1/2 on a controversial Sunday in Boston.
Whether Trump will stick around to address the US team this week remains to be seen. Though if they do find themselves 10 1/2 to 6 1/2 down on Saturday evening, the President may be wary of attaching his name to them, given his longstanding visceral disdain for losers of any sort.
The crowd factor has been a vexed one since the aforementioned '91 match, when the Americans, stung by their then unprecedented barren run in the late 1980s, set about reclaiming the Cup they had monopolised for decades.
Fourteen years earlier, the Ryder Cup had changed forever after an increasingly bored Jack Nicklaus had written to the chairman of the British PGA, Edward Stanley, the 18th Earl of Derby (Nicklaus later mistakenly called him 'John Derby') urging the GB&I team to expand to include continental players, in light of the fact that the European Tour had been founded a few years before.
This call coincided with Seve Ballesteros' emergence as a superstar of the sport in the late 70s. Soon after, Tony Jacklin was installed as the first of the modern, walkie-talkie wielding captains, taking a professorial, five-star general approach to the business of winning back the Cup.
The Ryder Cup as we recognise it today was born in those years of European dominance and it set the context for the events of 1991.
That became one of the most celebrated and infamous Ryder Cups of them all, staged at the newly-built Kiawah Island, a terrifyingly difficult course on the Florida coast, designed by Pete Dye, aka the Marquis de Sod.
In windy conditions, the course was playing so hard on Sunday that Colin Montgomerie came back from four down with four to play to halve his match with Mark Calcavecchia, despite double-bogeying two of the four holes in question.
The Floridian media, getting into the spirit of things, launched their 'Wake the Enemy' campaign in the midst of the tournament, a local radio station in the vicinity phoning the European players at all hours of the morning during the competition.
On the fateful final hole of the final match on Sunday, when Hale Irwin needed to halve the 18th against Bernhard Langer to win the Cup for the hosts, the American's wildly hooked drive on the last mysteriously wound up re-appearing on the fairway. The official explanation is that it hit a woman from the PGA of America on the small of her back and bounced back into play, though the European players retain the suspicion it may have been less accidental.
If that was bad, the controversy was dialled up another notch following the events at Brookline in '99. Justin Leonard's monstrous birdie putt on the 17th sparked a premature green invasion from the players and their WAGs, though nobody, as far as we're aware, traversed the line of Jose Maria Olazabal's subsequent putt to save the match.
Once Crenshaw and his players remembered themselves, there were belated and slightly panicked efforts to restore decorum, the green invaders hurriedly shepherding the cameramen off the putting surface.
The fallout was ugly from that one, the scenes sparking an orgy of sanctimony and aggrieved tut-tutting on the side of the Atlantic.
A few days afterwards, the nonagenarian British journalist Alastair Cooke, author of the long-standing 'Letter from America' column on BBC Radio 4, would title his latest offering, 'The Arrival of the Golf Hooligan', describing 26 September 1999 as "a date that will live in infamy."
The Americans, for their part, while somewhat chastened after Brookline, have occasionally expressed frustration at European preciousness, especially as reflected by the UK press coverage. Sam Torrance's marvellously overblown response to Tom Lehman's boisterous antics at Brookline - "and he calls himself a man of God!" - has come in for much deserved mockery.
They've also noted, with some justification, that European crowds aren't exactly tame themselves, as evidenced by the extreme ribbing the hatless Patrick Cantlay took in Rome. The often vicious caricatures of the American wives in the British press has been another understandable bugbear.
Nowadays, grousing about boisterous home crowds is out of fashion. There's been an acceptance that they're part of the package when it comes to Ryder Cups. The matches immediately following 1999, where both teams made a great show of their sportsmanlike gentility, lacked a certain bite and tension.
The modern golfer is less of an etiquette hawk than the Montgomeries et al of yesteryear.
Rather than exhort the home crowd to embrace a respectful decorum, Luke Donald has instead expressed the hope that the New York galleries could turn on their own if Europe get off to a fast start on Friday.
However, things pan out, the paying fans are expected to be a major character in what unfolds this weekend.
