Less than a week after Brandt Snedeker picked up an eye watering $11.5 million check as he claimed the FedEx Cup, the best golfers from the United States and Europe will go head to head with not a dime on the line and with nothing to play for but pride itself.

The 39th Ryder Cup matches at Medinah Country Club in Chicago will be watched by packed and partisan galleries and a huge global television audience, but for the 12 players on each team overall victory in the biennial team event is all that matters.

They are playing for expenses only and whenever the issue of financial rewards is raised, it is quickly ruled out.

"No prize money is involved, just a lot of pride," three-time European captain Bernard Gallacher told CNN.

"And the matches are very, very competitive."

The American team will have the Stars and Stripes running through their veins and it's a chance for the Europeans to combine under a united flag.

"It's the only competition we have with the United States outside the occasional football match and it's the same for them given that their main sports are baseball, gridiron and ice-hockey," said Bill Elliott, Chair of the Association of Golf Writers.

"Let's face it, it's not hard for Americans to show nationalistic pride! " the Briton added with tongue in cheek.

Timely intervention

This is a contest which grips golf and sports fans for three days but was in danger of extinction in the 1970s and had it not been for the intervention of 18-time major winner Jack Nicklaus, it may well have withered and died.

Nicklaus proposed to Earl Derby, the then president of the Professional Golfers Association, that players from continental Europe should augment the Great Britain and Ireland line-up to make for a better contest.

The United States had only lost once in the post-war era -- in 1957 at Lindrick -- and interest, particularly in America, was dwindling.

Nicklaus' suggestion was taken up, so in 1979 two Spaniards, Seve Ballesteros and Antonio Garrido, took their place for the match at Greenbrier in West Virginia.

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This did not prevent the visiting team from suffering a heavy defeat, but as Elliott, who was reporting his first of 17 Ryder Cups and counting, recalls, the change was "absolutely essential".

Scot Gallacher made one of his eight appearances as a player in that watershed encounter and admitted "Seve and Antonio had disappointing matches." (They both had 1-4-0 records.)

"However, their participation in the long-term saved the Ryder Cup," he added.

Two years later, Ballesteros sat out proceedings at Walton Heath in 1981 after a dispute over his European Tour membership, but even he would have been able to do little to prevent what is rated the strongest U.S. team in history thrashing the home side.

United Europe

That was to be last time that the U.S. enjoyed such a level of domination and by the time of the next match at Palm Beach Gardens in Florida in 1983, the Europeans were united under the captaincy of Tony Jacklin, with Ballesteros in his pomp.