Medinah, the tree-lined course that has hosted five major championships

Both teams desperately want that 17-inch gold trophy.

Europe is coming off a 14½-13½ win two years ago in Wales, a week of slogging through the rain that forced a Monday finish that made everything worth the extra day when it came down to the final match, with GraemeMcDowell delivering the winning point.

Medinah, the tree-lined course that has hosted five major championships, doesn't look anything like those events. Love has asked for the rough to be virtually eliminated and the greens to be slick as ever, hopeful that's an advantage to a U.S. team that he tried to stock with good putters.

Even though Europe seems to have owned this event, The Americans have lost only once at home in the past 15 years — at Oakland Hills in 2004.

Romney and Obama will be armed with competing numbers and visions

"In 2008, the first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, one of the takeaways was McCain did not make eye contact with Obama," Schroeder said. "That came off as rude, disrespectful."

Part of the practice sessions is figuring out when to be aggressive and how to demonstrate leadership. It's also honing the lines from months of campaign speeches as the candidates get their final opportunities to speak directly to tens of millions of voters.

In the first debate, on domestic policy, Romney and Obama will be armed with competing numbers and visions.

"We will not surrender our dreams to the failures of this president," Romney told an audience in Bedford, N.H., last December. Expect the Republican to point to 23 million Americans out of work or underemployed, a national debt now at $16 trillion and three years of an unemployment rate above 8 percent.