The Ryder Cup is all about stepping up to the plate and delivering the goods under the most intolerable tension.

That's just what the Scottish golf writers thrashing away here at Medinah have to do against a crippling six-hour time difference.

For the players on show this weekend, their D-Day will arrive on Friday morning when the biennial match finally swings into action. With the eyes of the world focused on that first tee, the opening shot is like no other. Who will get this 'honour' will be revealed on Thursday night. There could be some who may shirk the responsibility but, like a military man going over the top, Justin Rose is ready for the call of duty.

"That's part of the deal," insisted the Englishman, who has returned to the Ryder Cup battlefield for the first time since 2008. "That's what you sign up for. You have to be prepared to do it, although it won't be easy."

Rose, who has travelled to Chicago on the back of a second-place finish at last weekend's Tour Championship in Atlanta, has his own first-tee reminiscences.

As a 17-year-old raw recruit in the Great Britain & Ireland team in the 1997 Walker Cup at Quaker Ridge, Rose was thrust into action. His partner in the opening day foursomes was Scotsman, Michael Brooks. Rose takes up the story.

"I'd prefer to remember my first Ryder Cup tee shot [at Valhalla] which I stripped down the middle but I'll go with a Walker Cup story," he said with a smile. "I hit it out of bounds. I was a 17-year-old kid and my partner Michael – and I don't want to throw him under a bus here – was adamant that he didn't want to hit the first tee shot. The irony was that I hit it out of bounds so he had to then step up and hit the provisional. He was hitting off the first tee after all, so I quite enjoyed that." Golfing memories were very much to the fore for Rose yesterday. This week's contest will be the first since the great, swashbuckling Seve Ballesteros, an inspirational talisman in the Ryder Cup down the years, passed away.

The spirit will live on here, though. The European team all have their golf bags emblazoned with the iconic silhouette depicting the famous salute of triumph Seve gave when he won the Open at St Andrews back in 1984.

Rose's own recollections of Seve stem from a particularly torrid time in his own career when, as a rookie on the European Tour, he missed 21 cuts in a row.

"I did get to know Seve well," he said. "He was one of the few guys when I was struggling on tour to put his arm around me in a sense, more metaphorically, but just to give me some words of encouragement.

"One of of my favourite memories is winning my first tournament [in America] at the Memorial Tournament, and Seve was the guy being honoured that year. A couple of times during that win, I had some tough short-game shots and Seve sprang to mind and I was trying to picture how he would have tried to play the shot. He was definitely with me that week and one of my greatest keepsakes is the book from the Memorial that Jack [Nicklaus] had signed for me. Seve also signed it because I relayed the story to him about how I thought of him and he wrote back and I got him to sign my book. That's something that I will cherish forever."

Having missed out on a call up to the 2010 match, Rose is relishing the prospect of a return to the fraught fray. Europe's team members come from a' the airts these days, something highlighted by the fact that only three players were on the official flight in from London on Monday. Rose himself is one of the many with bases in the US but the 32-year-old is adamant that the close knit nature of Team Europe that has been forged over the years has not been diminished.

"Yes, the team dynamic has changed," added the former Open silver medal winner, who claimed the WGC Cadillac Championship in March.

"More of us play a worldwide schedule now rather than a tight-knit European schedule that happened 15 or 20 years ago. But a lot of us now live in the same communities in Florida, we're pretty much neighbours. So what you may lose playing on a tight-knit tour, you gain by pretty much living together.

"Once we start earning points for one another, that's where the camaraderie and the friendships really begin to build."