If your sporting memory doesn’t go back further than 20 years, you’d probably have a hard time believing that the Ryder Cup was once — even for golf — one of the most boring competitions in sports.

It was like the NBA Dream Team — not that bunch of phonies who misrepresented the United States last month in Athens, Greece, but the original, 1992 version — playing against the Little Sisters of the Poor. You knew who was going to win before the competition started; the only thing you didn’t know was how ugly the massacre would be.

Few people watched the event. Galleries during the early rounds, particularly for groups that did not include Arnie or Jack or another marquee name, numbered in the dozens. You could have a job plowing snow in Aruba and still have as little work as a Ryder Cup course marshal. NHL hockey had better TV ratings — if the Cup was on TV at all.

What’s strange is that despite the event’s utter lack of visibility, the best golfers always not only played in it, but wanted to. That was true as much in the United States, which almost invariably won the competition, as it was in England, which almost invariably lost the Cup, just as it lost most every other international sporting event.

That’s probably what saved the Ryder Cup and turned it into perhaps the best three days of competition involving just two teams that exists: The best always played in it; it was just a matter of making the sides even, of making it a contest.

The NBA’s worthies could take a lesson from golfers. Yes, the NBA season is long and grueling, but the golf season wraps around the calendar as well as around the world. But at the end of a summer of nearly constant travel and play, any pro golfer would give his favorite putter to be picked to represent his country — or countries — in team play.

If the NBA’s lack of interest has made a joke of  international competition, golf’s abiding passion for team play kept the Ryder Cup going through all the years when it was hardly worth watching and has turned it into the can’t-miss event it is today.

It’s 25 years now since golfers on both sides of the pond took the simple action that has led us to where we are. In 1979, it stopped being the United States against England and started being the United States against all of Europe, thus bringing players like Seve Ballesteros — a Ryder Cup legend — and Bernhard Langer into the mix. It took a while for the game to truly be joined, but in the past 15 years or so, the Cup has become more than a gentlemanly three days of golf; it has become a blood sport.

It starts again Friday at Oakland Hill Country Club in Michigan, where the sides — 12 men from Europe against 12 from the United States — are already getting in their practice rounds and plotting match-ups. For those of you keeping score, Europe won the last contest, held two years ago, 15 1/2-12 1/2.

Europe has, in fact, won three of the last four Ryder Cups, two in Europe and one in this country. Unlike even a dozen years ago, when columnists and analysts blithely predicted U.S.  wins — even as the Americans were losing — only a fool would say that the United States, for all its golfing talent, is any better than an even bet to get the Cup back.

That’s because the Ryder Cup, probably more than any other event, tests mental toughness more than pure skill. It’s not the best golfers who win, but the ones who can best handle the enormous pressure and stress of playing a game in which every shot is like a six-footer on the 72nd hole to win the Masters.

And most of that pressure is on the Americans. Nearly 40,000 people will cram Oakland Hills each day of the event, and they’ll be screaming and chanting and waving flags for their team. Playing at home is great, but feeling that you can’t let down all those fans can be devastating to the nervous system.

That’s especially true when you can’t go out and hit someone to burn off the excess adrenaline. You can’t even whack a vicious foul ball, just to work the kinks out of the swing. Hit one foul here, and, as Sam Snead once famously said, no one throws you another ball; you have to go find it and hit it again.

It’s even harder when you’re playing a game you are used to playing as an individual. It’s one thing to let yourself down. It’s quite another to let down 11 other guys and an entire country.

So it’s not wrong to say that the true test of a golfers’ nerve isn’t in the majors, but in this team competition. Jack Nicklaus was great in the Ryder Cup. So was Ballesteros. Both were also great individual golfers.

Tiger Woods has yet to prove himself in Cup competition. He’s been good, but he hasn’t been awe-inspiring. None of the Americans really have, which is why they have such a hard time getting hold of the hardware and keeping it.

And that’s why it’s worth watching. If Woods dominates in Michigan this week, you can forget all his troubles during the past year or two. If Phil Mickelson wants to cement the hold on greatness he forged when he won the Masters, let him make the big shots and hole the big putts this week.

In tournaments, we find out what golfers are as individuals. This week, we find out what they are as teammates.

Twenty years ago, nobody cared. Hard to believe, isn’t it?