Official World Golf Rankings

The Official World Golf Rankings are a system for rating the performance level of male professional golfers. They were introduced in 1986 and are endorsed by the four Major Championships and the six professional tours which make up the International Federation of PGA Tours, which are The PGA TOUR, the European Tour, the Asian Tour, the PGA Tour of Australasia, the Japan Golf Tour, and the Sunshine Tour. Points are also awarded for high finishes on the Canadian Tour, Nationwide Tour and Challenge Tour.

[edit] History

The intiative for the creation of the Official World Golf Rankings came from the Championship Committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, which found in the 1980s that its system of issuing invitations to The Open Championship on a tour by tour basis was omitting an increasing number of top players because more of them were dividing their time between tours, and from preeminent sports agent Mark McCormack, who was the first chairman of the International Advisory Committee which oversees the rankings.

The first ranking list was published prior to the 1986 Masters Tournament. The top six ranked golfers were: Bernhard Langer, Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Tom Watson, Mark O'Meara and Greg Norman. Thus the top three were all European, but there were thirty one Americans in the top fifty (compared with twenty at the end of 2005).

Initially the rankings were calculated over a three year period, but this was reduced to two in 1995. A few years after that the tapering system was changed so that instead of one half of the points for each result being deducted after a year and the other half after two years, one eighth is deducted every thirteen weeks. At first only the Championship Committee of the Royal and Ancient used the rankings for official purposes, but the PGA Tour recognised them in 1990, and in 1997 all five of the then prinicipal men's golf tours did so. The rankings, which had previously been called the Sony Rankings, were renamed the Official World Golf Rankings at that time. They are run from offices in Virginia Water in Surrey, England.

Twelve players have been World No.1. Seve Ballesteros took over from Berhard Langer and vied with Greg Norman for the No.1 spot, then Nick Faldo took over as Greg Norman’s rival. Ian Woosnam and Fred Couples held the position through 1991 and 1992 before Nick Faldo took over again through to 1994, when Nick Price’s career year took him to No.1. After a single week at No.1 by Tom Lehman, Tiger Woods dominated the position from 1997 to 2005 with brief interruptions from Ernie Els and David Duval. In September 2004 Vijay Singh became the twelfth World No.1, and he and Woods swapped the position several times in 2005, but Woods eventually opened a wide lead. Woods holds the longest consecutive streak as No. 1 at 264 weeks.

At the end of 2005 the top one hundred players were drawn from the following countries:

41: United States 16: United Kingdom (England 11; Northern Ireland 2; Wales 2; Scotland 1) 12: Australia 5: Japan, South Africa 3: Spain, Sweden 2: Canada, France, Republic of Ireland, South Korea, New Zealand 1: Argentina, Denmark, Fiji, Germany, Paraguay

There were 28 Europeans and 31 players eligible for the Presidents Cup International Team.

[edit] Calculation of the rankings

Points are awarded on the basis of final positions in official money events on the qualifying tours. The number of points available at each tournament depends on the prestige of the tournament and the existing rankings of the participating golfers. The four major tournaments automatically receive the maximum possible rating, with 50 points allocated to the winner. The winner of The Players Championship receives 40 points, and the winners of the three individual events in the World Golf Championships series generally receive 35 to 39 points. The winner of most PGA Tour events gains a number of points in the range from the high teens to the mid thirties, and most European Tour events offer a points tally between low double figures and the mid twenties for the winner. On the other tours, winners usually receive a single figure points award, but a few of the stronger events rate a double figure award.

Each player's personal ranking is calculated from the ranking points he has obtained over the previous two years. Firstly, his scores from all the tournaments he has played in are scaled down over a two year period, with one eighth of the points awarded for each tournament deducted every thirteen weeks in order to give priority to recent form. The player's adjusted scores are then totalled, and this total is divided by the number of ranking tournaments in which he has participated over the previous two years, subject to a minimum denominator of forty tournaments, with separate minimums of twenty for each of the last two years. For example if a player has played in 18 ranking events in the last 52 weeks and played in 27 in the 52 weeks before that, his denominator will be 47 (20+27), not 45. The resulting averages for all players are put into descending order to produce the ranking table. This means that the player who has obtained most cumulative success does not necessarily come top of the rankings: it is average performance levels that are important, and some golfers play substantially more tournaments than others. Players with full membership of one of the larger tours (that is, almost all players in the top few hundred in the rankings) usually play between 20 and 35 ranking tournaments each year, unless they are injured. New rankings are released every Monday.

[edit] Importance of the rankings

A professional golfer's ranking is of considerable significance to his career. For example, a ranking in the World Top 50 explicitly grants automatic entry to three of the four majors (The Masters, US Open, The Open Championship), and effectively assures entry into the fourth (PGA Championship). Also, ranking points are the sole criterion for selection for the International Team in the Presidents Cup and one of the qualification criteria for the European Ryder Cup team. The rankings are also used to help select the field for various other tournaments.

The rankings are well known to those who follow men's professional golf and feature prominently in media coverage of the sport. When Vijay Singh ended Tiger Woods' record run as world number 1 in 2004 it was one of the most reported golf stories of the year.

[edit] Number One-ranked golfers

These are the golfers who have topped the rankings, in order of the number of weeks they have spent at Number 1 up to July 24 2006, at which date Tiger Woods was World Number 1. His current spell at the top of the rankings is his tenth. It began on June 12 2005 when he regained first place from Vijay Singh.

The "Order" column indicates the sequence in which the players first reached number 1. The "Majors" column shows the number of major championships each player has won through the 2006 Open Championship.

Of these players Bernard Langer and Seve Ballesteros would be most likely to gain additional weeks at number 1 if the rankings were backdated to before 1986. Greg Norman might possibly also do so.

[edit] External link

More extensive lists of past rankings and the current weekly ranking list, which features more than a thousand golfers, can be found on the official site.

• Official World Golf Rankings Website