Jon Rahm continues as number one in the world golf rankings with half a point ahead of the American Scottie Scheffler after a week in which none of the greats participated in the tournaments of the American circuit.
Jon Rahm, ranking
Rahm, who returned to the top after winning his third tournament of the season at The Genesis Invitational, leads the list with an average of 9.59 points to Scheffler’s 9.03, while Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy is third with 8.44.
This Thursday almost all of the main figures will return to action. 44 of the first 50 will play in Bay Hill (Orlando) in the Arnold Palmer Invitational, in which Scheffler will defend the title achieved last year. Rahm, who was seventeenth at the time, leads the roster in his seventh tournament of the course, in which he starts again with the mission of confirming his status as the best player of the moment.
The first change in the standings is the rise of one place for Irishman Shane Lowry, who rises to 19th place after being fifth in The Honda Classic, won by American Chris Kirk, who beat Eric Cole on the first hole of the playoff thanks to to a ‘birdie’ after a spectacular third shot that left the ball ‘given’, and which rose to 32nd place.
Adrián Otaegui progressed to 79 and his compatriots Adri Arnaus and Pablo Larrazábal remain in 86 and 88. The impetus for the creation of the Official World Golf Rankings came from the tournament committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, which in the eighties realized that the system it adopted, i.e.
sending invitations to participate in the British Open by analyzing each tour individually, was leading to the exclusion of more and more top-level players because they split their schedules on several different tours, and by the influential sports manager Mark McCormack, who became the first chairman of the international committee overseeing the creation of the league table.
The system used to develop the rankings was developed based on that of McCormack’s World Golf Rankings, which had previously been published in his World of Professional Golf Annual from 1968 to 1985, which was an unofficial ranking and was not used for other purposes such as selecting players to invite to tournaments.
The first ranking was published before the 1986 edition of The Masters. The top six players were: Bernhard Langer, Severiano Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Tom Watson, Mark O’Meara and Greg Norman. The top three were therefore European players, but among the top fifty thirty-one were Americans.
