Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIIroy waste, Jon Rahm thanks and remains on the world throne. After the Arnold Palmer Invitational, a PGA Tour tournament won in Florida by Kurt Kitayama, the top three positions in the world ranking have not changed.
Despite a disappointing 39th place in Orlando, the Spaniard Rahm kept his lead. Scheffler and McIlroy finished 4th and 2nd respectively in the USA, missing an overtaking opportunity.
Ranking, results
With this exploit, Kitayama entered the Top 20 moving from 46th to 19th place.
Leap forward for Francesco Molinari. The blue number 1, with 14th place in Orlando, has risen from 151st to 123rd position in the world ranking. 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.
Over the years the method of calculating the ranking has changed a lot. Initially the ranking was calculated over a three-year period, with the current year’s score multiplied by four, that of the previous year by two and that of two years before left unchanged.
The ranking was compiled with the total score and the overall points rounded to the nearest integer. All tournaments recognized by the professional tours and some of the invitational tournaments were classified into categories, ranging from “major tournaments” (where the winner received 50 points) to “other tournaments” (where the winner received a minimum of 8 points).
). In each tournament, the other classified players also received points in proportion to their placement, starting with the runner-up who received 60% of the points due to the winner. In early April 1989, the rankings were changed to be based on average points per tournament played instead of the total amount.
This was to better reflect the prowess of some players (especially those of an older age) who played fewer tournaments than others, but demonstrated in major tournaments that their ranking was underrated. For example Tom Watson between 1987 and 1989 had finished in the top 15 in eight major tournaments, but with the overall points system he was only in fortieth position: with the average points system he went back to twentieth.
A new system was also devised to determine the “weight” of each tournament, based on the total value of the participants evaluated with the ranking prior to the start of the tournament. In the major tournaments, however, the maximum of 50 points was guaranteed for the winner, while all the others could reach a maximum of 40 if all the best 100 in the world had been at the start.
In practice, the result is that most Pga Tour tournaments settle around 25 points for the winner, those of the European Tour around 18 and those of the Japan PGA Tour around 12. In 2007 the system was changed again . In 1996 the three years that were taken into account were reduced to two and the current year became double.
Starting in 2000, points began to be awarded to more ranked players in each tournament and the average was no longer rounded to the nearest whole number.
