The American Scottie Scheffler, the Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy and the Spanish Jon Rahm remain one more week on the podium of the world golf ranking after the St. Jude Championship, the first playoff of the FedEx Cup.
Ranking, golf
Scheffler, 31st at St.
Jude, remains in first position with 11.6 points, followed by McIlroy (3rd) with 11.04 and Rahm (37th) with 9.93, with a considerable advantage over his pursuers, the American Patrick Cantlay ( 7.56), second in Memphis, and the Norwegian Viktor Hovland (6.34).The only change in the top 10 of the universal list is the rise to eighth place of American Brian Harman (4.92), overtaking Australian Cameron Smith.For his part, the Catalan Pablo Larrazábal remains in 67th place and Adrián Otaegui is 91st.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 across 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.