We find ourselves one week into the final month of 2020. Normally the professional golf scene is relatively quiet in December, but because of all the schedule adjustments from the earlier part of the calendar year, there is still a lot of golf out there being played. The LPGA Tour is in Texas this weekend for the playing of the Volunteers of America Classic. Next week the top women professionals head to the Champions Golf Club in Houston for the playing of the Women’s United States Open. The season-ending LPGA Tour Championship will be held in Naples, Florida from Dec. 17-20. The European Tour is in South Africa this week for the playing of that nation’s National Open while its season-concluding DP World Tour Championship will be contested next week in Dubai. The Champions Tour and the Korn Ferry Tour have concluded their seasons.
The PGA Tour is playing its final event of the year in Mexico at the Mayakoba Golf Classic. The Mayakoba is normally held during the second week of November, but they moved their tourney back to the first week of December to accommodate the rescheduling of the Masters. Mayakoba is one of those relatively new tour events that first came into play in 2007. It is a B-level event on the PGA Tour and it usually attracts a number of journeymen and rookies looking to make their mark on the big boy circuit.
However, there are top-flight linksters who are in the field this year at Mayakoba. Four-time major winner Brooks Koepka is part of the field. He has struggled with his game since the PGA Championship in August and is looking for a solid performance to conclude the year. Justin Thomas is also in the field. He plays in more tournaments than most top-notch golfers, so it’s really not a surprise to see him this week in Mexico. Another big name in the field this week is Rickie Fowler. Like Koepka, Fowler has struggled with his game of late. Most importantly, Fowler is looking four months down the line to next April’s Masters at Augusta National. At the conclusion of this calendar year, the top 50 golfers in the World Golf Rankings automatically receive an invite into the Masters. Prior to the start of play Thursday at Mayakoba, Rickie was in 49th place in the world rankings. He needs to have a decent week in Mexico to at least maintain his status among the world’s top 50.
In the 160-year history of major championship golf, the official World Golf Rankings are a relatively new addition to the game. It has only been around since 1986. In the early 1980s, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, those blue-coated aristocrats who run the British Open, had issues with its field at the Open Championship. They had a hard time assessing who deserved an invite into their championship. Too many of the European Tour’s top golfers such as Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, and Sandy Lyle were competing on multiple tours in Europe, America, South Africa and Australia. Journeymen who were playing exclusively on just one tour were getting better ranking points than those golfers who were traveling the world. There was a need for a uniform way of ranking world-class golfers.
Mark McCormick of the International Management Group (IMG) had been publishing an end-of-the-year informal ranking of the top golfers in the world since 1968. McCormick was the manager for Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, and he saw the unique difference of the schedules maintained by his star trio as they too traveled the world to play in events such as the South African Open in Player’s homeland, the Australian Open and Australian Masters during the heart of our winters, and the big-purse Dunlop Phoenix Tournament in Japan.
McCormick informally rated tournaments based on the strength of field and awarded points accordingly. A win at the Masters was worth more than a win at the Quad Cities. A victory in the British Masters received more credence than a win at the KLM Dutch Open. The very first world rankings came out in April 1986 just before that year’s Masters. Bernhard Langer of Germany was ranked No. 1 followed by Spain’s Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle of Scotland, Tom Watson of Kansas City, Long Beach’s Mark O’Meara, and Greg Norman of Australia. While the top three linksters in that first world ranking were European Tour regulars, 31 Americans who were regulars on the PGA Tour were listed among the top 50 in the world.
As time went on, the system received numerous tweaks. For instance, the initial world rankings were based on a diminishing three-year scale. In 1996, the world rankings only included the results over the course of a two-year period of time. The PGA Tour fully recognized the world rankings in 1990. The European Tour and the PGA Tour were joined by the Asian Tour, the Japan Tour, the Australiasia Tour and South Africa’s Sunshine Tour in 1997. Your world ranking was what it took to get into the four major grand slam tournaments, the World Golf Championships, and numerous other invitational tournaments on the six major world tours.
In 2019, a total of 23 professional golf tours factored into the world rankings used as qualifying criteria. While pros got world ranking consideration for playing with the big boys in America and Europe, you could also be a secondary tour regular and get ranking points. Other tours that “count” in the world rankings include the PGA Tour’s Korn Ferry Tour, the Korean Tour, the European Challenge Tour, the Canadian Tour, and the China Tour among others. My favorite tour among this unique listing of world golf is something called the Nordic Golf League. The Nordic Golf League is a satellite tour for the Challenge Tour. They are geographically confusing as they play tournaments during the summer months in Denmark, Sweden and Spain.
In a merit-oriented sport, the world rankings show who’s hot and who’s not. One year ago, Matthew Wolff was 117th in the world rankings. Today he is 14th. Will Zalatoris was 672nd. Now he is 60th. The Masters runner-up in 2019 was former British Open champ Francesco Molinari. He was ranked 18th. Today, after an indifferent 2020 year, he sits in 95th place. Former PGA champ Keegan Bradley was 96th last year. Now he is ranked 156th.
As for Rickie Fowler, he needs to hang onto that spot in the world rankings, barely inside the top 50. A drive up Magnolia Lane is on the line next April. Yet it’s not like Fowler can look around at Mayakoba and simply finish ahead of those closing in on the top 50. After all, regardless of how he plays, he still has to worry about what’s going on in South Africa as well.
