With success in Dubai, making his debut in 2023, Rory Mcllroy has consolidated his leadership. Thanks to this affirmation, the world number 1 extended his advantage over his direct pursuers, the American Scottie Scheffler and the Spanish Jon Rahm, in second and third place respectively.
Rory Mcllroy, ranking
Two variations regarding the Top 10, with Collin Morikawa moving to 7th place relegating Will Zalaris to 8th. News on the Azzurri front: Francesco Molinari, now 137/o, is once again Italy’s number 1.
The Turinese surpassed Guido Migliozzi, 139/o after the elimination in Dubai. Step forward for Max Homa who, after his success in San Diego in the Farmers Insurance Open (PGA Tour), jumped from 16th to 13th position. 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.
