The US dominates Europe 6-4 in the 'top 10'

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The world golf rankings remain steady in the lead-up to the Ryder Cup at Marco Simone Golf Club in Rome, with six American players in the top 10 and four Europeans. Scottie Scheffler retains his top spot with an average of 11.29, followed by Rory McIlroy (10.55), Jon Rahm (9.61), and Victor Hovland (7.66).

Ranking, golf

The American contingent continues with Patrick Cantlay (7.13), Xander Schauffele (6.63), Max Homa (5.23), and Englishman Matt Fitzpatrick (4.98) at eighth. Brian Harman (4.94) and Wyndham Clark (4.77) complete the American top 10. All players will compete in the Ryder Cup this weekend. The American team boasts a stronger grip on the world rankings, with the lowest-ranked player being Rickie Fowler at 25. In contrast, Europe has five players outside the top 25, namely Shane Lowry (34), Justin Rose (37), Robert McIntyre (55), Ludvig Aberg (80), and Nicolai Hojgaard (82).

The push 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 1980s realized that the system it adopted, i.e. sending invitations for participation in the British Open by analyzing each tour individually, was leading to the exclusion of more and more top-level players as they split their commitments across multiple different tours, and by the influential sports manager Mark McCormack, who became the first president of the international committee that oversees the creation of the rankings. 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, the previous year's score by two and the score from two years earlier left unchanged. The ranking was drawn up with the total score and the overall points rounded to the nearest whole value. 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 from the second place which received 60% of the points due to the winner.

from Tennis World USA https://ift.tt/kWgZJpv

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