Sport

Do the world rankings matter?

In the game of golf much import is placed on the golf rankings. Being number 1 means you are the best right? Well right, and wrong. Tiger did win this weekend’s Chevron tournament and yes his ranking has risen to 21st. He is certainly improving with each passing week and except for his one or two bad rounds in The President’s Cup he has certainly started to play the sort of golf that saw him as the world’s number one player for a record 5 years and 281 weeks. A title he finally relinquished on Halloween 2010.

The funny thing about that year is that Tiger did not win a single tournament. That goes to the point we are trying to make and that is: Shouldn’t a world ranking better reflect the current performance of a player and shouldn’t there be some propinquity about them? As realists we know that the world rankings aren’t always the best indicators of how on form a player will be in any particular event.

Take the current world number 1 Luke Donald for example. He has certainly been successful in recent times but he is not winning majors and in fact he has hardly won any competitions of late. But, like Tiger, he has accumulated enough points to maintain his position as the world’s number one golfer. Even though Tiger lost form in a meteoric way, his ranking did not follow suit. This was purely due to the fact that he had racked up enough points to remain on the log. In fact, the lowest he dropped in the 15 months that he was off completely or barely playing was 58th. He was hardly swinging a club whereas other golfers were slugging it out all across Europe and America to gain some valuable ranking points. 

The cry for the ranking system to be retrofitted into something more modern and meaningful has always fallen on deaf ears there at the Royal and Ancient, but perhaps it is about time that they confront the issue before we have another world number one who can barely make the cut in the majors. They better act quickly as April in Augusta looms and we all know, in Augusta, Tiger is King!