The Official World Golf Ranking is a system for rating the performance level of professional golfers.
The rankings are based on a player's position in individual tournaments (i.e. not pairs or team events) over a "rolling" two-year period.
As well as being of general interest, the rankings have an additional importance, in that they are used as one of the qualifying criteria for entry into a number of leading tournaments.
The initiative for the creation of the Official World Golf Ranking came from the Championship Committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, which found in the 1980s that its system of issuing invitations to The Open Championship on a tour by tour basis was omitting an increasing number of top players because more of them were dividing their time between tours, and from preeminent sports agent Mark McCormack, who was the first chairman of the International Advisory Committee which oversees the rankings.
The top six ranked golfers were: Bernhard Langer, Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Tom Watson, Mark O'Meara and Greg Norman.
This was in order to more accurately reflect the status of some (particularly older) players, who played in far fewer events than their younger contemporaries but demonstrated in major championships that their ranking was artificially low.
Beginning in September 2001, the tapering system was changed so that instead of the points for each result being doubled if they occurred in the most recent 12 months, one eighth of the initial "multiplied up" value was deducted every 13 weeks.
Source:[17] Simply put, a golfer's World Ranking is obtained by dividing their points total by the number of events they have played, which gives their average.
The only exceptions to this system are in the major championships where all players who make the cut get a minimum of 1.5 ranking points.
If a player competes in fewer than 40 tournaments over the two-year period his adjusted points total is divided by 40 and not the actual number of events he has played in.
This means that the player who has obtained most cumulative success does not necessarily come top of the rankings: it is average performance levels that are important, and some golfers play substantially more tournaments than others.
1 spot after Langer, before Greg Norman's worldwide success over the rest of that season made him the first year-end No.
As detailed in Mark McCormack's "World of Professional Golf 1991" annual, it was also the case (but less immediately apparent) that Norman had won a total of 14 events during the ranking period to Faldo's 10, and when the two had competed in the same tournament, had finished ahead of his rival 19 times to 11, so Norman's No.
In April 1991, a quirk in the way the rankings treated results from previous years meant that Ian Woosnam, who had never won a major, took the No.
By 1996, Greg Norman had regained the top spot and ended 1996 and 1997 narrowly ahead of first Tom Lehman, and then Tiger Woods and Ernie Els in the rankings, despite his rivals enjoying major victories in those years while he won none.
1 ranking, that change highlighted the fact that Woods had not won a major for over two years, and also the extraordinary success Singh had recently on tour had that had allowed him to overtake the American.
However, by the end of March 2013, a resurgent Tiger Woods had returned to the top of the rankings, after adding three PGA Tour wins in 2013 to his three victories from 2012 while McIlroy struggled with his form following equipment changes.
Woods then suffered a back injury that sidelined him for the early part of 2014, and in his absence, Adam Scott, winner of the 2013 Masters, became the 17th world No.
1 position until August 3, when McIlroy regained the top spot by following his Open Championship victory with another at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational.
1 spot passed back and forth between McIlroy and Spieth, due to the way each player's average points (which were almost identical) fluctuated (as their point weightings and events played divisors changed), until, on September 20, both were overtaken by Jason Day, the 2015 PGA Championship winner, who became the 19th world No.
1, but Day's continued good form took him back to number one after winning the WGC Matchplay in March 2016.
On February 19, 2017, Dustin Johnson became the 20th player to reach number one in the rankings following his victory at the Genesis Open.
He would remain number one for over a year before being overtaken in May 2018 by Justin Thomas, who had won the PGA championship and four other events in 2017.
Johnson regained top spot but was overtaken again in September 2018 by Justin Rose, who had finished second at the Open and again in two FedEx Cup playoff events.
Koepka remained number one at the end of 2019, although FedEx Cup winner Rory McIlroy had (like Rose the year before) amassed more ranking points in total than him.
On February 9, 2020, McIlroy regained the number one position as his higher 2019 points total became reflected in the weighted average.
Following the resumption of golf on the PGA Tour after suspension due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Jon Rahm became the 24th player to top the world rankings, and the second Spaniard, on July 19 after his victory at the Memorial Tournament, his fourth worldwide win in twelve months.
Rahm became the second player after Luke Donald to become world number one before having won or been runner-up in a major championship.
In March 2022, Scottie Scheffler became the 25th player to reach number one after winning the WGC Match Play, his third victory of the 2022 season.
Emulating Ian Woosnam in 1991, Scheffler then promptly won his first major in his very first start as world number one, the 2022 Masters Tournament.