Golf Tips and Golf News

The big news in golf this week is that rapidly declining golfing legend Tiger Woods ended up finishing tied 78th in the 80-man WGC Bridgestone Invitational. This means that only one player finished with a worse score than Woods, and the winner finished an astonishing 30 shots ahead of the greatest champion of all time. The question is, then: how is it that a player performing so badly can still technically be ranked as the greatest player in the world?

This may certainly seem mysterious to newcomers and golfing laymen, but the answer is really quite simple. The world rankings are calculated using a points system: different tournaments and courses are designated varying amounts of points depending on their profile and difficulty. Players are then awarded points dependent on their finishing position.

At first, this may seem flawed: players will surely accumulate points over their careers, and the greatest contemporary player will be overshadowed by a retired legend! The answer is that each individual player's ranking is calculated from only the last two years of playing. Again, this may seem unfair on a player who has only recently gained form (or, as in Tiger's case, lost form). Of course, the system cannot compensate for this entirely, but some compensation is done through scaling down the points awarded over time: each tournament's value remains for 13 weeks only, and is then reduced in weekly increments until the end of the 2 year period. This way recent form is given priority whilst allowing for anomalous performances.