“The world is unfair, Calvin,” the precocious child in Bill Watterson’s celebrated comic strip Calvin and Hobbes was once told by his father.
“I know,” Calvin replied. “But why isn’t it ever unfair in my favor?”
That Tao of Calvin has been embraced as a governing sentiment by European tour loyalists, who appear more alert than ever to any perceived dilution of their circuit’s long-established grace and favor status. And in August’s radical overhaul of the Official World Golf Ranking, the perpetually aggrieved found fresh wood with which to fashion a cross that they might nail themselves to.
“Laughable” is how Jon Rahm described the OWGR at this week’s DP World Tour Championship in Dubai. “The fact that the (PGA Tour’s) RSM Classic, which doesn’t have any of the top 20 in the world, has more points than this event, where we have seven of the top 20, is laughable.”
Rahm is a thoughtful guy and, to be fair, his comments erred only in their timeliness. The rankings were laughable. Now they are like most rating systems: merely imperfect.
Golf’s world ranking was compromised at birth and corrupted regularly thereafter, hostage to politicking and used as a statistical strut to prop up weak tournaments and tours. Member tours designated ‘flagship’ events, often ensuring more ranking points were awarded than would otherwise be justified by the strength of field. Every tour was also assigned a minimum number of points that would be given to winners of tournaments with weak lineups. The PGA and European tours both had a 24-point minimum. The PGA Tour relied upon that in roughly 12% of its events and the Europeans in about 50%, while other tours used it every time.
Any time an event was artificially inflated in value with the use of minimum points, the ranking was degraded, which served also to diminish the worth of accomplishments against elite fields. The 2019 Magical Kenya Open was elevated that year from the Challenge Tour to the main European circuit, but the field quality remained challenged. Justin Harding was the only player ranked higher than 117th in the world. He finished second and earned more ranking points (10.4) for that result against mediocre competition than he did for a T-12 at the Masters (10.3) a month later.
The system introduced this summer ended institutional bias and endemic false accounting. Every player contributes points to a total that is disbursed by percentage. The winner of the RSM Classic is…
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