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Max Homa, the American golfer, has elevated his ranking in the international leaderboard by one spot following his recent victory at the Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa. His triumph at the penultimate tournament of the European golf circuit season has propelled him to seventh place, ousting England's Matthew Fitzpatrick, who has now slipped down to eighth.
Max Homa, results
Notably, the only change among the top ten rankings on the international leaderboard this week has been the exchange of positions between Homa and Fitzpatrick.
The current leader in the rankings is still held by American golfer, Scottie Scheffler, with Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy following closely behind in second place, and Spanish golfer Jon Rahm trailing in third position.
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.