Tennis

Scheffler wastes again, McIlroy remains king

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At The American Express, on the last hole played of the PGA Tour tournament in California, Scottie Scheffler missed the ‘putt’ for the birdie that would have allowed him to return to first place in the world rankings. Another missed opportunity for the American, who thus remains 2/0 behind the Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy who, from 26 to 29 January, will contest his first race of 2023 at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, the second Rolex Series event of the season of the DP World Tour.

Scheffler, ranking

But McIlroy and Scheffler now have to watch their backs from Jon Rahm. The Spaniard, who won The American Express for the second time in his career at La Quinta, the first since 2018, moved from 4th to 3rd position. In amazing form, the Iberian ace has won four of the last six matches played between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour and now aims to take back the scepter.

As for the Top 10, the other changes concern the Australian Cameron Smith – now one of the leading golfers of LIV Golf, the Arab Superleague whose events are still not recognized by the official world golf ranking -, who moved from 3/ in 4th place, and the Californian Collin Morikawa (now 8th), who relegated Justin Thomas to 9th place.

As for the Azzurri, Guido Migliozzi gains four positions and is now 129/o. Currently number 1 in Italy, the Vicenza native is however closely followed by Francesco Molinari who, thanks to his fifth place in the United Arab Emirates, in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, has risen from 166th to 135th place.

 Victor Perez shot forward who, with his exploits in the United Arab Emirates, entered the Top 100, moving from 111th to 63rd position.

The impetus 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 eighties realized that the system it adopted, i.e. sending invitations to participate in the British Open by analyzing each tour individually, was leading to the exclusion of more and more top-level players because they split their schedules on several different tours, and by the influential sports manager Mark McCormack, who became the first chairman of the international committee overseeing the creation of the league table. 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.

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