The Official World Golf Ranking is a curious beast, and this week it served up a pair of peculiar tales.
Normally the winner of a tournament on the US PGA Tour can expect a nice little upward hop in his world ranking, but Cameron Smith and partner Jonas Blixt captured the two-man Zurich Classic of New Orleans and saw their rankings fall.
How? The culprit in this instance is not the OWGR but rather the fact the pairs event was deemed unable to accrue points towards players’ world ranking. A similar situation occurred in Australia in February when the innovative World Super 6 Perth tournament was forced at the last minute to abandon its plans for a nearest-the-pin tiebreaker in the matchplay phase of the tournament because doing so contravened what is permissible for an event with world ranking points on offer.
For the record, Smith’s ranking slid from 112th in the world to 114th, while Blixt fell from 252nd to 256th in the wake of their Zurich Classic win.
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Others received a benefit from the weekly shuffles in the numerics of the OWGR. Or perhaps Lee Westwood is secretly Will Hunting. Or maybe he just got lucky. Whatever the case, Westwood, by not playing last week, earned an invitation to next week’s 2017 Players Championship.
In the latest world rankings release, Westwood moved from 53rd to 50th, a noteworthy and timely development as the OWGR top-50 get the call to TPC Sawgrass. Two of the players he jumped – Hideto Tanihara and Russell Henley – were not credited for their Zurich Classic performances, as the tournament awarded zero ranking points (Tanihara and partner Hideki Matsuyama finished T-32, while Henley missed the cut). Westwood also went ahead of Jeunghun Wang, who failed to secure a top-50 finish at the Volvo China Open.
Westwood made the climb thanks to the OWGR’s divisor. For a refresher, there is a minimum divisor of 40 tournaments over the two-year ranking period, and a maximum divisor of a player’s last 52 tournaments.
The 44-year-old Englishman has enjoyed past success at Sawgrass, with five top-10s in 13 appearances.
