For the better part of the last 14 years, the top of the Official World Golf Ranking has largely been a nontopic. A certain 14-time major champion had a stranglehold on the position, his lead over the rest of the planet's best players insurmountable at times.
Golf fans knew at the beginning of the year that would not be on the docket in 2011: The top five of the OWGR are as bunched as they have been since the mid-2000s, and the top 10 are as close as they've ever been before in the system's history, which dates back to 1986.
Trivia question
Last week's winner, Brandt Snedeker, is one of four players in PGA Tour history to play a front or back nine in 9-under par (he did it at Torrey Pines in 2007). Who are the other three? (Answer below.)Already we've seen the No. 1 spot switch three times since Halloween, when Tiger Woods relinquished his position to Lee Westwood. That has resulted in three different men holding the position since then -- which is as many different players as we had over the previous 12 years combined. Vijay Singh jockeyed with Woods for the top spot in 2005, and David Duval had it for 15 total weeks in 1999.
However, with newsworthy jostling for first comes scrutiny of the rankings system itself. Westwood reclaimed the No. 1 position via his win at the Indonesian Masters, an Asian Tour event. Besides Westwood, this tournament had zero other top-50 players in the world ranking, and just one top-100 player (runner-up Thongchai Jaidee, who was 90th entering the week). The victory was worth 20 world ranking points, the same amount of a third-place finish at The Heritage, the PGA Tour's stop last week.
Consider this: Westwood ascends to first in the world without even finishing in the top 10 in either a PGA or European Tour event in 2011.
The world ranking uses a two-year rolling period to accrue points, and Westwood has three wins on the two major tours in that span: the 2009 Portugal Masters (European), 2009 Dubai World Championship (European) and 2010 St. Jude Classic (PGA). He also has four top-three finishes in majors during the current points window.
Luke Donald, on the other hand, has a WGC victory already under his belt in 2011. He's finished in the top-10 now in five straight PGA Tour starts, including a T-4 finish at The Masters. If he sinks his 10-foot birdie putt on the 16th hole Sunday, or holes out one of those remarkable sand shots down the stretch, he wins the tournament and stakes his claim as the world's No. 1.
In a topsy-turvy time atop the OWGR, mere inches can be the difference between a distinction you can keep your whole career (I was No. 1!) and simply being third this week.
With that, we dive into a few of the key numbers surrounding the world of golf this week:
14.3: Lost in the dramatics of Sunday afternoon in South Carolina was the emergence of a trend regarding the still-world-No. 3. Saturday evening marked the seventh time in his PGA Tour career that Donald held at least a share of the 54-hole lead in an official tour event. Sunday evening marked the sixth of those tournaments Donald did not win. That's a 14.3 percent winning clip.
For a bit of context regarding that stat, let's look at the three most prolific PGA Tour winners of the previous decade: Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh. Woods has won 48 of the 52 tournaments in which he held at least a share of the 54-hole lead in his PGA Tour career -- 92.3 percent. Mickelson (24-for-33) is at 72.7 percent, and Singh is 19-for-32, or 59.4 percent.
9: Ricky Barnes was in the mix over the weekend at Hilton Head, but once again came up short in his efforts to pick up his first PGA Tour win. Sunday's T-4 finish at The Heritage marked Barnes' ninth career top-10 finish on tour. Rest assured, Barnes has his name firmly entrenched in the discussion of who the best player on tour is without a victory.
Barnes is immensely talented, and that's never more present than in major championships -- at least in the early rounds. In his PGA Tour career, Barnes has been T-7 or higher seven different times entering the weekend. Five of those tournaments have been major championships.
4.267: TPC Louisiana ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of overall difficulty last year, but one hole that holds its mettle against any on the PGA Tour is the par-4, 482-yard fourth. This Pete Dye monster yielded a mere 35 birdies to the field last year at this event, and kicks off the creatively-named "Triangle of Doom," a three-hole stretch of tough par-4s on the front nine.
Though the fifth hole didn't prove to be that treacherous last year (the field played the hole under par for the week), the stretch has lived up to its billing over the last few years. When you add up each of the three holes since 2008, the field has made 401 more scores over par than under par during the stretch.
Three on the Tee is a rundown of three players we at Numbers Game will have our eye on this weekend. Not so much a list of favorites, but a trio of players who have caught our attention. And with that, the starter calls to the tee:
Brandt Snedeker: Your Hilton Head winner posted the lowest final-round score by a winner so far on tour this year with his Sunday 64. Snedeker has a very aggressive, confident approach to the ball when he putts -- if you watched him Sunday, you know he spends very little time over the ball before making his stroke.
His putting numbers might suggest that public course patrons and club players should quicken their approach on the greens. Snedeker is second on tour this year in putting average (1.695), fourth in total putting, fourth in one-putt percentage (44.8) and best on tour on putts from 10 to 15 feet -- he's made 47.8 percent of those this season.
Steve Stricker: Just three of the top 10 players in the Official World Golf Ranking are in the field this week: Luke Donald (3), Graeme McDowell (5) and Steve Stricker (9). Stricker makes his first start since finishing tied for 11th at Augusta National a few weeks ago, and will be seeking his first win on tour since his 26-under-par performance last summer at the John Deere Classic.
Stricker had a top-10 finish the last time he played here, grabbing a T-7 in 2009. Stricker has been a model of consistency the last year or so -- his streak of 30 straight tournaments in the money are the longest active run on tour. The magic number for Stricker, though, is 70.
Stricker has played 19 PGA Tour stroke-play events since last year's Arnold Palmer Invitational. In nine of those, he hit 70 percent of his greens in regulation or better. In eight of those nine tournaments, he finished in the top 10. In the 10 times during the stretch that he was lower than 70 percent GIR, he finished in the top 10 just once.
And he won't be playing this week, but a note we had to get in comes from ...
Trivia answer
Question: Last week's winner, Brandt Snedeker, is one of four players in PGA Tour history to play a front or back nine in 9-under par (he did it at Torrey Pines in 2007). Who are the other three?
Answer: Billy Mayfair (2001), Robert Gamez (2004), and Chris Riley (2009).
Lee Trevino: New Orleans has played host to a PGA Tour event since 1938, when it hosted the Greater New Orleans Open Invitational at City Park GC. Along the way, a bit of PGA Tour history was made in Louisiana. When Trevino won the tournament in 1974, he became the first, and remains the only, player to win a 72-hole stroke-play tour event without a bogey on his card.
Numbers Game is a weekly stat-centric look at the PGA Tour.
Justin Ray has been a studio researcher for ESPN since June 2008 and is the lead researcher for "The Scott Van Pelt Show." Send comments and suggestions to Justin.Ray@espn.com.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
Michael Collins has been writing for ESPN.com since yesterday. He started out as a stand up comedian and fell into PGA Tour golf and caddying completely by accident in 1998.
He started looping for fun in 1999 but by 2003 had decided to make it a full time gig. He won the Nationwide Tour Championship with Chris Couch in 2003 and was on the bag for Kevin Streelman when they captured the inaugural Kodak Challenge in 2009.
Michael has never won an award for his writing, probably because he failed high school English and still types with his index fingers. But he's smart, funny, and most importantly knows the game/players/caddies and what they go through on a week-to-week basis and brings a caddie perspective that's different than anything you've ever seen when it comes to golf coverage.
Farrell Evans grew up in Forsyth, Ga., 60 miles south of Atlanta, where he learned the game at the Forsyth Golf Club, an 18-hole public course. After high school, he played on the golf team at Florida A&M University and interned with the PGA Tour at the TPC at Sawgrass.
Before joining ESPN.com in August 2011, he was a golf writer for nine years at Sports Illustrated. He currently lives in Harlem and can be contacted at evans.espn@gmail.com.
Bob Harig is a golf writer for ESPN.com and has been covering the game for more than 20 years, first at the St. Petersburg Times and for the last four years at ESPN.com. He began contributing to ESPN.com in 1997.
Harig is a native of Barrington, Ill., where he got his first exposure to golf as a caddie at Inverness Golf Club, where he earned an Evans Scholarship to attend Indiana University. He graduated with degrees in journalism and history.
Harig lives in Florida and can be reached at BobHarig@gmail.com
Kevin Maguire is the senior golf editor for ESPN.com and covered his first PGA Tour event in 1994 while at American University in Washington, D.C. He played collegiately for the Eagles and graduated with a degree in print journalism.
Maguire grew up in the Philadelphia, Pa. area and now resides outside of Hartford, Conn. He has been with ESPN since February, 2007 and can be reached at Kevin.Maguire@espn.com.
Justin Ray is a senior researcher with ESPN Stats and Information. He has contributed to ESPN's golf coverage since joining the network out of college in 2008. He is based in Austin, Texas with the new Longhorn Network.
He can be contacted at Justin.Ray@espn.com.
You must be signed in to post a comment