KEY POINTS:
In April, 1986 the late Mark McCormack introduced us to the concept of ranking golfers. Results from international professional tournaments have been fed into a computer each week for more than 20 years and every Monday the new rankings are distributed via the media, most recently through the
internet.
As well as telling us the status and form of every player who's made the cut in a tournament on one of the main tours in the last two years (there are over 1300 players on the list), tournament officials use the rankings as one method to decide who gets into various events.
Now the R and A, the body that runs amateur golf everywhere except in the US and Mexico, is ranking amateur golfers because they need to ensure the players who make the field for the British Amateur championship are really the best who have entered.
Until now, entry for the British Amateur was based on handicap. That meant players who had manipulated their handicap down to scratch or below by submitting only good scores had a better chance of making the tournament than some other, more worthy entrants. It's a problem in amateur tournament golf everywhere.
The R and A's new system is based on scores from 440 tournaments. In New Zealand the events are the national under- 23 teams and individual championships, the Southland Invitational, the North and South Island championships, the New Zealand Amateur and the Wairakei Open.
The inclusion of Wairakei is intriguing. It's been played only once and is part of the GTNZ Tour which includes the Taranaki and Tauranga Opens. How come those other two events don't count ?
The R and A's rankings have been going for three weeks and 1019 players are on the list including eight New Zealanders in the top 200. The best is Hamilton's James Gill, whose second place in the under-23 championship at Hastings last weekend took him up to 25th. The runaway winner of that tournament, the brilliant 16-year-old Danny Lee of Rotorua, somehow dropped five places to 63rd despite beating Gill by 11 shots at Hastings and shooting 63 in the last round !
The other New Zealanders in the upper echelons of the list are Andrew Green (145), Leighton James (157), Brenden Stuart (174), Troy Ropiha (178), Travis O'Connell (186) and Mark Boe (200).
The New Zealand selectors have disregarded the rankings in picking their team for the revival of the Sloan Morpeth Trophy match against Australia next month. Gill and Lee lead the team and the others are Ropiha and Andrew Searle of Christchurch, who is at 317 on the R and A's list.
Rankings systems are never perfect. But how New Zealand Golf reacts to what appears to be a sophisticated international development will be worth watching as this system beds in.
