The Official World Golf Ranking ushered in a new format this week, the culmination of a four-year-long process to reimagine an adequate but flawed system.
This is no small tweak. The rules of how points are awarded have changed significantly, and the impact of this revamped ranking could be the core defender of LIV Golf’s challenge to the game’s ecosystem.
The start of this complicated equation begins with the OWGR, golf’s universally recognized ranking system since the week before the 1986 Masters. It was created, ironically, because players started splitting time between Europe and the U.S, a factor which did not jibe with the Open Championship’s qualifying system. The R&A used to award spots strictly by a player’s standing on each respective tour, so some who split their time were failing to qualify despite being accomplished players.
Agent Mark McCormack, who had individually published his own rankings from 1968 to 1985, was appointed chairman, and the organization he founded, IMG, owned the OWGR until 2004. That’s when Alastair Johnston, IMG’s new CEO, recognized a conflict between his agency that represented players and what the OWGR had become – an ever-more-valuable ranking that served as a gatekeeper to major championships and sponsorship dollars.
It was then that golf’s major stakeholders came together to form OWGR Limited, a company with an office in the DP World Tour Building at Wentworth in London. With former R&A CEO Peter Dawson currently serving as chairman, the seven member entities contribute financially to the company’s operations while also serving on its board. That board includes the organizations that run each major, the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the International Federation of PGA Tours.
That is an important backdrop as all of this unfolds.
The OWGR has gone through many changes over the years, so this latest install is far from being the only one. It is poetic, however, that the OWGR made this announcement on Monday, one day before the PGA Tour won a TRO (temporary restraining order) hearing that excluded three LIV players from participating in the FedEx Cup. The timing was awkward but coincidental, since this week’s install date was set more than a year ago. While the PGA Tour and LIV are now mired in an antitrust case that is likely to overlap with at least a few, and perhaps a handful of major championships being contested in the coming years, the thread being pulled on this ugly sweater seems to end with LIV’s desperate need for OWGR points.
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