Quiz – The First Official World Golf Ranking

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published 23 January 2022

Can you name the top 10 in the first Official World Golf Rankings?

The first Official World Golf Ranking was published in the week before the US Masters of 1986. The R&A had wanted a better system for deciding exemptions for The Open Championship. Tony Greer, a civil engineer, had been working on a system of ranking principally for his own amusement which Mark McCormack’s International Management Group picked up on. The rankings were launched in April 1986, backed by the R&A, sponsored by Sony and run by IMG.

Tony Greer remembers that its debut “landed like a lead balloon” in the US because the top three players were European.

The first Official World Golf Ranking was decided by performances over the preceding three years with a system of weighting whereby points earned in the most recent 52 weeks were trebled, and those points from 1 to 2 years ago doubled. Tournaments were put into four separate grades, with bonus points allocated based upon the number of players from the world top 20 participating in that particular event. The ranking was calculated based upon the total points for each player.

The top two golfers in the first rankings were well clear of the field – first place had 1,056 points, second place had 1,002 points; the golfer in third had only 726. Tenth place had 593 points incidentally.

Can you name the top 10 in that first Official World Golf Ranking? You have three minutes to do so. You need only enter the player’s surname to answer.

We have plenty more golf quizzes for you to test your golfing knowledge against. Or if you fancy to further test your knowledge of golf’s world rankings, how about taking on our quiz on the World No 1 Golfers. Or perhaps you may wish to challenge your friends to see if they can match your score on this quiz?

Contributing Writer Golf courses and travel are Roderick’s particular interests and he was contributing editor for the first few years of the Golf Monthly Travel Supplement. He writes travel articles and general features for the magazine, travel supplement and website. He also compiles the magazine's crossword. He is a member of Trevose Golf & Country Club and has played golf in around two dozen countries. Cricket is his other main sporting love. He is the author of five books, four of which are still in print: The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse; The Don: Beyond Boundaries; Wally Hammond: Gentleman & Player and England’s Greatest Post-War All Rounder.