The Official World Golf Ranking has flaws, but it is widely accepted. The pros play their way into major championships and big events, like this week's WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, based on their ranking.
Sure, the system has annoying quirks. Players can move up a few spots despite being idle. A newcomer can rise a little too quickly with a good early performance. Martin Kaymer, a 24-year-old German who was last year's European Tour rookie of the year, vaulted to 21st after he won the Abu Dhabi Championship last month. And how is it that Shingo Katayama of Japan seems to be a permanent fixture in the top 50? Never mind. The rankings aren't perfect, but they're good enough.
We're Americans, we love top-10 lists and rankings. Golf has another one you should check out, if only because of its mind-boggling nature. It's the Scratch Players World Amateur Ranking (SPWAR, scratchplayers.org). Where would you begin if you wanted to rank the world's best male amateur golfers? Forget apples and oranges, this compares apples and pork chops ... and angel-hair pasta and won-ton soup.
It sounds impossible, and yet Fred Solomon, 54, a numbers whiz and former financial planner based in San Francisco, has done it. His rankings have been accepted as the standard by a number of golf entities around the world, including Golfweek — SPWAR replaced the magazine's own amateur rankings. Solomon developed the rankings in part to fill a need, and in part to create a system to invite players to his own tournament, the Scratch Players Championship, which began in 2000. It is held the week before the U.S. Amateur and usually draws a top international field. (The '08 event was regrettably canceled when Solomon was unable to secure a suitable course near Pinehurst, site of this year's U.S. Amateur.)
"It was a hugely daunting task," said Solomon, who spent four years developing and refining his system. "You can't do a world ranking unless you get all of the tournaments. I knew the top state amateur events and the top national events in the U.S., but you start talking about Finland, India, Japan — it's difficult. The really hard part is figuring out how many points you give the Berkshire Amateur in England versus the Southeast Amateur in Georgia. That took me a long time to figure out."
The rankings have to be geographically balanced. If 85 of the top 100 ranked players were from the U.S., it wouldn't be credible. So Solomon scours the world looking for significant amateur tournaments. His rankings reflect results from 1,500 events worldwide and rank more than 4,800 amateur golfers. Solomon awards points based on the quality of the field (how many of the top 10, 50, 100, 200 or 500 are playing), the size of the field (the bigger, the better, such as the 312-man U.S. Amateur field) and the number of holes played (72 is better than 54).
"I didn't create a mountain out of a molehill as far as a statistical case study," he said. "You can crunch the numbers and be as quantitative as you want, but there's an art to it. You must know amateur golf."
It doesn't matter whether you're playing the Winter Season Amateur in Taiwan, the Coimbatore Amateur in India or the New South Wales Amateur, to name just a few. Solomon factors the results into his rankings. That's why his rankings bury his only competition, a recent foray into world rankings by the Royal & Ancient Golf Club (wagr.randa.org), the folks who run the British Open and the British Amateur, among other traditional events.
