NASSAU, Bahamas – Masters champion Scotty Scheffler from the McCombs School of Business in Texas didn’t put his skills to use to figure out the new World Golf Ranking formula.
He is number 2 in the world. If he wins the Hero’s World Challenge he can return to number 1, simple as that.
“I don’t like being No. 2,” he said. I don’t like finishing second.
Scheffler took a step in that direction with Albany’s relentless wind. He rattled off four birdies in five holes on the back nine for a 4-under 68, leaving him one shot behind winner Victor Hovland in the group.
Hovland knows quite a bit about wind. The Norwegian saw enough of it during his amateur days in Europe, then starred at Oklahoma State.
Hovland made an eagle for the second straight day – the other 19 players combined for one eagle this week – had three straight birdies on the back nine and had a 70. He was 5-under 139.
At Tiger Woods’ gala event in the Bahamas for a field of 20 elite players, the score is much lower. The course was wet and played long on Thursday. Friday was dry with 30 mph winds.
Xander Schauffele turned in a nice round of 68 to join Schauffele, Cameron Young (69) and Colin Morikawa (71) in the group one shot back.
Tom Kim dropped two shots on the final three holes to give him a 72 and leave him two shots behind. That’s not why the 20-year-old South Korean raised both his hands after signing his card. Flicking through his phone, he learns that South Korea has reached the knockout stages of the World Cup.
“Goosebumps,” Kim said as he stretched out his arms.
Scheffler spent more weeks at No. 1 than anyone else this year, earning him the Mark H. McCormack Award. That’s the result of his four wins against tough pitches in the spring, including his first game. Masters was the last victory.
Rory McIlroy replaced him by winning in South Carolina in October, and now Scheffler has a chance to take it back, even if only for a short time. Regardless of what happens in the Bahamas, McIlroy is expected to be No. 1 by the end of the year.
From ranking the top 200 players in the field based on their world ranking to ranking everyone in the field based on a “stroke gained” formula, the model adjusted for the relative difficulty of each round by measuring the actual score.
It favors deep fields no matter how many great players there are. And it won’t be fully integrated until next August.
But there is no shortage of complaints, this week even Woods is a flawed system. Some of the criticism stemmed from the new formula not giving as much credit to small fields as compared to full fields.
“I think I would say the top players right now don’t bring as much weight to events as they should,” Scheffler said.
The Hero World Challenge has 15 of the top 20 in the world. There are only 20 players in it and so the winner gets slightly less points than the winner of the Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland.
But it’s hard to rank golfers when they don’t play the same schedule, Scheffler said. “So when we all start playing together and you play a lot of better players, it’s a lot easier to rank those guys.
“It’s a tough system, it’s not something that’s easy to fix,” he said. “In other sports you have a record and golf isn’t necessarily a record. It’s a challenging system. I think they’ve gone from one extreme to the other and hopefully we’ll meet in the middle and find something a little bit better.”
The final measure remains a low point, and that is Hovland. Woods, who will not play this week because of plantar fasciitis in his right foot, is the only player to win the World Series in consecutive years.
He didn’t know how to do it, especially in this wind.
“It’s weird, I just feel like I know it’s windy and I miss a lot of putts,” Hovland said. “And I still don’t feel that I hit it well. The ball is not comfortable, but the ball is going straight and I give myself a look.”
