It was a Happy Halloween to everyone except Tiger Woods, whose year long Fright Night continued as he lost his World Number 1 Ranking to Lee Westwood.
At the end of the day, who cares?
The World Rankings were born of IMG’s desire to find something they could put in the sports pages along with an advertisement. The original went exactly like this:
Quintessential Old School IMG Guy (a great man to be sure): Hey buddy! I have something I’d like to see you run in the agate page. [Authors’ Note: That’s what they call the section with the box scores.] I got SONY to be the sponsor of this actuarial formula, Tour-weighted system which ranks the players.
World-class Sports Journalist and Quintessential Ink-Stained Wretch: This is garbage. Your formula weights the Tours all wrong. Change the weighting system to favor the U.S. Tour more and maybe I can sell the idea to the paper.
They changed it and – VOILA! – we have a new ad in the paper and something for the talk radio lugnuts to debate ad nauseum.
No one gets anything special from being number one in a ranking other than a warm glow. You don’t get a trophy and you don’t get cash, and that’s what you play for.
“The World Rankings are meaningless, but they provide us something to talk about on a slow news day,” said lifelong one golf writer, but in the grand scene of things, they are as meaningless as a pimple. They’re just sponsorship dollars and marginalia.”
Lee Westwood was, understandably grateful upon hearing the news, and did his job as a good company man. He said, “”It’s a great honor and a big responsibility. It certainly sounds and feels good right now,” but we all know he’d trade 200 weeks at World Number One for a handful of major wins.
Like my Golf.com colleague Cam Morfit, I don’t expect Woods’s stay out of the top spot to last long. Woods’s game last year, though at times putrid, always seemed to peak at the right time: the majors. He still nearly stole two majors with a cumulative grade of B for his game during those crucial weeks. Further, his swing is rounding into shape with new swing coach.
The only thing that will derail Woods’s comeback now is steroids. Woods was linked to steroids two separate ways last year: once through Canadian Dr. Anthony Galea, and a second time through a Woods trainer with direct links to BALCO. Dips in Woods’s performance can possibly be linked to 1) cycling off, and 2) the “bad news effect” of having troubling, embarrassing revelations pop up at inoppurtune moments.
Meanwhile, there’s much bigger news…Phish played a fistful of Led Zeppelin songs Saturday night, followed by Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus last night as their yearly Halloween costume. That’s far more interesting than made-for-newspaper rankings or made-for-TV slow speed points races like the FedEx Flop. We’ll never see that again. Woods number 1? Old news that we’ll see again.
