There are many clubs in golf worth fighting to join, but none as lucrative as Official World Golf Ranking End Of Season Top 50 National CC.
If it were a piece of architecture I'm fairly certainly it'd be a Tom Fazio course heralded as Golf Digest's Best New Private and, six years later, Golf Digest's Best New Remodel.
Here we are again watching players and their agents crunching the OWGR numbers to determine if how they get finish in the world top 50 and its $350k or so of guaranteed money and opportunities for easy ranking points. Oh, and there's a Masters berth on the line, too.
What people will do to join this elite club!
We had that sensitive flower Brandt Snedeker trekking to Indonesia last week, only to have his top 50 bid succumb to heat exhaustion during second round play.
This week world No. 51 Kiradech Aphibarnrat withdrew from the event I know you have all had circled on your calendar, the Boonchu Ruangkit Championship, where his lower back sent signals to Kiradech's brain suggesting he'd be better off not playing.
Golfweek's Kevin Casey takes it from there:
Aphibarnrat is currently No. 51 in the Official World Golf Ranking and would finish No. 49 by year’s end by not playing in anymore 2017 events – with the top 50 in the world at the end of 2017 earning Masters invites for the following April.
What would happen, though, if Aphibarnrat did play this week, in the final tournament offering OWGR points in 2017?
Well, he would need a top-12 finish … or else he would fall out of the top 50 and lose his guaranteed Masters spot!
This annual manipulation of the algorithms could easily come to an end if the golf world stopped exempting the world top 50 at season's end. Such a move, however, makes way too much sense.