A Somewhat Sexier Look at the World Golf Rankings

Last week I lamented the dourness of the OWGR's website and their "just the facts ma'am" style of presenting data.

The subject of who actually is the #1golf in the world is generating quite a lively debate at the moment. One that would/could only be enhanced by some sexy visuals.  So with some help from my friends at IBM and their awesome Many Eyes project I've made a modest start at sexing up the stats.

Now the thing is... much as I love analytics, infographics and such... producing/explaining them is not my forte,  I'm more of a look at the pictures and turn the pages type, as the old song says.  But... someone's got to do it, so I'm making an attempt.

For my first visualization I decided to look at one of the more... um... contentious elements of the current discussion: Increased globalization and the end of U.S. dominance in men's professional golf.  For convenience sake I took an existing visualization made from 2007 data, and built the same one using current data.  This provides something of a baseline comparison.

It's not perfect.  I would like to have adjusted some of the perimeters and functionalities (probably not the right words) but I was working with a preset program and couldn't quite... figure out how to do it.  Check out the interactive diagrams at Many Eyes: the 2007 stats  and the current stats.  I'd be curious as to what you think.

I've got to admit I looked longingly at the big Tiger bubble on the 2007 model.

OWGR Needs to Serve Up Some Sexy Infographics

For the time being, the era of an ultra-dominant W#1 golfer is over.

This reality has opened the door for some bombastic opinionating thoughtful discussion on the system by which golf's top player is determined.

As Lee Westwood recaptured the top spot... then quickly grew weary of of the public polemic surrounding it... myriad opinion posts and countless Twitter debates have challenged the current point system or... extolled its virtues.
 
Some suggested there was simply too much nuance inherent in the game for any ranking system based strictly on data to be relevant ...which was kind of interesting until that post abrubtly ended with a facile quip on Luke Donald's recent fashion daring.

PGATour.com's Melanie Hauser wrote what I found to be the best breakdown of the current OWGR controversy, providing some historical perspective and finishing with a call to "sit back and enjoy the shuffle".  Which is definitely what I'll do. --->

I do have one suggestion for the OWGR that might go a long way towards making their rankings more engaging for a wider swath of the population... those like myself who just aren't that into raw data on who's #1: Have a look at the Rolex Rankings.

Women's golf certainly knows something about a shuffle at the top, but they don't seem to get bogged down by it.  And the Women's World Golf Ranking... the Rolex Rankings... do some extremely sexy things with their stats. They also provide a depth of information about the game that makes the battle for number one... and the trajectories of individual players... much, much, much more engaging than the bare-bones OWGR site.

The Rolex site is easy-on-the-eyes and interactive; fans can select favorite players and compare their progress infographically.  It's brilliant and I'm quite sure that if applied to the OWGR it would encourage... and enrich... engagement with men's professional golf. The tiresome discussion of who should, could, would be #1 is fine for hardened golf journalists/bloggers/scribes but the rest of us would surely appreciate a little infographic love.