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Spencer Robinson

To be number one. It's the ambition of every professional sportsman.

 In the upper echelons of golf, however, rising to the summit of the controversial and much-maligned world rankings is not considered the be-all and end-all. Far from it.

 Yes, it's important. Primarily because of the extra marketability it provides the player through lucrative product endorsements, and the negotiating power it gives to avarice-driven agents who claim a hefty percentage of appearance fees they secure for their client.

 But in golf, it's Major championship titles that remain the barometer by which greatness is measured, not the number of weeks that a player has sat atop the rankings.

 When David Duval continued his remarkable purple patch by capturing the Players Championship last week he usurped Tiger Woods as the 'official' world number one. He is only the 11th player to have held the position since the inception of the rankings in 1986.

 Yet for months prior to his seemingly inevitable elevation, even his peers, Woods among them, had publicly proclaimed Duval 'the best player in the world'.

 But such is the complexity of the way in which the rankings are calculated that Woods, until last week, had been in possession of top spot for a consecutive spell of 41 weeks.

 To be fair to the powers that be (a governing body chaired by International Management Group's Mark McCormack) who compile the rankings and set the parameters for the system, recent modifications confining allocation of ranking points to two years rather than three have been a move in the right direction. Perfect, though, the rankings are not.

 A large part of the problem has always been that it's impossible to judge comparative merits of players when they're competing on different Tours in different conditions for most of the year.

 Entirely predictably, the rankings last week received ringing endorsements from McCormack and US PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. 'The rankings are a very sound structure, basically, to measure players from around the world,' said Finchem.

 However, McCormack and Finchem, in private at least, are aware that the rankings are treated with scant respect by many of the players themselves.

 Indeed, no one has been more outspoken about their shortcomings than Greg Norman. That might be understandable if he'd suffered grave injustice from the system. But the Australian held the top spot for almost half of the 677 weeks the rankings have been in existence.

 Derided though the rankings frequently are, nobody has yet come up with a better alternative, although the onset of the World Golf Championship tournaments should, in theory, lessen the arguments as it promises to bring the best players directly into opposition more often.

 But back to Duval, who on his form of the past 18 months is a truly worthy world number one. Nevertheless, Duval knows he still has much to prove, to himself and golfing statisticians. For no matter what the rankings may tell us, if he is to be mentioned in the same breath as Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Ballesteros and Faldo, then he needs to get into the habit of winning Major titles.

 Until he captures that elusive first Major, he can expect to be continuously branded as 'the best player not to have won a Major' and also 'the only world number one not to have won a Major'.

 All 10 of the previous holders of the number one spot are Major champions - Bernhard Langer, Seve Ballesteros, Norman, Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam, Fred Couples, Nick Price, Tom Lehman, Woods and Ernie Els.

 Many pundits are convinced that Duval's Major breakthrough will come this year, quite possibly this week in the US Masters at Augusta National.



Being world number one does not make Duval a Major player