Tiger Woods is without a doubt the best golfer of his time and arguably the best to ever play the game. His success is completely unprecedented and to put it bluntly, we will never see it repeated again. The Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) began in 1986 in conjunction with all of the major professional golf tours in the world. Since then, there have been a number of golfers to emerge as mainstays at the top since Bernhard Langer became the first to do it.

Tiger Earns His Stripes

Since his time at Stanford, Woods was a surefire bet to become one of the best on the PGA Tour. Less than a year after joining the Tour full time, he earned the top spot. He only held it for one week but he got back to the top intermittently for the next few years before really cementing himself in August 1999.

• Woods rose to no. 1 in August 1999 and would not be demoted for five years until August of 2004, a span of 263 weeks.

• Just under a year later, he became world no. 1 again in June 2005 and remained for 280 weeks until October 2010.

• Woods last ranked top of the heap for 58 weeks from March 2013 to May 2014.

• In all, Tiger Woods was OWGR world no. 1 for 683 weeks.

His Successors

Since May 12, 2014, the world no. 1 spot has been occupied by someone other than Tiger Woods. 10 individuals have risen to the top with just a couple spending considerable time there:

• Dustin Johnson spent 135 weeks as no. 1, the only player to surpass triple digits

• The other player to spend the most time is Rory Mcllroy with 67 weeks.

• The time period from 2014 to 2022 is about nine years of time.

• In the same amount of time preceding May 12, 2014, from 2006-14, Woods was ranked world no. 1 for 309 weeks.

Through those numbers alone, it is clear that no one has ascended to anywhere near the status of Woods. Johnson's 135 weeks isn't even within a stones throw of Woods total and he still spent over two and a half years as the best golfer on the planet.

Heir Apparent?

Given that there have been 10 different players ranked as the best player in the world in the past nine years shows that there truly is no heir apparent to Tiger Woods. But that doesn't necessarily qualify as a bad thing.

The talent on the PGA Tour has been so good for the last number of years that there doesn't seem to be a way for someone to take a stranglehold of the best golfer in the world like Tiger did. This isn't necessarily a new notion, the golfer with the second highest total at no. 1 is Greg Norman at 331 and third is Dustin Johnson. So, naturally there were great amounts of time where other players traded the title throughout the years.

Young players like Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland, Scottie Scheffler, Cam Smith (who won The Open yesterday), Xander Schauffele and others. More established players like Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, etc. And some of the elder statesman now in Rory Mcllroy, Shane Lowry, Tony Finau, Hideki Matsuyama and others in their 30s that are more than capable of beating the younger guys.

We will likely never see dominance like that of Tiger Woods again. At least not for a long while. Watching Woods be nearly unbeatable for over a decade was fantastic for some and boring for others. Now the field is wide open and we just get to sit back and wait until someone emerges as the best in the world.

Mound Visit

Saints Sports Network is a Christian group that brings you interesting sports coverage. Our name comes from Ephesians 2:18-21 where it notes that all Christians are saints in God's eyes. Therefore we are saints who write about sports but also want to make sure to share the Gospel. That's where Mound Visit comes into play because we all need a visit to the mound from God in good times and bad to recenter our lives and trust in him. We'll do that by highlighting a Bible verse for you to think and pray about in each newsletter that you receive from us.