Burmester edges closer to being SA’s top-ranked player

Dec 19, 2022 | Featured, Rankings

He might have missed the cut at the weekend, but Dean Burmester still climbed one place on the Official World Golf Ranking to 55^th, putting him just six spots off becoming South Africa’s top-ranked player.

At the end of a long year, Burmester was unable to muster what it took to get into the weekend action at the AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open co-sanctioned by the DP World Tour and the Sunshine Tour, but the algorithm was his friend as he reached a career-high position on the list.

Louis Oosthuizen is still South Africa’s top-ranked player at 49^th, but with his move to LIV Golf and the downward slide on the rankings that has produced for all involved, a good performance early in the new year should see Burmester slot in to that spot.

It will be reward for a year of hard graft for Burmester, who, although he didn’t get a win in 202, had a second and six other top-10 finishes. On the flip side of that statistic is the fact that his nine missed cuts is the second-highest number in a year since 2010 when he turned professional.

That aside, he made himself a global player in 2022, earning his playing status on the PGA Tour via the Korn Ferry Tour Playoffs. He got his first top-10 finish on the circuit which – rightly or wrongly – dominates the world rankings when he came fourth in the Sanderson Farms Championship at the beginning of October. That sat nicely with his second place in the Steyn City Championship in March in the DP World Tour and Sunshine Tour co-sanctioned event. Add those to his second place in the Dimension Data Pro-Am, co-sanctioned by the Challenge Tour and the Sunshine Tour in February, and his top-10 showings with fifth and seventh in the Investec South African Open Championship and the Alfred Dunhill Championship respectively, then he is very clearly the class of the South African field in the world right now.

The next cab off the rank in terms of the world listings is Thriston Lawrence, who also had some help from the algorithm to climb two places to 63^rd. He, like Christiaan Bezuidenhout, didn’t play in Mauritius, and Bezuidenhout was up one place to 68^th.

Oliver Bekker did play on the Indian Ocean island, and was up three places to 105^th as a result of his share of seventh.

South Africa’s top 20