Friday, August 15, 2008

Double The Fun

Between peeks at yesterday’s Canadian Open leaderboard, I was checking web links I don’t regularly visit and chanced upon the current Rolex Rankings (“oh no – here he goes again!”). For grins, I was looking at the players near the bottom of the page and noticed “Feng Shan Shan” of China at position #803 with only one event played over the last two years. Realizing that the Feng who recently collected two LPGA Top 10s would be ranked much higher than that, I found “Shanshan Feng” ranked at #182 with 21 events in the bank.

Having done a little research on Asian golf web sites, it’s very easy for me to understand what’s happening here. At some event in the last two years, Feng was entered into the Rolex database as “Feng Shan Shan” and no one has since realized the player in that event is the same Feng who is currently an exempt rookie on the LPGA.

Honest mistake, right? Well, it isn’t the only one. If you’ve scanned a few LPGA leaderboards this year, I’m sure you’ve seen the name Onnarin Sattayabanphot – that’s
the Thai girl whose nickname is “Moo”. She’s ranked #452 while her alter-ego “Sattayabanpot Onarin” is ranked #755. Player #750 is Li-Ying Ye of China and player #754 is Li Ying Ye of China – I don’t know which of these two is the real Ye. Maybe there ARE two Yes (or is it "Ye's"?).

A little quality control of the Asian persuasion might be needed here…

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