The Andersen Consulting World Championship of Golf was a 32-man match play

Match play

Match play is a scoring system for golf in which a player, or team, earns a point for each hole in which they have bested their opponents; this is as opposed to stroke play, in which the total number of strokes is counted over one or more rounds of 18 holes...

 golf

Golf

Golf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....

 tournament played from 1995 to 1998. It was the predecessor tournament to the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship

WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship

The WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship is one of the annual World Golf Championships. It is a knockout event and is staged in January or February each year...

.

The top eight players available from four different regions, the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, and the "Rest of the World", were selected from the Sony Rankings. Each region played three rounds of match play to determine the regional winner to send to the finals. The regional tournaments were played at various times (February to August) throughout the year at different courses in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

The semi-finals and finals were played in late December (1995) or early January (1997 and 1998) at the Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona

Scottsdale, Arizona

Scottsdale is a city in the eastern part of Maricopa County, Arizona, United States, adjacent to Phoenix. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2010 the population of the city was 217,385...

, USA. All matches were played over 18 holes except the final which was played over 36 holes. The purse each year was US$3,650,000 with $1,000,000 going to the winner.

The World Golf Championships

World Golf Championships

The World Golf Championships are a group of four annual events for male professional golfers created by the International Federation of PGA Tours, with a fifth to be added in 2012...

 were formed in 1999 and Andersen Consulting remained as the sponsor of the match play championship. The format changed to a 64-man tournament played over one week. The field is drawn from the Official World Golf Rankings

Official World Golf Rankings

The Official World Golf Ranking is a system for rating the performance level of male professional golfers...

. Andersen Consulting became Accenture

Accenture

Accenture plc is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company headquartered in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. It is the largest consulting firm in the world and is a Fortune Global 500 company. As of September 2011, the company had more than 236,000 employees across...

 in 2001 and remains the event's sponsor.

Winners

Year	Player	Country	Runner-Up	Score	Third Place	Fourth Place
1995	Barry Lane Barry Lane Barry Lane is an English professional golfer.Lane was born in Hayes, Middlesex. He turned professional in 1976 and first played on the European Tour in 1982. For the first few seasons he failed to finish high enough on the Order of Merit to retain his card and he made several visits to the...		David Frost David Frost (golfer) David Laurence Frost is a South African professional golfer who has more than twenty professional tournament wins to his name, spread across four continents....	2 up	Mark McCumber Mark McCumber Mark Randall McCumber is an American golfer who has played on the PGA Tour and Champions Tour.McCumber was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He turned professional in 1974 and joined the PGA Tour in 1978. McCumber won ten times on the PGA Tour between 1979 and 1994 including the prestigious Players...	Masahiro Kuramoto Masahiro Kuramoto is a Japanese professional golfer.Kuramoto was born in Hiroshima. He turned professional in 1981. He has won 30 tournaments on the Japan Golf Tour, ranking fifth on the career list. He ranks seventh on the career money list with earnings of just over 1 billion ¥....
1996/7	Greg Norman Greg Norman Gregory John Norman AO is an Australian professional golfer and entrepreneur who spent 331 weeks as the world's Number 1 ranked golfer in the 1980s and 1990s...		Scott Hoch Scott Hoch Scott Mabon Hoch is an American golfer, who represented his country in the Ryder Cup in 1997 and 2002.Hoch was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was a member of the golf team at Wake Forest University before graduating in 1978. He also played on the winning U.S. team in the Eisenhower Trophy...	1 up	Hisayuki Sasaki Hisayuki Sasaki Hisayuki Sasaki is a Japanese professional golfer.Sasaki has won three tournaments on the Japan Golf Tour and featured in the top 100 of the Official World Golf Rankings....	Sam Torrance Sam Torrance Sam Torrance OBE is a Scottish professional golfer and sports commentator. He was one of the leading players on the European Tour from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s, with 21 Tour wins. Torrance was a member of European Ryder Cup teams on eight occasions, from 1981 to 1995 consecutively; he was...
1997/8	Colin Montgomerie Colin Montgomerie Colin Stuart Montgomerie, OBE is a Scottish professional golfer, often referred to by one of his nicknames 'Monty'. He has had one of the finest careers in European Tour history, having won a record eight Order of Merit titles, including a streak of seven consecutively from 1993 to 1999, and 31...		Davis Love III Davis Love III Davis Milton Love III is an American professional golfer.Love was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina before turning professional in 1985. He earned his PGA Tour card in the fall of 1985, on his first attempt. He quickly established himself on the PGA...	2 up	Ernie Els Ernie Els Theodore Ernest "Ernie" Els is a South African professional golfer, who has been one of the top professional players in the world since the mid-1990s. A former World No. 1, he is known as "The Big Easy" due to his imposing physical stature along with his fluid, seemingly effortless golf swing...	Hajime Meshiai Hajime Meshiai is a Japanese professional golfer.Meshiai was born in Chiba. He turned professional in 1978. He won 11 tournaments on the Japan Golf Tour and led the money list in 1993...