Northern Trust: Final round postponed until Monday due to Hurricane Henri

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – There won’t be a trophy handed out at the Northern Trust on Sunday.

The PGA Tour announced that based on the projected path of Tropical Storm Henri and the Tropical Storm Warning that has been issued by the National Hurricane Center for the area where the tournament is located, there will be no play on Sunday, Aug. 22.

Editor’s note: The storm has since been upgraded to category 1 hurricane status with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph as of Saturday afternoon.

Instead, the final round will be played on Monday.

The Northern Trust is at Liberty National, sitting tight to the water just across the bay from New York and the Statue of Liberty. It is situated near the western edge of the projected cone for Henri, which is predicted to make landfall Sunday morning.

“It looks like it’s on a path 80 to 85 miles to our east. They are expecting land fall, it could be anywhere but what I’m hearing is somewhere around Long Island,” said PGA Tour rules official John Mutch. “We are on the good side of it. But it’s going to bring two to four inches of rain, wind, sustained winds, gusts to 35, maybe even up to 60 if we get on the wrong side of this.

“For public safety, for everyone’s safety, we felt it was the right thing to do.”

BREAKING: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has issued a state of emergency for parts of the state, imploring people to take warnings seriously ahead of Hurricane Henri. https://t.co/pYbOWej9ex

— The Associated Press (@AP) August 21, 2021

After the completion of Saturday’s third round, much of the tournament infrastructure will be taken down and will have to be put back up, Mutch said.

“Move things that look like they could become airborne,” he said. “We have a lot of different people here. We have ShotLink, television, agronomy staff, and the operations staff and everybody is going to work in their areas to secure everything, tents, things like that for sure.”

Tee times and groupings for Round 4 will be published on Sunday afternoon, with play on Monday slated to begin no earlier than 7:30 a.m. Mutch confirmed that they will play threesomes and off both tees to try to get the round completed as soon as possible.

“When we have a golf course on Monday to play, we are going to play,” Mutch said. “We have at least a 7-hour window where we can play golf Monday and hopefully get a winner.”

Henri isn’t the first storm to disrupt the tournament. In 2011, Hurricane Irene made landfall and forced the cancellation of the final round of the Barclays, as the tournament was then known. It was then played at Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey, and the event was abbreviated after 54 holes with Dustin Johnson the winner. Plainfield was flooded in that storm.