Northern Trust postpones final round: What you need to know

The Northern Trust, with Hurricane Henri expected to touch down less than 100 miles away, is postponing its final round.

Liberty National, the Jersey City, N.J., host of the tournament, is expected to receive 2 to 4 inches of rain with wind gusts up to 60 mph “if we get on the wrong side of this,” PGA Tour senior tournament director John Mutch Jr. said on Saturday. That forecast led to the decision to move the event’s final day from Sunday to Monday. 

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

In a statement, the Tour said tee times and groupings would be released on Sunday afternoon and that play on Monday would start no earlier than 7:30 a.m. Mutch said that players would be grouped in threesomes and play off split tees. There was no immediate word on a broadcast schedule. 

While storms are also forecast for Monday, Mutch was confident the first leg of the Tour’s three-week postseason would be played in full. In 2011, the tournament, then known as the Barclays and played at Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey, was shortened to 54 holes due to Hurricane Irene. 

Next week’s event, the BMW Championship, is scheduled to begin Thursday in Baltimore. 

“We fully expect to be able to play Monday,” Mutch said on Golf Channel. “We really need seven hours. We’ll obviously go off two tees in threes. My meteorologist here on site thinks we have that. It might be raining, it might be wet, but we’re very fortunate that we have a golf course here that is built on sand and it’s used to this type of thing and we have an all-star maintenance crew here. 

“Actually when I leave here we’re going to go have an agronomy meeting and I have all the confidence in the world in this team so I think we’ll be here Monday and I hope to get a winner on Monday.”