Genesis Open forced to restart after major weather delay

The Genesis Open first round may be washed out, as torrential rains forced the PGA TOUR to restart the round after just two holes.

The Genesis Open continued a streak of surprisingly poor weather on the PGA TOUR’s west coast swing, as torrential rains at Riviera Country Club pushed the TOUR to make a decision they haven’t had to call in years.

Only 23 players had finished at least one hole before the conditions became truly unplayable. With such a small portion of the field in play, the TOUR will be resetting all the scores to zero and starting from scratch. The only issue: they still don’t know quite when that will be.

The official word from the PGA TOUR’s communications department is that they will issue an update at 4 P.M. Eastern. Since that’s still just 1 P.M. on the west coast, it’s certainly conceivable that they can get through a significant portion of the day, but considering that play was stopped at just 7:30, they’re already losing nearly five hours of play. Play was already beginning on both the first and tenth tees, so the likelihood of pre-cut play bleeding into Saturday is already pretty high.

The next update at the @genesisopen will be made at 1 p.m. PT. When play resumes, all R1 scores will be reset.

10 groups had teed off at the time play was halted.
— PGA TOUR Communications (@PGATOURComms) February 14, 2019

The last time the PGA TOUR had to completely scrap a round already in play came at the 2013 Dell Technologies Championship (then the Deutsche Bank Championship). That week was even tougher to work through, since the third round was played on Sunday of Labor Day weekend, raising a very real possibility that play could have pushed into Tuesday.

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Thankfully, that tournament immediately led into the old bye week in the FedEx Cup Playoffs before the BMW Championship.

Among the notable players already on the course at the time of stoppage were Dustin Johnson, Tony Finau, Cameron Champ, and defending champion Bubba Watson. The featured group of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas wasn’t even scheduled to go off until 12:22 P.M. Pacific, meaning it’s entirely possible they won’t even get to start until Friday.

In addition, Phil Mickelson – fresh off his win at Pebble Beach – had one of the most interesting starts to the round before heading in. Mickelson teed off on the par-4 10th hole just before play was halted. He sent his drive into a fairway bunker. His second shot went over the green, finding yet another bunker. Clearly unsatisfied with just going bunker-to-bunker, Mickelson’s third rolled through the green, finding the rare third consecutive bunker.

Golf can be such a fickle game, but leave it to a short-game master like Phil to make the most of a hilariously bad situation. He holed his fourth shot for one of the more interesting pars you’re likely to see on Tour.

And now, none of it counts for a thing. We’ll look forward to seeing play get started sometime soon, and hopefully some sun can break through at Riviera before we lose too much more golf. Those of us who are still frozen in our winter caverns might need it just as much as the players in SoCal this week.