His given name was Juan, though the golf world knew him as Chi Chi, a better fit for the outsized personality who dwarfed his 5-foot-7, 135-pound frame. He was a golfer, yes, and a good one, but it was his showmanship and repartee that helped place him perpetually on center stage.
Chi Chi Rodriguez died Thursday at age 88, the news reported by the Puerto Rico Golf Association with no cause listed, closing a chapter of golf history that began in a dirt-poor town in Puerto Rico and ended with one of the more decorated players in history. Rodriguez won eight PGA Tour events and 22 senior tour titles, the victories paving the way for his 1992 induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Rodriguez also received the USGA’s highest honor, the Bob Jones Award (1989), and the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America’s highest honor, the Old Tom Morris Award (1989). It was a life well played, even including serving as the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif., in 1995.
He was born into poverty in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, one of six kids. His father earned $18 a week as a dishwasher and cattle handler. When Chi Chi was 7, to help out his family, he went to work earning $1 a day delivering water to those working at a sugarcane plant.
His introduction to golf came a year later, when he began working as a forecaddie. Soon after, he fashioned a golf club, more or less, from a guava branch and used it to hit tin cans. He soon began caddieing and playing golf in earnest with other caddies one day a week.
As he improved, he began to boast that one day he would be beating Hogan and Snead, thought to be a pipe dream inasmuch as no Puerto Rican golfer had ever made it to the PGA Tour. “They told me I was a hound dreaming about pork chops,” Chi Chi told Jaime Diaz, then of Sports Illustrated.
Following a two-year stint in the Army from 1954 to 1956, Rodriguez returned to Puerto Rico and was hired as the caddie master at Dorado Beach Resort. There, he began taking lessons from its resident pro, Pete Cooper, who won five PGA Tour events and the PGA Senior Championship in 1961.
Rodriguez competing at the 1973 Open Championship at Troon.
Evening Standard
Rodriguez turned pro in 1960 and joined the PGA Tour full time in 1961. Two years later, he won the Denver Open Invitational, the first of his eight PGA Tour victories. He was exceedingly long, by any standard, much less of a man of such small stature. He, too, had a world-class short game.
Chi Chi was an entertainer from the start. When he would hole a birdie putt, he’d place what became his signature Panama fedora over the hole, to keep the ball from escaping, he said, and then did “a one-man tango,” around the hole, Diaz wrote.
It was a practice that didn’t necessarily go over well with Rodriguez’ peers. “When you throw down your hat and dance on the greens, you leave spike marks for guys who haven't putted yet,” Bob Rosburg told Sports Illustrated.
Several players preferred not playing with him, Dave Marr among them. So Chi Chi devised another way to celebrate a birdie, the sword dance that would come to define him. “I figured the hole was the bull and the putter was my sword,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. “Then I would wipe the blood off and put it back in the scabbard.”
He became known as the clown prince of golf, who augmented his manifest golf skills with stand-up comedy:
- “When I caddied, I was so small that they used me as a tee marker. If a guy had an unplayable lie, he'd use me for two club lengths.”
- “After all these years, it's still embarrassing for me to play on the American golf tour. Like the time I asked my caddie for a sand wedge and he came back 10 minutes later with a ham on rye.”
- “I am a millionaire today and my wife deserves all of the credit. Before I met her, I was a multi-millionaire.”
- “Jack Nicklaus is a legend in his spare time.”
Rodriguez, along with Lee Trevino and Arnold Palmer, helped establish the Senior PGA Tour (now the PGA Tour Champions) in the 1980s and early 1990s.
PGA TOUR Archive
Rodriguez had a serious side, too. He was a humanitarian and it usually involved kids. In 1979, he started the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation in Clearwater, Fla., for disadvantaged youth. “I ask God every night why me,” Rodriguez told the Orlando Sentinel. “Then I see a kid with a problem. And that’s the way I get my answer. I don’t do these things for any special reason. I just want to provide kids with something good.”
He was motivated, he said often, by his own childhood. “Why do I love kids so much? Because I was never a kid myself,” he said. “I was too poor to really have a childhood.”