Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez, a Hall of Fame golfer whose antics on the greens and inspiring life story made him one of the game’s most popular players during a long professional career, died Thursday. He was 88.
Rodriguez’s death was announced by Carmelo Javier Ríos, a senator in Rodriguez’s native Puerto Rico. He did not give a cause of death.
“Chi Chi Rodriguez’s passion for philanthropy and outreach was surpassed only by his incredible talent with a golf club in his hand,” PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “A vibrant, colorful personality both on and off the golf course, he will be deeply missed by the PGA Tour and those whose lives he touched in his mission to give back. The PGA Tour extends its deepest condolences to the entire Rodriguez family during this difficult time.”
He was born Juan Antonio Rodriguez, the second oldest of six children, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, when it was covered in sugarcane fields and where he had spent his childhood helping his father with the harvest. The area is now a dense urban landscape, part of San Juan, the capital of the U.S. island territory.
Rodriguez said he learned to play golf by hitting tin cans with a guava stick and then found work as a caddy. He claimed he could hit a 67 at age 12, according to a biography from the Chi Chi Rodriguez Management Group in Stow, Ohio.
No one from Puerto Rico had ever made it to the PGA Tour, and Rodriguez was determined not only to get there, but to beat the best. “They said I was a dog who dreamed of pork chops,” he once told Sports Illustrated.
He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957 and joined the PGA Tour in 1960. In his 21-year career, he won eight times and played on one Ryder Cup team.
The first of his eight tour victories came in 1963, when he won the Denver Open. He followed that up with two the following year and continued until 1979 with the Tallahassee Open. He had 22 victories on the Champions Tour from 1985-2002, and had total combined career earnings of more than $7.6 million. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.
His playing record does not look like Hall of Fame material. His contributions to the sport through his showmanship and charity and dedication to youth development were immense.
He started an academy for children in the Tampa, Florida area in the 1970s, focusing on those at risk. “Why do I love children so much? Because I was never a child. I was too poor to have a real childhood,” Rodriguez once said.
And his humor never left him. He had a passion for baseball, and when the 1996 U.S. Senior Open went to Canterbury outside Cleveland, he was asked why he gave up the sport. “I used to steal bases,” Rodriguez said as the room erupted in laughter.
Rodriguez was perhaps best known for his fairway antics, which included spinning his club like a sword, sometimes referred to as his “matador routine,” or doing a celebratory dance, often involving a shuffling salsa step, after making a birdie putt. He often irritated fellow players in what he insisted was meant as good-natured fun.
In October 1998, he was admitted to the hospital with chest pains. He reluctantly went to the doctor, who told him he was having a heart attack.
“It was the first time I was shocked,” Rodriguez said in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press. “Jim Anderson (his pilot) drove me to the hospital and a team of doctors were ready to operate on me. If I had waited another 10 minutes, the doctor would have said I needed a heart transplant.
“They call it the widowmaker,” he said. “About 50 percent of people who have this kind of heart attack die. So I pretty much beat the odds.”
After his recovery, he returned to competition for several years, but then gradually retired from his professional career and devoted more time to community and charitable activities, such as the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, a Clearwater, Florida-based charity founded in 1979.
In recent years he has spent most of his time in Puerto Rico, where he was a partner in a golf community project struggling with the recession and housing crisis. He also hosted a talk show on a local radio station for several years and appeared at various sporting and other events.
He showed up at the 2008 Puerto Rico Open, strolling around the grounds in a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses, shaking hands and posing for photos, but not playing golf. “I didn’t want to take away a spot from young men who were trying to make a living,” he said.
