Chi Chi Rodriguez, the Golf World’s Swashbuckling Champion, Dies at 88

Chi Chi Rodríguez, whose extravagance in the field and passion for the golf game transformed him into one of his most popular players during his more than three decades in professional tours, died Thursday. He was 88 years old.

His death was announced by the PGA tour. The announcement did not cite a cause or said where he died.

In a sport typically associated with lush field clubs where the respectful crowds idolate or the soft players with comfortable roots, Rodríguez broke the mold.

Growing up in a poor family in Puerto Rico, he almost dies at 4 years of vitamin deficiencies. At 7 years, he helped in the sugarcane fields where his father, Juan Rodríguez Mr., went with a machete for a few dollars a day.

The child who would be known as Chi Chi also so crazy in a course that attracted rich tourists. He taught to play with the extremities of the Guayaba trees to boost the dyes to the holes that he had fallen in the baseball fields, and when he was 12 years old he shot 67 in a true golf game. After playing in Puerto Rican tournaments, he joined the PGA tour in 1960.

Rodríguez had 5 feet 7 and approximately 120 pounds. But he used his strong hands and dolls to get out of long and low units, and was an excellent wedge player, compensating his sometimes considerable putting game. “For a small man, insurance can hit him,” Jack Nicklaus told Sports Illustrated in 1964, Row Rodríguez Rodríguez or surpassed the shirt in the flat and interior streets.

Rodríguez won eight tournament at the PGA Tour, then became one of the best players on the senior tour (now champions), captured 22 events, including two largest: the 1986 senior players championship and the 1987 Senior Championship of 1987. It was included in the World Golf Hall in World Golf in 1992.

And played with a flowering rarely seen.

When he made a Birdie, he covered the hole with his narrow high -high straw hat, then he had a bullfighter dance.

“One morning we were playing for five cents per hole,” Hey once said to People magazine, remembering his games for a long time against other caddies. “I made a 40 -foot putt, but there was a toad on the hole. When it jumped, the ball came with her. I lost the nickel.” That inspired him to make sure that his ball never escapes prematurely, or that was the story.

After draining a difficult putt, Rodriguez would sometimes like the putter into a simulated sword that unleashes in a bull, then erases the imaginary blood and put it in an invisible sheath.

Such theatricality, plus his talk with the galleries, did not love some of his playmates.

The PGA did not give up $ 200 for the PGA in October 1970 after Dave Hill complained that Rodriguez had distracted the duration of Kaiser in California when he tried to have fun the spectators with a simulated attempt to hit a bunker rake.

Rodríguez always maintained that he should not miss the game. But, as he once expressed: “Golf is a show. I love making people laugh.”

Despite all his success, Rodríguez never forgot his origins, having inspired bone to help others for his paternity to those who had a little than him.

After visiting a Florida Youth Detention Center to give a golf clinic, he promised to do more. In 1979, he became the founder of the Chi Chi Rodríguez Youth Foundation, which provides advice, educational and vocational training for disadvantaged students, and contributed substantially to the funds in their form. The Clearwater complex, in Clearwater, Florida, now includes a public-private academy for students from the fourth to wide degrees.

“I love the children because I was never a child,” Rodriguez said once. “It was too poor to be a child.”

Juan Antonio Rodríguez Jr. was born on October 23, 1935 in Rio Piedras, PR, one of the six children. Beyond the golf, he played baseball when he was young and called his life Chi Chi Chi after the Puerto Rican professional baseball player Chi Chi Flores.

It served in the Army in the mid -1950s and then became the professional assistant at El Dorado Beach Resort in Puerto Rico, on the outskirts of San Juan. He recovered a participation of $ 12,000 from Launce S. Rockefeller, who developed the property, to help finance the beginning of Rodríguez in the PGA Tour. His eight victories included the Western Open of 1964 and the Byron Nelson Classic of 1972.

Rodríguez joined the senior tour in 1985 and became one of his main money winners, accrediting the Bob Toski teaching professional with the improvement of his game. “Bob told me to put Talaller,” he said. “At least, as high as some as I can endure. It helped me to place and helped me to my placement.”

In his last years he lived in the Golf Resort the Legacy, which he built, in Guayama, on the southern coast of the island. In May 2010, the masked night introducers tied him along with his wife, Iwalani, and stole them in cash and jewels valued at $ 500,000.

Rodriguez survives a daughter, Donnette Markham; Two brothers, Jesus and Julio; and three sisters, Juanita, Carmen and María. His wife, Native or Hawaii, died in 2021.

Rodríguez complemented his style in the golf course with a large number of ironic observations, or his own cost.

In his youth: “He was poor when he started. I mean, he had such a small room that he couldn’t change his mind.”

In his personality: “I am a hot dog professional. It was then that some in the gallery look at their pairing sheet and says:” Here are Joe Baloney, Sam Sausage and Chi Chi Rodríguez. Let’s look for a hot dog. “

About his problems: “I read the greens in Spanish, but I put myself in English.”