Hall of Fame golfer Juan ‘Chi Chi’ Rodriguez dies at 88

Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez, the Hall of Fame golfer whose game on the greens and inspirational life story made him among the game’s most popular players during his long professional career, died Thursday. He was 88 years old.

Rodriguez’s death was announced by Carmelo Javier Ríos, Senator for Puerto Rico Rodriguez. He did not give a cause of death.

“Chi Chi Rodriguez’s passion for philanthropy and community outreach is surpassed only by her incredible skill with the golf club,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “A dynamic, colorful person on and off the golf course, he will be greatly missed by the PGA Tour and those whose lives he touched in his recovery. The PGA Tour extends its condolences to the entire Rodriguez family during this difficult time.”

He was born Juan Antonio Rodriguez, the second eldest of six children, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, where he was surrounded by sugarcane fields and where he helped his father harvest when he was young. The area is now a dense urban area, part of San Juan, the US state capital.

Rodriguez said he learned to play golf by hitting tins with a guava stick and then got a job as a caddy. He said he could shoot 67 at age 12, according to a history provided by Chi Chi Rodriguez Management Group in Stow, Ohio.

No one from Puerto Rico had ever been on the PGA Tour, and Rodriguez was determined not only to be there but to beat the best. “They told me I’m a predator who dreams of pork buns,” he once told Sports Illustrated.

He served in the US Army from 1955 to 1957 and joined the PGA Tour in 1960, winning eight times during his 21-year career and playing on one Ryder Cup team.

The first of his eight tour victories came in 1963, when he won the Denver Open. He followed it up with two the next year and followed it up in 1979 with the Tallahassee Open. He had 22 victories on the Champions Tour from 1985 to 2002 and had a combined total career earnings of over $7.6 million. He was inducted into the PGA World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.

His playing record doesn’t look like Hall of Fame material. His contributions to the game through his creativity and generosity and dedication to the development of the youth have been great.

He started a school for children in the Tampa, Florida, area in the 1970s, focusing on the at-risk. “Why do I like children so much? Because I was never a child myself. I was too poor to be really friendly,” said Rodriguez.

And his humor never left him. He had a passion for baseball, and when the US Senior Open went to Canterbury outside of Cleveland in 1996, he was asked why he gave up the game. “I used to steal bases,” Rodriguez said as the room erupted in laughter.

Rodriguez was perhaps best known for fairway antics that included twirling his club like a sword, sometimes called his “matador style,” or doing a celebratory dance, often with a lively salsa step, after making a birdie putt. He often imitated his fellow players in what he insisted was fun.

He was hospitalized in October 1998 after experiencing chest pains and reluctantly agreed to see a doctor, who told him he had a heart attack.

“It scared me the first time,” Rodriguez recalled in a 1999 interview with the Associated Press. “Jim Anderson [his pilot] he drove me to the hospital, and a team of doctors was waiting to operate on me. If I had waited another 10 minutes, the doctor said I would have needed a heart transplant.

“They call it a widow,” he said. “About 50 percent of people who get this type of heart attack die. So I’m beating the odds pretty well.”

After recovering, he returned to competition for a few years but gave up his professional career and devoted most of his time to public and charitable activities, such as the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, a charity in Clearwater, Florida, founded in. 1979.

In recent years, he spent much of his time in Puerto Rico, where he was involved in a community golf project that was struggling during the economic and housing recession, hosted a talk show on a local radio station for several years and appeared in various sports. and other events.

He appeared at the 2008 Puerto Rico Open and walked the grounds wearing a black leather jacket and dark glasses, shaking hands and asking for pictures but not playing golf. “I didn’t want to replace the young men trying to make a living,” he said.