Hall of Fame Golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez Dies at 88

Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez, a Hall of Fame golfer whose antics on the greens and inspiring life story made him among the sport’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 didn’t provide a cause of death.​​

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“Chi Chi Rodriguez’s passion for charity 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 missed dearly by the PGA Tour and those whose lives he touched in his mission to give back. The PGA Tour sends 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 blanketed with sugarcane fields and where he helped his father with the harvest as a child. 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 tree stick and then found work as a caddie. He claimed he could shoot a 67 by age 12, according to a biography provided by 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 to not only get there but to beat the best. “They told me I was a hound dreaming about 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, winning eight times during his 21-year career while 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 continued through 1979 with the Tallahassee Open. He had 22 victories on the Champions Tour from 1985 to 2002, and had total combined career earnings of more than $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 but his contributions to the game given his showmanship, charity and devotion to youth development were gigantic.​​

He started an academy for children in the Tampa, Florida, area in the 1970s, focusing on those who were at risk. “Why do I love kids so much? Because I was never a kid myself. I was too poor to really have a childhood,” Rodriguez once said.​​

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