Juan “Chichi” Rodriguez, the Hall of Fame golfer whose eccentric antics on the green and inspiring life story made him one of the game’s most popular players throughout his long professional career, died Thursday.
He was 88 years old.
Rodriguez’s death was announced by Senator Carmelo Javier Rios of Rodriguez’s native Puerto Rico.
He did not disclose the cause of death.
“Chichi Rodriguez’s passion for philanthropy and advocacy is unmatched by his incredible talent with a golf club in his hands,” PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “A vibrant and colorful personality on and off the golf course, Rodriguez’s absence will be a great loss for the PGA Tour and the lives of those he touched in his mission of community service. The PGA Tour offers its deepest condolences to the entire Rodriguez family during this difficult time.”
He was born Juan Antonio Rodriguez, the second of six children, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, when the area was covered with sugarcane fields and he spent his childhood helping his father with the harvest.
The area is now part of the U.S. territory’s capital, San Juan, and is a densely urbanized landscape.
Rodriguez said he learned to play golf by hitting tin cans with a guava stick and then found work as a caddie.
According to a resume provided by the ChiChi Rodriguez Management Group in Stow, Ohio, he claimed to be shooting 67 by age 12.
He served in the U.S. Army from 1955-57 and joined the PGA Tour in 1960, winning eight times over a 21-year career and playing on the Ryder Cup team.
The first of his eight wins on tour was at the 1963 Denver Open.
He won twice more the following year and continued to win the Tallahassee Open until 1979.
He won 22 times on the Champions Tour between 1985 and 2002, earning more than $7.6 million in career prize money, and was inducted into the PGA World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.
Rodriguez was known for his antics, such as his “matador routine,” in which he would spin his club like a sword on the fairway, and his salsa-step celebratory dance after making a birdie putt. He would often imitate fellow players, but insisted it was just good-natured fun.
He was hospitalized in October 1998 complaining of chest pains and reluctantly went to see a doctor, who told him he was having a heart attack.
“It was the first time I was scared,” Rodriguez recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 1999. “Jim Anderson (the pilot) took me to the hospital, and a team of doctors were waiting to operate. If I had waited 10 more minutes, the doctors said, I would have needed a heart transplant.
“It’s called the widow machine,” he says. “About 50 percent of people who have this type of heart attack die, so I’d beaten the odds by a lot.”
After his recovery, he returned to competitive play for a few years, but gradually retired from professional athletics to devote more time to community and charitable work, including the ChiChi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, a charitable organization he founded in Clearwater, Florida in 1979.
In recent years, he spent much of his time in Puerto Rico, where he served as a partner in a golf community project struggling with the recession and housing crisis, hosted a talk show on a local radio station for several years, and made appearances at various sporting and other events.
He showed up to the 2008 Puerto Rico Open in a black leather coat and dark sunglasses, wandering the grounds, shaking hands and posing for photos but not playing golf. “I didn’t want to take away a seat from a young guy who’s trying to make a living,” he said.
Rodriguez is survived by his wife, Iwalani, to whom he was married for nearly 60 years, and his daughter, Donette, from her previous marriage.
