Chi Chi Rodríguez, flamboyant Puerto Rican golfer

Though “Chi Chi” Rodríguez was adored by golf fans for his flamboyant style, admiration was not universal among his fellow professionals, some of whom objected to his incessant bantering and his habit of salsa dancing across the course.
“When you throw down your hat and dance on the greens, you leave spike marks for guys who haven’t putted yet,” one golfer, Bob Rosburg, groused.
After sinking a birdie putt, Rodríguez would drop his Panama hat over the hole “so the little birdie won’t fly away”. He claimed this idea came to him after he sank a putt in his youth only for the ball to be pushed out by a toad that hopped from the hole.
When the PGA Tour commissioner banned the routine, Rodríguez adopted a new skit, which he called the sword dance: waggling his club at the hole like a matador thrusting a sword at a bull, then pretending to wipe off the blood and returning the weapon to its scabbard. Golf, he declared, “is the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off”.
Rodríguez complied when one of his heroes, Arnold Palmer, asked him to mute the theatrics when they played together at the 1964 Masters. “Personally, I like him,” Palmer said. “But I think a little of his clowning around goes a long way.” In 1970, however, he was fined for “conduct unbecoming a professional golfer” after another player complained that he was distracted by Rodríguez cavorting with a bunker rake during the final round of a tournament in California.
Still, his irrepressible personality ensured his friends in the sport far outnumbered his foes, and he was close to Jack Nicklaus, whom he described as “a legend in his spare time”. Nicklaus beat Rodríguez in a playoff for the 1991 US Senior Open title and marvelled at Rodríguez’s power: he could drive the ball farther than many rivals despite standing only 5ft 7in and weighing less than nine stone. “For a little man, he sure can hit it,” Nicklaus observed in 1964.
A deficient short game prevented Rodríguez from becoming one of the best players of his generation. He also admitted to lacking concentration because he was more interested in being popular than in winning.
He was at least one of the sharpest wits in a staid environment, sometimes riffing on his status as the first Puerto Rican golfer on the PGA Tour and a working-class Hispanic man in a mainly white, middle-class sport. “After all these years, it’s still embarrassing for me to play on the American golf tour,” he quipped. “Like the time I asked my caddie for a sand wedge and he came back ten minutes later with a ham on rye.” Shots that veered too far right were “Ronald Reagans”. Discussing his woes on the greens, he explained: “I read the greens in Spanish, but I putt in English.”
Nicknamed “Chi Chi”, Juan Antonio Rodríguez was born into poverty in Rio Piedras, San Juan, in 1935. One of six children, aged four he almost died from rickets and tropical sprue, and from seven he worked in the sugar cane fields alongside his father, a labourer, building strong wrists as he carried water and guided an ox-driven plough. His mother was a housekeeper.
Rodríguez started smoking aged ten and had to brush his teeth with his fingers using soap or charcoal. He wore the brimmed straw hats that were an on-course trademark because boyhood sun exposure damaged his eyes, making them permanently bloodshot. Left with thin and tender bones from his childhood illnesses, to boost his energy levels as an adult he had vitamin B-12 injections and ate steak nearly every day. Rickets gave him crooked fingers, which he said aided his ability to grip golf clubs.
Blessed with exceptional hand-eye co-ordination, Rodríguez aimed to become a professional baseball player but discovered golf, hitting tin cans with guava tree branches and caddying at a country club patronised by wealthy tourists because it paid better than toiling in the fields. The caddies were allowed to play the course once a week. A member gave him a pair of golf shoes that were far too big so he stuffed them with paper. He put broken glass in his pocket and shook it to create the impression that he had money jangling in his clothes.
He served in the US army for two years in the 1950s before returning to Puerto Rico and improving his game under the tutelage of a golf professional at a beach resort. Friends laughed when he discussed his dream of playing on the PGA Tour. “There had never been a touring pro from Puerto Rico,” he told Sports Illustrated. “They told me I was a hound dreaming about pork chops.”
The resort was run by Laurance Rockefeller, son of the financier and philanthropist John D Rockefeller Jr. The younger Rockefeller provided $12,000 in financial backing to Rodríguez that enabled him to join the tour in 1960. Rodríguez secured his first win three years later at the Denver Open and compiled four top-ten finishes in major championships, his best result being joint-sixth in the 1981 US Open. “The first time I played the Masters, I was so nervous I drank a bottle of rum before I teed off,” he once said. “I shot the happiest 83 of my life.”
A highlight was selection alongside Nicklaus, Palmer, Tom Weiskopf and Lee Trevino for the US Ryder Cup team that beat Great Britain & Ireland at Muirfield in 1973. A return of eight PGA Tour wins and $1 million in prize money was unremarkable after a quarter-century on the circuit, but a switch to the seniors’ tour in 1985 proved far more lucrative: he won 22 tournaments and earned $6.6 million. A brother, Jesus, also became a professional golfer.
In the mid-Sixties Rodríguez married Iwalani (née Lum-King), a professional hula dancer and Miss Hawaii pageant contestant, after they met when she performed in San Juan with a Polynesian dance troupe. She died in 2021. He is survived by a stepdaughter, Donnette. In 2010 he and his wife were tied up by robbers who invaded his home on a Puerto Rican golf resort and stole cash and jewellery worth $500,000.
Much of his time was devoted to charitable efforts, including an educational foundation in Florida that helps at-risk young people by using golf to develop life skills. He set it up at the urging of Mother Teresa after he met her in the Seventies.
Rodríguez was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992, less for his playing record than for his philanthropy and showmanship. “The people come out and pay good money to see golf,” he once said. “I think they deserve something extra, and I like to give it to them.”
Chi Chi Rodríguez, golfer, was born on October 23, 1935. He died of undisclosed causes on August 8, 2024, aged 88