By DOUG FERGUSON 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 …
FILE – Chi Chi Rodriguez, of Puerto Rico, smiles while signing an autograph at the Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord, Mass., Friday, June 9, 2006. 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.
He was born Juan Antonio Rodriguez, the second oldest of six children, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, when it was blanketed with sugar cane 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.
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 1985-2002, 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.
“It scared me for the first time,” Rodriguez recalled in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press. “Jim Anderson drove me to the hospital and a team of doctors were waiting to operate. If I had waited another 10 minutes, the doctor said I would have needed a heart transplant.
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