Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez, an eight-time PGA Tour winner and one of the most charismatic and beloved figures in pro golf, has died at age 88.

Chi Chi Rodriguez, the Golf World’s Swashbuckling Champion, Dies at 88

He won eight PGA Tour tournaments and two senior majors — but it was his flair on the greens that made him one of the sport’s most popular players.

A golfer mid-stroke, wearing a white hat and shirt with bright colors mixed in.
Chi Chi Rodriguez at the 1994 PGA Seniors’ Championships in Florida.

Chi Chi Rodriguez, whose flamboyance on the course and passion for the game of golf transformed him into one of its most popular players through his more than three decades on the pro tours, has died. He was 88.

His death was announced by Carmelo Javier Ríos Santiago, a member of the Puerto Rican Senate, and the PGA Tour. No cause of death or other details were given.

In a sport played out at lush country clubs where respectful crowds idolize often bland players with comfortable roots, Rodriguez broke the mold.

Growing up in a poor family in Puerto Rico, he almost died at age 4 from vitamin deficiencies. At age 7, he helped out in the sugar cane fields where his father, Juan Sr., whacked away with a machete for a few dollars a day.

The boy who would be known as Chi Chi also began caddying at a course that drew affluent tourists. He taught himself to play using limbs from guava trees to propel crushed tin cans into holes he had dug on baseball fields, and at age 12 he shot a 67 in a real game of golf. After playing in Puerto Rican tournaments, he joined the PGA Tour in 1960.

Rodriguez was 5 feet 7 and 120 pounds or so. But he used his strong hands and wrists to get off long low drives, and he was an outstanding wedge player, offsetting his sometimes balky putting game. “For a little man, he sure can hit it,” Jack Nicklaus told Sports Illustrated in 1964, relating how Rodriguez often out-distanced him off the tee on flat, into-the-wind fairways.

Rodriguez won eight tournaments on the PGA Tour, then became one of the top players on the Senior (now Champions) Tour, capturing 22 events, including two majors, the 1986 Senior Players Championship and the 1987 Senior PGA Championship. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.

And he played with a flourish seldom seen.

When he made a birdie, he would cover the hole with his narrow-brim straw hat, then perform a toreador dance.

“One morning we were playing for five cents a hole,” he once told People magazine in recalling his long-ago games against fellow caddies. “I made a 40-foot putt, but there was a toad in the hole. When he hopped out, the ball came with it. I lost the nickel.” That inspired him to make sure that his ball would never again escape prematurely — or so the tale went.

After draining a difficult putt, Rodriguez would also turn his putter into a simulated sword being unleashed on a bull, then wipe imaginary blood from it and place it in an invisible scabbard.

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Chi Chi Rodriguez performing his sword dance at the Security Pacific Seniors Classic in 1990.Credit…Mike Powell/Allsport, via Getty Images
Such theatricality, plus his chattering with the galleries, didn’t endear him to some of his playing partners.

He was fined $200 by the PGA in October 1970 after Dave Hill complained that Rodriguez distracted him during the Kaiser Open in California when he sought to amuse the spectators with a simulated attempt to bat a golf ball with a bunker rake.

Rodriguez always maintained that he meant no disrespect to the game, but as he once put it: “Golf is show business. I love to make people laugh.”

For all his success, Rodriguez never forgot his origins, having been inspired to help others by his father’s generosity to those who had even less than him.

After visiting a Florida juvenile detention center to give a golf clinic, he vowed to do more. In 1979 he became a founder of the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, which provides counseling, educational and vocational training for disadvantaged students, and he contributed substantially to its funding. The Clearwater complex, in Clearwater, Fla., now includes a public-private academy for students from the fourth to eighth grades.

“I love kids because I never was a kid,” Rodriguez once said. “I was too poor to be a kid.”

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Rodriguez with children at the 3M Championship in Baine, Minn. in 2005.Credit…Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Juan Antonio Rodriguez Jr. was born on Oct. 23, 1935, in Rio Piedras, P.R., one of six children. Beyond golf, he played baseball as a young man and called himself Chi Chi for the Puerto Rican professional baseball player Chi Chi Flores.

After serving in the Army in the mid-1950s, Rodriguez became the assistant pro at the Dorado Beach Resort in Puerto Rico and received a $12,000 stake from Laurance S. Rockefeller, who developed the property, to help finance his beginnings on the PGA Tour. His eight vict