Chi-Chi Rodríguez and Puerto Rico's sporting rise

Juan "Chi-Chi" Rodríguez, born in 1935 and alive until 2024, grew up poor in Río Piedras. His father earned eighteen dollars a week as a plantation laborer, and Rodríguez himself worked as a water carrier on a sugarcane plantation from age seven, well before discovering golf while working as a caddie at a local course. He had no real equipment to learn with. He taught himself to play golf using a branch cut from a guava tree as a club and a metal can in place of a ball, and by his own account was already shooting a 67 at age twelve, in 1947.

He turned professional in 1960 and built a long, sustained tour career: eight PGA Tour titles between 1963 and 1979, followed by twenty-two more wins on the Senior PGA Tour between 1986 and 1993. He also carried Puerto Rico's name to the international stage in a format other than the Olympics, representing the island in the World Cup golf tournament twelve separate times between 1961 and 1993, a two-decade run representing home in golf's own national-team event.

In 1992, Rodríguez became the first Puerto Rican inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, a milestone marking how far the barefoot caddie from Río Piedras had traveled. He was known on tour for a genuinely joyful signature move, a "toreador dance" he performed after sinking a birdie or eagle putt, a small piece of showmanship that made him one of the sport's most recognizable personalities. Later in life he founded the Chi-Chi Rodríguez Youth Foundation, turning his own improbable start in the game into a program built to give at-risk youth a path into golf themselves.

Sources: Chi-Chi Rodríguez. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.