He Always Has a Crowd Rooting for Him to Win

Chi Chi Rodriguez has made $4,809,895 in his golf career. Which, on balance, is a good thing.

You see, Chi Chi has the same problem a sailor has on his first shore leave in a year. He throws his money away.

Only Chi Chi doesn’t spend it in bars, casinos or on dance hall hostesses. He gives it away.

He’s a sucker for a hard-luck story. He’s had so much trouble in life, he believes you.

I don’t suppose they will ever have to give any benefits for Chi Chi, but if they must, all they have to do is round up the people he helped out of a jam and they can fill a ballroom. Chi Chi has spread more of his money around than the World Bank.

Golfers are not ordinarily soft touches. They work hard for their money. Oh, I know it looks easy. You’re out in the sun and fresh air, the sponsors send cars for you, a caddie does all the heavy lifting. But putting for a living is a hard way to go. That ball squirts one inch--or less--to the right enough times and, instead of $200,000, you get $982.11. Golfers, as a class, have a high respect for a buck. They tell the story of a Masters winner who was so loathe to whip out his own money, he borrowed the dime to mark his ball. I can think of some who wouldn’t grab the check for Mother Teresa and a party of orphans.

Chi Chi might grab the check for the King of England. Chi Chi is a check-grabber. And a check payer. He is a Card Walker Award winner for his contributions to junior golf. Quite a few senior golfers are into him, too.

Golfers don’t ordinarily leak money, because golfers don’t have guaranteed contracts. In baseball, you can bat .203 and go to arbitration and get $2 million. In golf, you, so to speak, bat .203 and you will be back stacking bags and cleaning clubs for a living.

Fighters have notoriously been the biggest giveaway artists in sports. What he didn’t lose on the golf course, Joe Louis lost to panhandlers. Dempsey, they say, used to stock up on $20 bills for his trips to promoter Tex Rickard’s office because Eighth Avenue would be lined up with hard-luck stories every step of his way, and Dempsey never turned anyone away.

Chi Chi likes to think he’s selective in his charity. “I like to give to kids. I figure adults have had their chances. It might be their fault if they’re down on their luck. Kids are just victims,” he explains.

Friends dispute him. Chi Chi doesn’t ask for a birth certificate, they tell you, just a plausible story.

The prototypal story of golf giving has to do with another Latin American golfer, the great Argentine Roberto De Vicenzo. Roberto won the Dallas Open one year and, as he was given his check, a woman with a young daughter came up to him and pleaded for money. Her daughter had leukemia and needed treatment, she said. De Vicenzo, the story goes, peeled off several hundred dollars--and this was well before golf tournaments paid off in six figures. The woman accepted it and drifted off, grateful. Some time later, a friend got wind of the story. He clutched De Vicenzo. “Roberto,” he protested, “you’re the world’s biggest sucker. Her daughter doesn’t have leukemia!”

“My friend,” De Vicenzo is said to have responded gently, “that is the best news I ever heard in my life!”

Chi Chi has been an ambassador of good will for golf all his life. He has never forgotten what it’s like to be poor and chop sugar cane for a living, and he’s grateful there’s a game like golf to take him out of that.

But he wasn’t always understood. An ebullient type, he liked to make the game fun. At the haughty and very proper Masters one year, as grim-faced golfer after grim-faced golfer paraded across the TV screen looking like guys going to the electric chair, Chi Chi suddenly sank a birdie putt, ran up to it--and dropped his hat on the cup.

Golf was mortified. But the public loved it. And him.

Actually, Chi Chi had a reason: “It dates back to a time when I put the ball in the cup in Puerto Rico--and for some reason, it bounced right back out. So I put my hat over it to keep it in there.”

Still, the Masters crowd was not amused. So, Chi Chi changed his routine. He sank a putt and took to hauling his putter out of his belt and stabbing the air with it like a scene from a Zorro movie. Golf decided to let him alone before he brought fireworks.

A lot of us were skeptical the first time we saw Chi Chi. It was at an L.A. Open years ago at Rancho Park when he came up to the press corps and announced he could hit the ball as far as Jack Nicklaus.

I remember looking at this improbable little character, wearing glasses, weighing a scrawny 115 pounds and barely topping 5 feet 7, and speaking in an accent he must have learned from Desi Arnaz reruns, and we snickered.

But, just on a whim, we went out the next day to see this comical little blowhard get his comeuppance.

Juan Rodriguez was as good as his word. The ball flew off his club head 300 yards on one hole. He loves to tell the story of the first time he played with Nicklaus and, after hitting their tee shots, Jack trudged confidently up to the farther of the two. It wasn’t his. Chi Chi smiled wickedly. “That’s the longest walk in the world, Jack--back to your ball when you’re away!” he teased Nicklaus. “I had him by 50 yards!” Rodriguez boasts.

That’s when Juan became Chi Chi, as good as anyone out there, despite that swing that looked like nothing so much as a guy beating a carpet.

He won eight tournaments on the regular tour. He has won 21 on the senior tour. He hopes to make it 22 this week at the GTE West Classic at the Ojai Valley Inn Country Club, where he set the course record of 62 last year and finished second to Bruce Crampton.

A lot of people hope he makes it. It’s not that Chi Chi needs the money. His friends do.