Chi Chi Rodriguez, whose flamboyance on the course and passion for golf made him one of the most popular players in his more than three decades on the professional tour, has died. He was 88 years old.

His death was announced by Carmelo Javier Ríos Santiago, a member of the Puerto Rican Senate, and the PGA Tour. The cause of death or other details were not given.

In a sport played in posh country clubs, where respectful crowds often idolize boring players with comfortable roots, Rodriguez broke with convention.

He grew up in a poor family in Puerto Rico and nearly died of vitamin deficiency at age 4. At age 7, he helped out in the sugar cane fields, where his father, Juan Sr., chopped away with a machete for a few dollars a day.

The boy who would later become known as Chi Chi also began working as a caddy at a golf course that attracted wealthy tourists. He taught himself the game by using branches from guava trees to hurl crushed tin cans into holes he dug in baseball fields, and by age 12 he was shooting a 67 in a real golf game. After playing in tournaments in Puerto Rico, he joined the PGA Tour in 1960.

Rodriguez stood 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed about 120 pounds, but he used his strong hands and wrists to hit long, low drives, and he was an excellent wedge player, which made up for his sometimes stubborn putting game. “For a little guy, he can hit the ball pretty well,” Jack Nicklaus told Sports Illustrated in 1964, recounting how Rodriguez often out-hit him off the tee on flat, windy fairways.

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

And he played with a lightness that was rarely seen.

When he made a birdie, he covered the hole with his narrow-brimmed straw hat and then performed a bullfighter dance.

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

After sinking a difficult putt, Rodriguez also transformed his putter into a sort of sword that would be unleashed on a bull, then wiped imaginary blood from it and placed it in an invisible sheath.

Such theatrics and his chatter with the audience did not make him particularly popular with some of his playing partners.

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

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

Despite all his success, Rodriguez never forgot his roots. His father’s generosity towards those who had even less than him inspired him to help others.

After visiting a youth prison in Florida to teach a golf course, he vowed to do more. In 1979, he co-founded and helped fund the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, which provides counseling, education and job training for disadvantaged students. The Clearwater complex in Clearwater, Florida, now includes a public-private academy for students in fourth through eighth grades.

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

Juan Antonio Rodriguez Jr. was born on October 23, 1935, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, one of six children. In addition to golf, he played baseball as a young man and named himself Chi Chi after Puerto Rican professional baseball player Chi Chi Flores.

After his military service in the mid-1950s, Rodriguez became an assistant professional at the Dorado Beach Resort in Puerto Rico and received a $12,000 share from Laurance S. Rockefeller, who developed the property, to finance his beginnings on the PGA Tour. His eight victories included the 1964 Western Open and the 1972 Byron Nelson Classic.

He joined the Senior Tour in 1985 and quickly became one of the top prizewinners. He credited golf instructor Bob Toski for improving his game. “Bob told me to stand taller,” he said. “At least as tall as someone like me can stand. That helped my swing and my putting.”

In his final years, Rodriguez lived in the golf resort he built, El Legado, in Guayama (Praxen). In May 2010, masked night-time intruders tied him and his wife Iwalani up and robbed them of $500,000 worth of cash and jewelry.

Rodriguez leaves behind a daughter, Donnette Markham, his brothers Jesus and Julio, and his sisters Juanita, Carmen and Maria. His wife, a native Hawaiian, died in 2021.

Rodriguez complemented his flair on the golf course with a lot of wry remarks, often at his own expense.

About his youth: “I was poor when I started. I mean, my room was so small that I couldn’t even change my mind.”

About himself: “I’m a hot dog pro. That’s when someone in the gallery looks at his mating sheet and says, ‘Here come Joe Baloney, Sam Sausage and Chi Chi Rodriguez. Let’s get a hot dog.'”

On his putting problems: “I read the greens in Spanish, but I putt in English.”