Chi Chi Rodriguez, Hall of Fame golfer known for antics on the greens, dies at 88
Rodriguez served in the US Army from 1955-57 and joined the PGA Tour in 1960 and won eight times during his 21-year career
Rodriguez was perhaps best known for fairway antics that included twirling his club like a sword, sometimes referred to as his “matador routine”
Updated 09 August 2024
AP
NEW YORK: 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.
Rodriguez’s death was announced by Carmelo Javier Rios, a senator in Rodriguez’ native Puerto Rico. He didn’t provide a cause of death.
“Chi Chi Rodriguez’s passion for charity and outreach was surpassed only by his incredible talent with a golf club in his hand,” PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “A vibrant, colorful personality both on and off the golf course, he will be missed dearly by the PGA Tour and those whose lives he touched in his mission to give back. The PGA Tour sends its deepest condolences to the entire Rodriguez family during this difficult time.”
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 US island territory.
Rodriguez said he learned to play golf by hitting tin cans with a guava tree stick and then found work as a caddie. He claimed he could shoot a 67 by age 12, according to a biography provided by the Chi Chi Rodriguez Management Group in Stow, Ohio.
He served in the US Army from 1955-57 and joined the PGA Tour in 1960 and won eight times during his 21-year career, playing on one Ryder Cup team.
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.
Chi Chi Rodriguez does his sword routine after putting for birdie on the 9th green on June 27 1997, during the second day of the US Senior Open golf tournament at Olympia Fields Country Club in Olympia Fields, Illinois. (AFP)
Rodriguez was perhaps best known for fairway antics that included twirling his club like a sword, sometimes referred to as his “matador routine,” or doing a celebratory dance, often with a shuffling salsa step, after making a birdie putt. He often imitated fellow players in what he insisted was meant as good-natured fun.
He was hospitalized in October 1998 after experiencing chest pains and reluctantly agreed to see a doctor, who told him he was having a heart attack.
“It scared me for the first time,” Rodriguez recalled in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press. “Jim Anderson (his pilot) 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.
“They call it the widow-maker,” he said. “About 50 percent of the people who get this kind of heart attack die. So I beat the odds pretty good.”
After his recovery, he returned to competition for a couple of years but phased out his professional career and devoted more of his time to community and charity activities, such as the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, a charity based in Clearwater, Florida, founded in 1979.
In recent years, he spent most of his time in Puerto Rico, where he was a partner in a golf community project that struggled amid the recession and housing crisis, hosted a talk show on a local radio station for several years, and appeared at various sporting and other events.
He showed up at the 2008 Puerto Rico Open and strolled through the grounds in a black leather coat and dark sunglasses, shaking hands and posing for pictures but playing no golf. “I didn’t want to take a spot away from young men trying to make a living,” he said.
Rodriguez is survived by Iwalani, his wife of nearly 60 years, and Donnette, his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage.
Cadillac out to change F1 playbook by leaning into American identity
Backed by TWG Motorsports and General Motors, Cadillac will make its debut in 2026 as F1 expands to 11 teams
Updated 12 December 2025
Reem Abulleil
ABU DHABI: As the curtains closed on the 2025 Formula One season in Abu Dhabi last weekend, excitement was already setting in for what will be a radically different 2026 campaign.
Not only will a new set of regulations come into play next season, but a brand-new team will join the grid in the form of Cadillac Formula 1 Team.
Backed by TWG Motorsports and General Motors, Cadillac will make its debut in 2026 as F1 expands to 11 teams.
With the US hosting three of the 24 races in the calendar and proving to be a key growth market for F1 in recent years, Cadillac are leaning into their American identity and plan to launch with a bang, revealing their car livery in a TV advertisement during February’s Super Bowl. A Keanu Reeves-hosted documentary that will tell the story of Cadillac’s long journey towards joining F1 is also in the works.
“We’ve been very open that we want to be the American team,” Cadillac team principal Graeme Lowdon told Arab News in an interview at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last week. “There are few things in this world more American than the Super Bowl, so it would be really great to be part of the festivities around that amazing event.
“We said when we were coming into Formula One that we wanted to attract new fans — for the team, but for Formula One as well. And I think initiatives like this will do that.”
While Cadillac will initially rely on Ferrari to supply the engine for their cars, GM plan to be the team’s supplier by the start of the 2029 season.
“They don’t think we have it. They don’t think we’re going to deliver,” GM president Mark Reuss said in a behind-the-scenes video released on the company’s YouTube channel. “And I love to prove people wrong.”
Lowdon is fully aware of the massive challenge ahead and admits there is an element of satisfaction in proving people wrong.
“It’s partly a reflection of the entry process itself — it is incredibly rigorous this time around. And it lasted a long time as well. And there were people who were very negative towards the team coming in,” explained the British principal, whose wealth of F1 experience includes being sporting director with Marussia/Manor and being part of the management team of China’s first F1 driver, Zhou Guanyu. “There’s always that little thing in your mind that it would be nice to prove people wrong. But to be honest, that’s not really what the team’s about. It’s more about proving it to ourselves.
“Formula One is an incredibly difficult sport. It’s hugely competitive. And for sure, we want to do well, but we know how difficult it is. It’s not an easy sport to come into. I think if we can execute well as a team, then for sure we’ll take more than just mild satisfaction from it,” Lowdon continued. “We very proudly carry the Cadillac badge. It’s a fantastic brand. It’s a globally recognized brand. It’s one that we’re very proud to represent. Nothing would give me more pleasure, personally, than being able to deliver a team that allows General Motors to be proud of as well. I hope that we’re able to give that sense of satisfaction to everybody in GM.”
The surge in interest in F1 in the US has been enormous. Survey figures released in August showed that the sport’s American fanbase has reached 52 million and is the largest F1 market for YouTube viewership (135 million) and social media followers (5.8 million — up 26 percent year-on-year).
The Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive,” which premiered in 2019, and this year’s Brad Pitt-led “F1” movie have contributed to the sport’s soaring popularity and Lowdon explained why he thinks F1 has resonated so deeply with Americans.
“When I think of America, I think of team sports a lot,” he said. “American fans love team sports. (American football, basketball)… these are all team sports. Also, part of our ownership is TWG, who are the majority owners of (Los Angeles’ basketball and baseball teams) the Lakers and the Dodgers. So, we’ve seen firsthand the vision (of) our American owners and how they go about team sports.
“I think Formula One is the greatest team sport in the world. It’s sometimes seen as an individual sport, because all sports need heroes and, quite rightly, the drivers are the heroes in Formula One. But if there was no one to design the car or put the wheels on the car, it doesn’t matter how good the driver is, they’re not going to win a grand prix. So I think it’s the greatest team sport in the world. There are a thousand players on every side and it’s our job to put the best team that we possibly can together. I think that resonates with American fans.”
Lowdon has already witnessed the excitement that is building ahead of Cadillac’s debut. “When we were in Austin earlier this year and walked out of the hotel wearing a shirt with Cadillac on, people were stopping us on the street and saying, ‘We can’t wait to follow the team, we can’t wait to support it. We’re proud to see Cadillac on the grid.’ And that’s fantastic. These are quite often fans who are very new to Formula One. I hope we can play a part in the growth of the sport in North America.”
Experience matters
While there has been a lot of emphasis on bringing young blood into F1 — six of the drivers on the 2025 grid were aged 23 and under — for their debut season Cadillac have opted for an experienced lineup of Valtteri Bottas and Sergio “Checo” Perez, who, between them, have 527 grands prix under their belts.
“We did go for experience. But first and foremost, we went for speed,” said Lowdon. “We choose our drivers on merit. Valtteri and Checo have 16 grand prix wins between them. These guys know what they’re doing and they’re fast. They’re very, very fast. Both in a race environment, but also in a qualifying environment. Both of them have had multiple pole positions. So that overrides everything.
“But secondly, they’ve got vast experience of working with other teams,” he continued. “We’re pulling together a brand-new team here. We’ve got literally thousands of years of experience at Formula One within the team, but less than one year of working together as Cadillac Formula 1 Team. So having drivers who understand what it takes to gel (with) the engineering group and the mechanics and everyone else is very, very important. And with Valtteri and Checo, we get that.”
Lowdon noted that F1 can be a very unforgiving place, and that joining a new team would have been an incredibly challenging task for first-time drivers.
“We can’t do an extensive test program this year. Some of the rookies who were on the grid this year did literally thousands of kilometers of testing in TPC cars – testing of a previous car. We don’t have one, so we can’t. So, I think, all in all, we’re super happy with the driver lineup. It’s the right lineup for us as a team,” he said.
Countdown is on
There are multiple clocks hanging on the walls of all of the teams’ offices, counting down to key events, like the car fire-up, shakedown, and the Melbourne Grand Prix — the first race of the season. Time is the enemy, but Lowdon is feeling good about the progress Cadillac have made so far.
“Car build is fully underway at the moment; it’s on schedule,” he said. “There are numerous FIA homologation tests that every team has to pass and we’ve passed the majority of those. We’ve got very few left to do. So, we’re probably slightly ahead in terms of where some of the other teams are. So, we’re really happy with the progress. And it’s busy. There’s a lot happening. Because at the same time we’re doing all this, we’re building factories and hiring people and stuff as well.”
F1 is more competitive and more technically-involved than it was the last time Lowdon was directly involved in the sport, but he said that the stability in regulations makes for easier planning. “Fifteen years ago, they were changing almost every week,” he noted.
While starting with a blank canvas has its advantages, Lowdon stressed that the challenges of joining an F1 grid for the first time far outweigh the perks of spending an entire year focused on 2026. For one, the team will be operating without having any on-track data from a 2025 car, and no matter how many simulations they’ve run so far, they don’t mean much without verification against a car on the track.
With those challenges in mind, Lowdon is refraining from making any predictions regarding Cadillac’s performance next year.
“It’s very difficult to predict anything for next year in terms of championship standings, even after testing or first race or whatever, because it’s so new for everybody,” he said. “To be honest, you’ll get that same answer from everyone. Nobody knows who’s going to have a good car, bad car, whatever. So, what does success mean for us? Success for us is measuring ourselves against all of the things that we actually have in our control — how well we execute.
“We don’t know how good the car is going to be relative to the other cars, but we know that everything that we’re doing, we want to execute well,” he continued. “So, if we have that excellence in execution, then that’s our first indicator that we’re hopefully heading in the right direction.”
‘We want to do things a little bit differently’
Adding two more cars to the grid was far from an easy decision for the powers that be, and many have questioned what value another team can add to what is already a thriving sport.
“In really simple terms, we just want to bring the fans more cars, more drivers, more action,” said Lowdon. “But, actually, it’s way more than that. We’ve said all along we want to do things a little bit differently. We are a truly American team. We want to appeal to some new audiences and existing audiences as well. And we just want to contribute.
“Hopefully, one of our key value pillars is to be a leader in innovation. We want to try and innovate in lots of ways, not just technically, but also in how we interact with fans. The Super Bowl initiative is a good example of that. I’m not aware that a Formula 1 team has ever done that before, so there’s some innovation straight away,” he continued. “And (we want to) just try to give more reasons for fans to love Formula One, really. That’s kind of the essence of why we’re here.”
