Chi Chi Rodriguez grew up Third World poor in Puerto Rico, started caddying, and taught himself golf. Despite topping out at 5’7” and 120 pounds due to childhood malnutrition, Chi Chi wound up winning 8 PGA tour titles in the 1960s and 1970s and, after he turned 50, 22 Senior tour victories as one of the best senior golfers of the 1980s and 1990s.
With his matador’s sword dance after sinking a long putt, he was popular with fans and got to endorse some golf merchandise:
According to an extremely detailed investigation by Sean Cole of WBUR, two art students from Akron, Ohio, future Devo band members Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, were walking through a store when they were outraged-enthralled by this picture of Chi Chi:
"I saw it and I just loved it. It was a picture of him in front of a golf ball," Mark says….
"We chuckle. We have to have that," Jerry says. "And, of course, golf was almost symbolically like the most lame, kind of, you know, bourgeois pursuit that you could have, especially at that time. Unless your parents were rich, you didn’t get to go golfing."…
"And how boring it looked on TV and the announcing," Jerry continues. "But the one guy who stood out was Chi Chi, because he didn’t fit with the rest of the golfers at all. He wore these loud pants and bright shirts, and he had this famous hat that only he wore, which had a specific hat band, and, you know ... "
So they took the package home. Mark used the picture in a self-published manifesto he was writing about being a "spud boy" in the rubber town of Akron.
So Devo put Chi Chi on the sleeve of their first single:
Then Warner Bros. signed Devo to make a full album, which began a long series of negotiations with the corporation’s lawyers who were afraid Chi Chi would sue them. So, the picture was altered to look sort of less like Chi Chi.
"And about three weeks later," Jerry says, "a letter comes back from Chi Chi’s representatives, saying, 'Yes, Chi Chi thinks it’s fine to use that image. He just wants 50 records at Christmas time to give out to his friends and family.'"
"He wanted to say to his friends and family, like, 'Look! I’m on a record!'" I say.
"Right. He liked that."
"So, at that point, it’s like we couldn’t go back," Mark says. "They’d already printed the cover, so now we had this mutilated potato face for an album cover, and it didn’t really look like the handsome Chi Chi anymore, so I’m sure he was quite surprised when he got a box of them in the mail."
"All our efforts were, in fact, in earnest," Jerry says. "But what it looked like in the end is that Devo had meanly tricked Chi Chi Rodriguez and put out something that made him look hideous. It was — you know, it was a mess."
In 2017, Cole interviewed Chi Chi:
"Did you notice when you got the record that it didn’t quite look like you that much?" I ask.
"Well, it looked like me. I look at the pluses: it looked like me a little bit," Chi Chi says. "At least the hat looked like me."
He didn’t seem to know anything about all the mishegas that went down at Warner Brothers, didn’t know at all they were worried he would sue them.
"Sue them?" Chi Chi asks. "Well, anybody that worries about somebody suing them, that means that they’re so crooked that they sue people and they think people are gonna sue them. I thought it was these young people trying to make a career out of it, and I could help them and that’s it. Because I like to do something good every day of my life, and I wanna leave the earth better than I found it."
"So even young, sort of avant-garde punk musicians you wanna help?"
"Yeah."
"Did you listen to that record?"
"Yeah. I listened to it one time."
"Just once?"
"I put it away," Chi Chi says with a chuckle.
"You didn’t like it?"
"No, I didn’t like it.”
Here’s an entire documentary on the Chi Chi Rodriguez - Devo connection:
Didn't he once say "Golf is the most fun thing you can do with your clothes on" or something like that ?
God Bless Chi Chi.