NBC's Golf Channel: ``Chi Chi & DEVO`` | GeraldVCasale.com

I met Chi-Chi Rodríguez face-to-face at a private golf club down in Jupiter, Florida. We were there as interview subjects for a new NBC-Television Golf Channel documentary about DEVO’s strange intersection with the professional sports legend. It was autumn of 2019, and it felt like 40 years of my lingering anxiety popped like a pimple. 

Despite being an octogenarian, Chi-Chi was still the bigger-than-life rascal that I had seen on black-and-white ‘50s TV, then later in color during the 1960s and ‘70s. He wore a stylish hat with a flashy custom band designed by his lovely Hawaiian wife, Iwalani. She also curated the colorful shirt/pants ensembles that he sported as he devoured the fairways and conquered championship links around the planet.

With his showmanship and dance move celebrations (including the “bullfighting” sequence seen in the documentary), Chi-Chi brought color to in an otherwise bland sport that’s typically devoid of humor and personality. He was the necessary foil to the Arnold Palmers and Jack Nicklauses that permeated the sport. 

We sat in the clubhouse before the cameras rolled. For the first time, I would finally be able to explain that we did not try to trick him in 1978 — it was a Corporate Lawyer Clown Show who insisted that a mutant version of Chi-Chi’s face appear on the front cover of our debut album.

He joked and jabbed as if age had granted him a pass, then explained his mission to travel to the Maldives islands to get stem cell replacement treatments so he could live to the age 125. I looked for a sign that he was joking, but the twinkle in his eye and his wife’s approving nod made it clear that he meant business. “With the way this culture is devolving,” I said, “I commend you for wanting to keep going.”

That’s when Señor Rodríguez leaned forward and got serious. “You never know what’s going to happen,” he warned. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something like this: “Hell, I was a lifelong Republican, but that guy Trump ruined it all for me. He doesn’t fly straight. He cheats at golf! There’s nothing worse than a guy that cheats at golf!” He laughed, and I added my own chuckling decibels because I find Trump to be a vile, toxic human being. (Political party affiliation notwithstanding.)

Chi-Chi’s “cheating at golf” comment is both funny and profound. Perhaps there’s no other pro sport where such an important code of honor exists. Golfers compete against their own mental and physical limitations, hole after hole, with countless opportunities to cheat. And yet they hold themselves to a self-imposed ethic, pledged to honesty at the cost of winning.

Cameras rolled, my story was told, and Chi-Chi laughed at the train wreck — the DEVO / Warner Bros farce that left him somewhat miffed and scratching his head, 40-odd years earlier. He took me for wild rides in his cart as we visited putting greens on the club’s 18 hole course, and he offered me tips on my left-handed duffing.

The pimple had popped and the blemish was repaired. We understood one another, parting ways warmly. I asked Chi-Chi and his wife to keep me updated about their Maldives travel plans, the concept had peaked my curiosity during that day in Jupiter. 

Now we fast-forward a few months. In March of 2020, the world slipped through a wormhole in space and into an alternate reality nightmare. The lights went out and we descended into Pandemic Times. I lost touch with Chi-Chi, and based on the news headlines about lockdowns and death rates, I figured he didn’t make that trip to the Maldives for his fountain of youth treatments.

October 23rd, 2021 is Chi-Chi Rodríguez’s 86th birthday. I think it’s incumbent that I reach out and catch up as we collectively begin to crawl out of our foxholes and breath again.
Happy Birthday, Chi-Chi!

—Gerald V. Casale, for DEVO, Inc.

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