Chi Chi Is Right

Chi Chi Rodriquez celebrates
making a putt.

Juan ("Chi Chi") Rodriquez, 78 years old and 30-time winner on the PGA and Champions tours, grew up dirt poor in Puerto Rico. He began working as an apprentice forecaddie at 7 making ten cents a day, and moved up to full caddie at age 9. That gives Chi Chi a big leg up on me. By the time I started finding and hawking golf balls, for a nickel, a dime or a quarter, through the chain link fence at the local muni, I was all of 8 years old, and I began caddying across the street at the country club when I was the advanced age of ten. The $3.50 fee for an 18 hole loop seemed a fortune by comparison.  

Most of the important things Chi Chi and I learned in life we didn't learn in school. In Chi Chi's case, that was guaranteed, because he was a high school dropout. I my case, I leveraged my caddie years to go on and get a couple of fancy degrees at fancy universities, and later completed business programs at three prestigious schools, but those experiences were nothing compared to working nine years as a caddie, laboring as a janitor and a dishwasher, toiling in cardboard box and plastic factories, and manufacturing culverts -- all before I finished college.

Here is what Chi Chi says:

Negativism is the sister of failure. I you're negative, you fail. America has become a negative country. It's because our leaders our lawyers. The leaders should be business people. Lawyers are necessary for different things, of course, but they go to school to learn how to win arguments. America is divided now, probably more than it has been since I first came on tour. GolfWorld, March 31, 2014.

Rodriquez is right and kinder than Shakespeare.

It starts right at the top with the SOB Washington lawyer ensconced in the White House. I would know for I spent more than three decades in the vicinity, wrapped in knots at one time or another to the hilt in substantive, regulatory and political battles with DOL, DOE, OSHA, CBO, OMB, GAO, OPM, FCC, PRC, among others, and continuously beckoned to heed the arbitrary call of the Hill and the White House. 

The fellow at the top is not unique. There are literally tens of thousands of Washington lawyers like the manipulative, lying jerk in the White House. If you are at all wise, you wouldn't want any one of them leading you to an outhouse, much less to our country's destiny. We have become a failing country. Good luck to all.