Senior Skins Game : For Openers, Chi Chi Has a $40,000 Day

Chi Chi Rodriguez, joking less than usual, said he learned one thing quickly as he competed in the first Senior Skins Game.

“It’s amazing the pressure of this,” the jovial golfer from Puerto Rico said after he was the big winner Saturday, the opening day of the two-round, 18-hole competition.

“Where you really feel the pressure, when the putts are the hardest, is when you know two other guys are counting on you to make it to tie the hole,” Rodriguez said.

Continuing to prove that life on a golf course can begin at 50, Rodriguez won three holes and $40,000 on the first nine holes of the $360,000 event.

Arnold Palmer snapped a two-year drought in Skins competition by winning a hole worth $20,000.

Gary Player and Sam Snead were shut out on the opening day.

“Sure I’m happy to win a skin,” Palmer said. “I had hoped to do it on the first hole, to get the nerves settled down.”

The 75-year-old Snead, never seriously in contention to win a hole, quipped, “I played like I was 90.”

The final three holes Saturday, worth $20,000 each, were tied, making the first hole today worth $80,000.

In the match-play Skins format, the low score wins a hole, with ties thrown out and the money carried to the next hole.

The first six holes in the Senior Skins were worth $10,000 apiece, the second six holes $20,000 each and the final six $30,000 each.

Palmer, 58, has played in all five regular Skins Games before joining this foursome at Turtle Bay Resort on the north shore of Oahu for the first Senior Skins.