Bill Hayes: Rebel With A Cause
Bill Hayes and The Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation
The year was 1978, and Bill Hayes was a self-described "square peg in a round hole." At thirty, he'd already lived a full life; he had grown up in Scotland and England and spent several years in New York City with some of the most famous musicians of his time.
As a drummer, he had graced the stage with the Lovin' Spoonful, The Turtles and the Young Rascals. In 1971, he'd become a member of the Professional Golf Association - the PGA - and he'd worked for several years as a player and instructor of professional golf. Then, in 1975, a freak accident on the golf course ended Hayes' days as a professional golfer, and, suddenly, the man who'd grown used to the spotlight of New York nightclubs and the glamour of professional golf tournaments was living in near oblivion in Clearwater, Florida, searching for a direction to his life. Two years later, while working as a guard at the Pinellas County Juvenile Detention Center in Clearwater (to finance his master's degree in education at the University of Tampa), Hayes had an idea that would change not only his own life,  but also the lives of thousands of Bay Area children who never would have had a chance at life.
Never having forgotten his own roots in the golf world, Hayes took a chance one day, on a whim, and snuck a set of golf clubs into the prison. "The kids had no idea about golf," Hayes recalls. "They knew a lot more about drugs and robbing 7-11s and cars." The idea was to see how the kids would react to a new challenge, not the challenge of surviving on the streets, but the challenge of a game that none of them had ever experienced. "I made up a golf tournament called the 'Popcorn Open'," says Hayes. The then thirty-year old prison guard designed a course through the halls of the prison in which the young golfers had to navigate a Wiffle ball around corners in an attempt to truly "sink" the ball...in the toilet. "We used eighteen different toilets," laughs Hayes, "If they hit the ball in the toilet in three shots, they could win bags of popcorn." he pauses and laughs again. "Do you know how weird this is that I set this up?"
To Hayes, the purpose of a juvenile detention center mock tournament was not merely to share with the young inmates a game that he loved. It was to gauge their reaction and to see how well they rose to the new challenge that confronted them. As he watched their interest grow, what had started as a seed of an idea in the mind of Bill Hayes began to take root and blossom. "I saw that they were competing and that they were interested in the golf because they couldn't do it," says Hayes. "Being a former golf pro, I could do it. I could make the ball curve around the hallway, and this was very aggravating to them. they had to figure out how to do that."
Once Hayes realized that the game of golf did indeed spark the interest of his young charges, it was time to take his plan a step further. In order to teach the kids to apply the lessons of golf to living in the real world, the kids would have to learn the lessons in the real world, outside the walls of the juvenile detention center. It was here that Hayes faced his first major obstacle. He wanted to pair up some recently released young inmates with successful golfers on the links, to provide the children with positive role models of success. The problem? "Your successful people don't really like the kids in prison." says Hayes bluntly. "So what I had to do was come up with a plan."
Hayes bought the children new clothes and got them haircuts, dressing them to look just like the upper-middle class golfers he expected them to compete with. "In order to get them involved on a golf course, the idea was to not to trick the kid; the idea was to trick the successful person," says Hayes with a smile. "So, I dressed the kid like the successful person. If (the successful person) sees someone who looks like himself, he'll say, 'That must be a nice little kid.' It was to fool the successful person into treating the kid with respect. It was the first time (these kids) felt respect from a different part of the society." Pretty clever, isn't it? They all went for it. "What really happened was that both sides were afraid of each other," Hayes continues. "neither one was comfortable in the other one's arena. So, I brought them together, based on the way they looked. "It really changed the kids' point of view." Elated by his success, Hayes approached the head of the juvenile detention center with a suggestion. "I thought to myself, 'This would be cool,'," says Hayes. "So I went to the head of the prison and told him to put a championship golf course connected to the prison." Hayes pauses for a moment and laughs. "That's when they threw me out. They figured a way to throw me out, based on that. "I wasn't following 'directions'. I was different. My ideas were radical and didn't fit with their ideas. In a bureaucracy, that means you're not there anymore." Suddenly, Hayes found himself without a job. However, Hayes had come too far to turn back. He had seen, if only briefly, the potential of the idea that was slowly sprouting in his mind. His own history wouldn't permit him to give up on children who still had a chance.
Hayes' own childhood had been marred by an episode that had stayed with him for years. In fact, it wasn't until 1980 that he was finally able to talk about the abuse he'd suffered. "I was sexually abused when I was twelve," says Hayes. "I ran away after that, in the streets of London. I lived with street people, took care of their babies and ate out of garbage dumpsters. I learned to speak like them, I faked the accent, and I hustled pool for a living." Hayes was finally caught and returned to his parents, but he lived with the pain of an episode that he didn't understand and felt ashamed to admit. "Nobody ever really knew why I (ran away)," says Hayes. "My mother died not knowing why. I never told anybody until I was 33 years old." Knowing how significantly the sexual abuse and its aftermath had changed his life, Hayes felt compelled to help youngsters who were troubled and unable to reach out for help. Despite rejection by his employers, he knew he couldn't let his idea die.
In 1978, he arranged to take several of his former charges to the J.C. Penny Golf Classic in nearby Largo. It was then that professional golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez entered the picture. "Rodriguez came down the fairway," recalls Hayes, laughing "dressed in pink!" This was very offensive to the kids at the time. Pink was just not a color that guys wore. They said, 'What is this strange man doing?' But they were amazed at how good he was at hitting a golf ball. "That day, I brought Rodriguez to the prison," Hayes continues. 'Chi Chi went over and did a clinic for the children, and he deliberately hit the warden's car with a ball... he was aiming at it on purpose. The kids thought that was great." Hayes approached Rodriguez with his new idea; he wanted to put a school on a golf course to help at-risk children turn their lives around using the game of golf as a tool. Rodriguez agreed to help sponsor the program, and the Chi Chi Rodriguez Foundation was born. With the help of Bob James, founder of Raymond James Financial, Inc., the Foundation began with two students in 1979. Yet Hayes would have to wait years until the school would become reality, and, in the meantime, he had serious challenges to face.
Although the Modesta-Robbins School provides only a fifth-grade classroom, and the after-school program only takes kids through the end of high school, no one ever stops being on of "Chi Chi's Kids." Countless children whose chances of completing high school were slim have gone on to college, sponsored by the Foundation. Children who came to the Foundation as young teenagers barely knowing how to read, have graduated from High School and gone onto college with scholarships. Steven Monroe is one such graduate of the Chi Chi Rodriguez Foundation. Today, he attends Talladega University and is one of the best college golfers in the country. The Foundation has given him the hope for a bright future.
Since 1985, the Foundation has won numerous national awards, including the American Education Award and the 758th Point of Light Award, presented by President George Bush in 1992. Hayes and Chi Chi have appeared in interviews with the ABC, NBC, and CBS National Evening News Programs, CNN Sports, ABC Wide World of Sports, and the Oprah Winfrey show. In addition, Hayes has also met with Dan Quayle concerning the future of the program and with national education professionals to discuss his ideas. Today, Hayes can sit back and watch his dream in motion, everyday of his life.
"I have brought people together from different walks of life so that they can cooperate," he says. "The reason this works is that the kids are part of the environment here. The learning process is every minute of every day." As Hayes leans back in a chair in the pro shop, he smiles as he looks through the windows at the course he designed and built. "This is a brilliant place," he says. Hayes no longer writes the curriculum for the school, nor does he supervise the day-today operations of the program. He has created his dream and trained others to carry it out. Thousands of children have received a second chance at life through the Chi Chi Rodriguez Foundation. "I've created my painting," says Hayes slowly, "and the people live in my painting." He is an artist whose one "painting" has changed the world for thousands.
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