Researching Bill Rogers

Rogers was born in Waco, Texas. He attended Texarkana, Texas High School where he excelled on the golf team. He began honing his skills at Northridge Country Club winning numerous local amateur events in northeast Texas. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and Rogers spent part of his military brat youth in Morocco and Germany. Rogers began playing golf at age nine and later attended the University of Houston, where he played on the Cougar golf team and roomed with fellow future PGA Tour pro Bruce Lietzke. As an amateur golfer, he played for the U.S. in the 1973 Walker Cup.

Rogers played the PGA Tour full-time from 1975 to 1988 and won six tournaments, including four in 1981. Almost uniquely for an American golfer, his two most notable victories were in Britain: Rogers won the Suntory World Match Play Championship at Wentworth in 1979, and The Open Championship in 1981 at Royal St George's, four strokes ahead of runner-up Bernhard Langer. He was the PGA Player of the Year for 1981, and finished second on McCormack's World Golf Rankings; he was also on the Ryder Cup team in 1981.

In 1982, Rogers won the PGA Grand Slam of Golf, and led the U.S. Open during the final day before falling short. After one further PGA Tour win in 1983, Rogers' tour career faded to the point where he experienced burnout; He told the Independent that "it got to a point in the mid 1980's that the golf course was the last place I'd rather be." he left the tour in 1988 and took a position as director of golf at San Antonio Country Club, where he worked for 11 years.

Since turning 50 in 2001, Rogers has played sporadically on the Champions Tour; his most notable accomplishment as a senior player was winning the team portion of the 2002 Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf with Bruce Lietzke.

Rogers lives in San Antonio, Texas.

He currently holds the Liberian national record for the 1500 m. He ran a 4:01.56 for the Liberian record in Cotonou, Benin on 27 June 2004.

Rogers was slated to run the 800 metres representing Liberia in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece but instead joined Sayon Cooper and Kouty Manweh in a boycott of the games due to alleged unfair treatment of the expelled Liberia National Olympic Committee (LNOC) boss, Clemenceau Urey.

In 2010 Bill formed the Bill Rogers Youth Foundation, benefiting and empowering the youth of Liberia. He is a graduate of El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas and of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas with a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology.