George Bradford ’97 – Businessman, Golfer

People know about Tiger Woods, who stormed the 1997 Masters Tournament and dominated the PGA Tour for the next several years. “It was a truly seismic moment in the tour,” ESPN sportscaster and University of Maryland alumnus Scott Van Pelt said March 4, 2016, during a daylong symposium on race, social class and professional golf. “Galleries started looking more like America.”

But George Bradford ’97, a Terrapin golfer who graduated from UMD’s Robert H. Smith School of Business the same year that Tiger won his first Masters, provides a reminder that gaps remained. He was the second-highest ranked black golfer from 2007 to 2010, yet he struggled during most of this period to find sponsors and stay in the game.

“By the end of 2009, I couldn’t afford to go to the PGA Tour Qualifying School,” Bradford said during a panel discussion at the event, organized by UMD’s College of Arts & Humanities. “I was broke.”

His world ranking peaked at No. 463. But even when he dropped outside the top 1,000, no other black golfers emerged between him and Woods at No. 1. The gap was even more pronounced on the women’s side. “Not only do we have an ethnicity problem in golf,” Bradford said, “but we also have a gender problem.”

If anything, black representation in the sport has declined in recent decades. Bradford, who grew up with access to black coaches and mentors in Maryland, also had role models on television such as Lee Elder, Calvin Peete and Jim Thorpe. Yet during Bradford’s junior and collegiate careers, he encountered virtually no one else of color. “Zero,” he told Van Pelt during the event, co-sponsored by the University of Maryland Golf Course and Phillip Merrill College of Journalism.

When skeptics told Bradford to “get a job” after college, he had a quick response. “I have a job,” he said. “I’m a professional golfer.”

He played in various mini tours across North America after leaving the University of Maryland, and achieved a milestone in 2004. That’s when he hit a hole-in-one during a qualifying tournament at Little Bennett Golf Course in Clarksburg, Md., and earned a spot in his first PGA Tour event.

“Everyone’s going to tell you why you can’t be successful or why you can’t do what you want to do,” he said. “If you tune those people out and stay focused, you can do it.”

Bradford shares this message as a youth mentor and tutor at First Tee of Howard County in Maryland. “I continue to share my story,” he said. “I believe that minority kids should have the opportunity to at least plant the seed in the game of golf.”

Bradford still golfs professionally, but he also works as a dual-licensed investment advisor and broker at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith in Bethesda, Md. He said his Smith finance degree has helped in both career tracks. “I like to credit the Smith School with my career,” he said.

Others in his family have their own Smith experiences. His wife, Kristie Curameng Bradford, MBA ’05, applies her Smith education as a business development executive at IBM Watson Ecosystem. And his uncle, William D. Bradford, served as a Smith School finance professor and later as associate dean of academic affairs from 1991 to 1994.

“I was raised a Terp,” George Bradford said. “And I’m always a Terp.”

- Daryl James, Office of Marketing Communications