Bob Conrad: Professional Golfer & RADMOR Co-Founder
In the summer of 1995, Newport Country Club hosted the 95th U.S. Amateur Championship, exactly 100 years after the historic Rhode Island club hosted the first championship in 1895.
The field included a 19-year-old defending champion from Stanford named Tiger Woods.
It also included a senior from the University of Washington named Bob Conrad.
Tiger, of course, would go on to defeat Buddy Marucci in the championship match, winning the second of his unprecedented three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles.
Bob’s name would not become part of that particular piece of golf history.
But he was there.
Competing on the same stage.
Playing the same course.
Chasing the same championship.
And for anyone who knows Bob, that says something important about the golfer he was, and still is.
A LIFE BUILT AROUND THE GAME
Long before RADMOR, Bob Conrad was a golfer.
A very good one.
He grew up in Washington and went on to play collegiate golf at the University of Washington, where he and Scott Morrison became teammates, roommates and lifelong friends.
Those years at Washington were formative.
There were practices, qualifiers, tournaments and countless hours spent trying to get better at a game that offers very few shortcuts.
There were also conversations.
Some serious.
Most probably not.
And somewhere among them was an idea that the two friends might one day start a golf clothing company together.
At the time, there were more immediate concerns.
Like making the team.
Winning tournaments.
And seeing just how far golf might take them.
For Bob, it would take him considerably farther.
CHASING THE GAME
After graduating from Washington, Bob did what very few college golfers ever get the opportunity to do.
He turned professional.
For more than six years, he chased the game across what were then the Nike and Nationwide tours, the Canadian Tour and the Asian Tour.
Professional golf at that level is rarely glamorous.
There are long drives.
Cheap hotels.
Monday qualifiers.
Missed cuts.
Flights to places you’ve never been.
Practice rounds with everything on the line.
And the constant understanding that the difference between moving forward and going home can be a single shot.
Bob lived that life for years.
He competed against players who would go on to become some of the best in the world.
He learned what it meant to play golf for a living.
And, perhaps more importantly, what it meant to keep showing up when the game wasn’t giving much back.
You learn a lot about someone that way.
THE 1995 U.S. AMATEUR
The 1995 U.S. Amateur offers a glimpse into just how high a level Bob reached.
Newport Country Club that week brought together some of the finest amateur golfers in the world.
Tiger Woods arrived as the defending champion and one of the most talked-about young players the game had ever seen.
Bob arrived as a University of Washington senior who had earned his place in the same field.
There is something we love about that.
Not because Bob won the championship.
He didn’t.
Not because history remembers his week at Newport alongside Tiger’s.
It doesn’t.
But because simply getting there matters.
Anyone who has played competitive golf understands that.
Golf has a way of reducing a lifetime of work to names on a leaderboard.
What the leaderboard doesn’t show are the thousands of hours that came before it.
The balls hit.
The qualifiers survived.
The tournaments won and lost.
The early mornings.
The long drives home.
The belief required to keep going.
Bob earned the right to be there.
For a golfer, that means something.
STILL THE BEST GOLFER IN THE ROOM
The funny thing about Bob is that, decades later, the game never really left him.
Scott will tell you his own golf game peaked sometime around 1995.
Bob’s apparently missed the memo.
He remains one of those irritatingly gifted players who can go weeks without touching a club, show up on the first tee, and somehow still make the game look relatively simple.
The rest of us know better.
There is a lifetime of golf underneath it.
The competitive instincts are still there.
So is the feel.
So is the understanding of how to play the game rather than simply swing a golf club.
Ask Scott who the better golfer is and there is no debate.
Bob.
Next question.
COMING FULL CIRCLE
Eventually, Bob stepped away from professional golf and built a career outside the game.
But the conversation he and Scott started as college teammates never completely disappeared.
More than two decades later, it resurfaced.
By then, Scott had spent his career in fashion, founding Paper Denim & Cloth, Earnest Sewn and 3x1, and serving as CEO and Creative Director of EVISU.
Bob had spent years experiencing golf at nearly every level, from junior and collegiate competition to elite amateur championships and the professional tours.
One knew how to make clothes.
The other knew golf from the inside out.
Both believed golf apparel could be better.
So, nearly 30 years after they first imagined it, they built the company they had talked about as college roommates.
RADMOR.
MORE THAN A RÉSUMÉ
Bob has played golf at a level most people never will.
He competed in the U.S. Amateur.
He played professionally for more than six years.
He has shared fairways with some of the finest players of his generation.
But none of that fully explains what Bob brings to RADMOR.
It is a lifetime of understanding the game.
The traditions worth preserving.
The conventions worth questioning.
How a shirt should feel when you’re standing over a shot that matters.
Why details golfers never consciously notice can still make a difference.
And, above all, why people fall in love with this maddening, beautiful game in the first place.
Golf introduced Bob Conrad and Scott Morrison more than three decades ago.
It gave them a friendship.
It took them in different directions.
And eventually, it brought them back together.
Some ideas just take a little longer than others.
Golfer. Competitor. Founder. Friend.
An original Citizen of the Game.