Over the decades my relation to golf has evolved into a mature love affair. The first phase was as a 10 year old laddie back in 1971 to play with a few second hand blades on a course we designed ourselves in a park on weekdays and caddying in the weekends for the gentry of Stockholm for £1.50 for a round. We quickly grew into low handicap players and begun playing competitive golf. Starting as a caddy tought us a lot about golf. And life.

Golf also got me employed with the Swedish Golf Federation to manage the development of the new national golf system. Further, golf brought me to Texas to learn clubmaking and setting up a business 2004 as a clubmaker and club fitter. The same year I came to understand the fascination of links golf via David Hamilton and became a links bagger, striving to play all the 210 true links on the British Isles. And still I am striding on (like Johnny Walker), with a third of them left. Links-bagging also helps to grow an interest in the fascination of nature. The fast running game in the wind on the links offer fantastic scenery over the ocean that fills your soul with joy and desire to play soon again.

I was introduced to hickory golf in 2010 and played in the Swedish national hickory championship. This added to my interest in the history of the game, in how the game begun and to understand the different eras of golf, and how we ended up where we are today.

More often than not the best links courses were build from 1880 and into early 1900’s. Playing these links with the hickory clubs of the period turned out to be a splendid combo, and brought my love affair to golf into new hights. I now became a regular hickory woodman on the British Golf Collectors Society’s hickory circuit including to play for their European hickory team vs USA in a Ryder Cup format. I also became a member of Western Gailes GC in 2015 and same year became a Scottish resident .  This later was followed up with a personal family Ritzen tartan and we joke and say the Ritzens are a “start-up clan”; Gey nerdy aw’right! 

As the true golf history nerd I have become, and beside beeing a “woodman” I have also taken on the task as a “blades-man” to drive the inauguration of the Swedish Golf Historical Society’s first persimmon and blades competition, an informal Swedish championship for classic golf where we play for a medal “The Classic Champion Golfer of the Year”.

This has pretty much been a build-up to setting up 2021 of The Heritage Golf Tour business in Troon, enabled by my recent retirement from a life as project manager and SAFe Certified Lean-agile Coach. I hope the new business will bring much joy and valuable insights to many customer golfers in years to come.