When Thomas Matsson views a long, undulating putt across the green, or stands in a bunker looking at the flag facing a near-impossible shot, he knows the odds are against him.
But he is used to that. These obstacles don’t faze him at all. He has plenty of courage.
Not at first. When diagnosed in 2005, he refused to accept it. He rebelled against the specialists, couldn’t bear to listen, sought other answers while feeling, with growing panic and despair, that his life was slipping through his fingers.
“I can’t really describe it. I started fighting everything,” explains Thomas. “‘I’m not sick’, I would insist. ‘I will fight you all the way! ‘Mr P’ will not win. I am going to be the master in my life, I will never surrender’.”
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects a person’s movement throughout the body (also having non-motor symptoms), getting worse over time, primarily due to the loss of cells that produce dopamine, which helps transmit signals that control movement and coordination.
Courage was at a premium however when in February, 2023, Thomas Matsson was in the first tiny number (five patients in fact), and he records he was the first patient in Europe to receive an experimental new treatment. Scientists at Lund University in Sweden implanted more than seven million newly created, lab-grown cells into Thomas’s brain.
The patient himself and his professors are now awaiting the full result of this treatment over five years, which if successful, could slow down degeneration and take away the necessity to take so many daily drugs. On the flip-side, the treatment in the early days brought huge uncertainty, stress and real fear as well as sickness, and Thomas was warned that the futuristic, invasive procedure would bring an immediate increased risk of brain tumours.
For some time now, Thomas’s personal haven from this at times terrifying maelstrom has been the golf course. He took up golf in 2012, seven years after his diagnosis. Apart from forming an immediate obsession with the technique of the game, he will tell you that golf has given him a “huge release”. It is perhaps easy to underestimate the value to anyone with his condition, the power that golf offers to help Thomas to simply relax and enjoy the fresh air around him, while the personal challenge tests his motor skills, the movement and coordination that has all been compromised.
The intelligent and determined Swede says he is now on something of a mission to show others with an illness or disability that if you can keep active (golf being a great way to do this), it can help in innumerable ways.
“Golf is a perfect sport for the Parkinson’s-rammed,” he says in typically direct terms. “It makes you come out for walks. It makes you socialise with other people and it makes you practise your ability to time your movements.”
And golf doesn’t have to mean 18 holes, Thomas adds, explaining there are short formats including, of course, simple putting and chipping, something for any player across the ability range.
A great thing about the game is the social connection, he adds.
“Parkinson’s patients can easily become lonely and some hide as much as they can because it can be very unpleasant to be out among people sometimes and feel them staring and whispering stupid things. Such behaviour is understandable, but not at all good for the person.”
After the excitement of discovery, playing at first “just too much golf” and pushing himself too hard physically, Thomas has eventually found a more settled rhythm of practise and play. Today he enjoys his game at his home course of Kävlinge GC, 10km north of Lund in Skåne. “It’s a nice but tricky parkland course in a lovely area next to a small river,” he explains. “The club is a friendly, welcoming place which is important.”
We spoke with Thomas on the three-year mark after his stem-cell implant.
It may be another two or three years before the success of the treatment can be assessed fully, but Thomas is optimistic, feeling that it is making a great difference. His symptoms are more under control; for the first time in two decades he says he can forget, for just a while at times, that he and ‘Mr P’ are together. Guarded optimism then, for Thomas and for others in the future: he “feels great”, and golf and positivity for him have become intertwined.
However, getting out there to play hasn’t been easy all the time, practically or mentally. Now 62, there is no doubt the last 20 years have been very tough for Thomas, and he praises “the love of my life” Linda for helping him through some very dark times.
Thomas told one newspaper that Parkinson’s was like walking waist-deep in syrup for years. He speaks of his collar always being pulled in the opposite direction as he walked, and he feared walking in any crowd.
The brutal diagnosis when it came hit a man with a highly active lifestyle, and just as he was recovering after a family break-up and significant changes to his life.
“Before the diagnosis, I lived in Ånge, a small town in the middle of Sweden. You could say it was an active lifestyle. I played hockey and football, off-piste skiing, I coached hockey, football and I loved fly-fishing,” Thomas explains. “I had been to Alaska twice fishing for rainbow trout together with the bears! In California I was chasing cutthroat trout and brown trout five times there, and once to Montana, Colorado and the Rockies, searching for dry-fly fishing at its best.”
As a skier Thomas visited Chamonix in France 11 times and once to Banff in Canada looking for the best “champagne powder” snow. Living life at such a pace gave him a wealth of experiences and friendships.
When he was fit and well in the 1990s Thomas was working as a headmaster in the local school. Then married to his first wife, with three daughters: Emma, born 1987 and twins Tova and Hanna born 1991. Unfortunately the marriage didn’t last and Thomas moved to Skåne.
“In 2005 I got my diagnosis: Parkinson’s! I was only 42 years old and it was unbelievable…. Is this true? Why me?”
Thomas adds: “I have struggled. I worked full time until 2021 but then my employer didn’t want me anymore so I went to the Försäkringskassan (local authority services) and I haven’t worked since. The love of my life has been my support. Without Linda I wouldn’t be alive.”
Thomas would meet Linda at work. He had changed his job to become an ombudsman in the public sphere, supporting teachers and nurses in their respective unions.
“It was love at first sight, knocking us totally off our feet,” says Thomas. Two years later they found themselves being married and living in a traditional stone and timber ‘Skåne house’ in Lund.
He had started running (another new sport) because Linda was taking part in city half-marathon events.
“I ran the Gothenburg in 2003, taking one hour and 47 minutes to make the 21km! In 2004, I needed two hours eight minutes to run it, 20 minutes slower. I felt a shake in my left arm and my left foot had problems getting in the right running position.
“I thought it was some nerve getting squeezed in my back so that August I went to my local doctor and he agreed, but as a safety precaution he sent me to the neurologist at the University Hospital in Lund in February, 2005. He met me in the lobby, took me to his room and said: ‘You have Parkinson’s.’ After that I don’t remember any more from that meeting.”
He would fight the diagnosis and demanded more testing, but in 2007, Thomas finally had to accept it. With Linda’s support, Thomas has somehow retained the positive energy, inner courage and also, as with his skiing, an acceptance of risk.
“I’ve changed in many different ways! Some I wanted and some Mr P forced me into. I really try to be optimistic and see what I can do with what I have, and not focus on what I have not,” says Thomas.
“However, since I had my transplantation on the 13th February, 2023, I have been on a mission.
“I was the first patient in Europe to receive 7.8 million specially developed stem cells, made in Lund, into my brain! It was a difficult task for the professor that did the surgery. It took 13 hours to finish.
“But we believe it is a success! Because these cells are so young and need to mature it’s no quick fix. My professors tell me that it can take more than five years to tell how effective this treatment can be.”
It is documented that when Thomas came round after the procedure in 2023 he suffered a psychosis for 10 days, such was the impact on his brain. “It was very frightening and I escaped from the ward twice. The second time I left the hospital and it was the police that brought me back,” he tells us.
“But after 18 months things started to change! And right now it has been 42 months since the transplant and there are a lot of things happening! This study finished for me when I completed 36 months of time after the transplant.
“I feel great. The feeling of walking in syrup and having someone pulling my collar is gone! I can walk through big crowds outdoors without problems. But the professors will be writing their conclusions and we will see.
“In recent years, golf has been such a wonderful thing for us. It has played such an important role in keeping me going and we’ll see how it all goes from here.”
Linda encouraged Thomas to start in golf as many of her friends played, but he was highly reticent at first because he knew how the sporting escapades he used to enjoy could completely take over his life.
“I had actually said since I was 30 that I should not play golf because I knew what this was going to do to me! It would take all my time and become a problem. I was, for once, correct! I started playing and I got completely hooked! In 2015, I played 200 (18-hole) rounds of golf and got down to a 15.3 golf handicap. I had gone totally mad and I would pay a price with injuries from 2017-2019, with surgery twice on my left hand and once to my right hand.”
After reining himself back in, Thomas was introduced to G4D (golf for the disabled) or ‘paragolf’ as the Swedes call it, by another Swede, Jan Gleisner from Helsingborg, a fellow Parkinson’s patient. Thomas is hugely grateful to Jan for giving him the confidence and access to this new area of competition.
The two men would play together in consecutive EDGA Tour Algarve championships in Portugal in January, 2026, and Thomas would win the first Stableford event at Pestana Pinta, while Jan would win the second at Gramacho.
“It has been a great golfing memory with EDGA, that I was there in Portugal with my Parkinson’s friend Jan Gleisner who was the one who introduced me to paragolf. Jan won the second tournament of the Algarve Swing in Gramacho. So the ‘Mr P boys’ took it all!”
During these events, Thomas found himself making more new friends on-course, and pictured above he was playing with Holland’ s Perry Leijdsman and Portugal’s Jorg Gabriel. The trio wore hats in support of EDGA’s ‘You Can’ campaign to encourage more people with a disability to try golf at any level.
Thomas’s first G4D tournament was the EDGA Tour London Club in May, 2025. Here too he surprised himself by winning the Stableford division. He has been a regular player on the Folksam Paragolf Tour at home in Sweden for two seasons and in May, 2026, he returned as defending champion to London Golf Club.
“I am enjoying competing and I really hope to highlight to others that you can play golf with Parkinson’s. I feel I have to pay back as much as possible to all others with Parkinson’s. To give more people a small light in the tunnel proving that we may have at last a treatment that can at least stop the disease from getting worse!
“That would be so much better than all other treatments. There has been no treatment in the world that stops Parkinson’s. I want to be seen by as many people as possible and spread knowledge of this [expletive] disease! I want to get everyone to send money to be used in the research trying to find a cure for Parkinson’s.”
While advocating golf’s benefits for others, Thomas is in no doubt that the game has brought him personally plenty of healthy exercise and also joy. The long putts and difficult bunkers don’t worry him at all, they are not real-life problems.
“Linda has cheered me on! I love the walk and all the nice places you get to see playing golf. I want to encourage others by showing that it’s possible to start playing golf at any age or in any state.
“To keep being active is very important, both in mind and body. Try to be optimistic and get out of your house, start being active and do what you can today! you never know if you can do it tomorrow!”
This honest, clearly highly intelligent man presents as a natural leader to take many more people to the fairways. Much of his spirit comes out of the honesty from everything he has been through. Such honesty means his final answer to our final question can’t help but make you smile. Sometimes the truth alone can make you smile.
“Who is your golfing hero?” we asked Thomas.
“I am,” was the simple reply.
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