In 1957, Tumba was the first European player to attend an NHL training camp, with the Boston Bruins.

However, Tumba turned down the offer as he would no longer have been eligible to play amateur hockey for the Swedish national team.

Having been introduced to the game of golf for the very first time, being over the age of 30, he reached a scratch handicap in 1970, at 39 years of age, when he, representing Stockholm Golf Club, also won the Scandinavian International Amateur Match-play Championship (one of three major amateur tournaments in Scandinavia at the time) and was selected, as one of the four best amateur players in the country, to the Swedish national team at the 1970 Eisenhower Trophy in Madrid, Spain.

In 1973 the Scandinavian Enterprise Open tournament was established, with Tumba as its founder, and it soon became one of the richest ones on the European Tour.

[18] On 4 June 2022, Tumba was the seventh person to be inducted in the newly founded Swedish Golf Hall of Fame.

[19] Golf projects Amateur Professional Tumba was the son of engineer Torsten Johansson and his German-born wife Greta, née Kruse.

Johan previously played on the European Tour and finished tied 13th in the 1989 Scandinavian Enterprise Open and later became a successful professional long driving competitor.

[20][21] For most of his retirement, Tumba and his wife lived in West Palm Beach, Florida, returning to Sweden in summers.

He was subsequently honored prior to the Swedish hockey league Elitserien games that were played that day, with a one-minute silence.

Approximately 500 friends and relatives arrived at the church to leave flowers and honour Sven Tumba.