Monday, April 06, 2026
A Pole in Pittsburgh, Part 3
To say that the history of professional soccer in the USA is somewhat complicated would be a considerable understatement. After the long period of mid-century amateurism, there were many competing attempts to make the sport commercially viable. The original North American Soccer League, formed in 1968, was in fact a merger of two competing leagues whose earlier battles are worth an article in themselves. Nevertheless, by the mid-seventies the NASL had stabilised, and a galaxy of fading stars decamped to the Land of the Free, the most prominent among them being Pelé.
But there was another competition that became very successful at the beginning of the 1980s: the Major Indoor Soccer League. The indoor game, with its similarity to basketball, had long been popular in the States, and there was sufficient interest in it to run a competition in tandem with the glitzy NASL. It was at one of the new MISL franchises, the Pittsburgh Spirit, where Stanislaw Terlecki's football career was to reignite.
Frozen out of Polish football after his political indiscretions, which included an abortive attempt to form a Solidarity-esque players' union, Terlecki initially headed to Holland in search of a club. Now 25, and with a young family to support, he needed to find work quickly. He was unable to secure a contract in Holland, but while there he made contact with John Kowalski, a young Polish-American coach only a few years his senior, who had managed the Pittsburgh Spirit in their first stint in the MISL in 1979. The club was now re-forming, and they needed an overseas star player.
It was a good fit. Pittsburgh has a Polish community of long standing (it even boasts a suburb called Polish Hill), and Kowalski hoped that the sensitive and potentially homesick Terlecki could make a home away from home in the city...and score some goals in the process.
On the latter score, he certainly succeeded. His two years at Pittsburgh saw him score an avalanche of goals in the unfamiliar format. With 74 (!) goals in his first season, he was second only to another former international from Eastern Europe, the Yugoslav Slavisa ("Steve") Zungul, on the scoring charts. A local star was born. Stanislaw became "Stan the Fran" (for "franchise"), and the correct Polish pronunciation of his surname became an all-American "Turr-lekky". All in a good cause.
On the personal front, there were, perhaps inevitably, a few problems. Not yet proficient in English, the prickly Pole did not always get on well with his team-mates, and sometimes took simple miscommunications as personal affronts. "A great player," recalled one of his Pittsburgh team-mates many years later, on an internet forum. "But a total wacko."
A TV report early in his second season gives a good impression of Terlecki's state of mind in his first couple of years in America, and of Kowalski's efforts to integrate him into the team and the society. Terlecki had another successful season with the Spirit in 1982/83, and he and his family were starting to feel more at home in America.
But the next year came the call from the NASL's glamour club...and the lure was impossible to resist. Rubbing shoulders with Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Neeskens, and even Pelé - what more could a footballer ask for? More in Part 4.
