There’s no other reason to be here, it’s just Tottenham. Obviously I’m working here and I like it here, I like England, because of Tottenham. I’ll always like England, because of Tottenham. That’s how it started.
My first letter from Tottenham, I wasn’t even 10, at that time you couldn’t get anything from England, so I was sending the letters to the football clubs all over the world. We got two replies from Dutch clubs and Tottenham, that’s it, maybe there was something later, but later it didn’t matter, because I was a Tottenham fan then. It was like a feature brochure really, 30-some pages or something like this. At that time in my country if you see a colourful picture it was something special, I fell in love with programmes, with Tottenham programmes, and I’m in love still, I collect the programmes. I collect the old programmes; I’ve got almost everything from 1961 anyway.
Older boys when we were playing football, we are using a bottle cap to play. As I remember I made Tottenham team, I put Holsten on it and some Tottenham players. I was so proud, because older guys were asking, ‘Who is that club?’ It’s nothing like this, because everyone could like some Polish teams and I was proud to say… well, I didn’t say Tottenham, because I didn’t know how you pronounced it, I said, ‘Tott-en-ham’. And everybody, ‘What is Tott-en-ham?’ I said, ‘That’s a club from England.’ And everybody was very impressed. Then this guy told us that we can listen to English football on the BBC World Service and that’s a very important day, that was the first time when I heard Tottenham spoken in English and it was funny. It was like the way they pronounced Lineker, it was hard to understand Lineker, very strong Lineker. After this we started to listen to the games on the radio every week.
I started to learn English about that time as well. I didn’t have a chance at that age to come to England and watch Tottenham. Then I went to the army, it was an obligation, everyone had to go. You always got a bit of money when you left the army but then I thought, ‘Maybe I should get this money and watch Tottenham?’ Well, I came here for the first game in 1998, since 1998 any time I got the chance, I’d get the money, I was coming to watch Tottenham. In 2006, I’d asked actually a few places for a job or something, anything on the high road I was thinking could give me a job or anything, and it was a waiter who heard that. He came to me and said, ‘You see this guy, go and talk to him, he may get you a job.’ So I got my first job moving some furniture. Every game at that time was something special, I would spend every, single penny to watch the next game. Most of the time I do labouring jobs. Now for the last few years I’ve actually started to spend more time in Poland, because Poland is my country, but I always like this coming home the next day after the season’s over, and coming here for the first…
I know the teams from 1920, from 1930, I would say there is maybe a few people inside the ground who knows more about Tottenham than I do. I feel like I’m being a part of Tottenham.
