The best scorer in the history of the TFC died this morning in a Toulouse retirement home in Castelginet. He is a TFC legend who passed away.
“I’m talking to you about a time that those under 20 can’t know”… The youngest supporters of the Toulouse Football club certainly didn’t know him. And yet. He is a legend of the Violets who has just passed away at the age of 88 at the Tour Totier retirement home in Castelginest. Pierre Dorsini left a lasting mark on the history of a club whose colors he had worn for 10 years, from 1957 to 1967, after starting his professional career in Nancy. He then briefly trained his heart club renamed, for a time, the Union Sportif de Toulouse (UST) during the 1972-1973 season. 104 goals scored in 10 years.
“I don’t remember if it’s 104 or 114,” he explained modestly, when The Dispatch had met him. I know it’s more than a hundred and that there’s a four…” The man who was nicknamed “Mister One Goal per Match” in the 1960s, had only recently learned that he had this modest record while watching a match on television.
Pierre Dorsini was born in Lorraine, in Villerupt near Metz, at a time when people were destined for the steelworks. It was in Micheville that he did his apprenticeship: fitter CAP in his pocket, he made railway rails during the week and on weekends, put goal wagons on the football fields of Lorraine. His first contract, he signed it in Nancy, with the hereditary enemy. “My coach at Villerupt was a former Messin, he was very angry with me,” he remembered. But his father encouraged him: “He was proud of me, poor thing!” He finally arrived in Toulouse.
Stadium darling
In a TFC that President Jean-Marc Puntis ran as a father, Pierre Dorsini quickly became one of the stars of the team with Boucher, Cahuzac, Schultz, Rytkönen or Bassidiki Touré, José’s father. “We lived well but not like today…” In Toulouse, Pierre is a prominent man, a clothing brand in the rue Alsace even photographs him with the slender Argentinian Carlos Monin for the purposes of an advertisement. “They had taken the biggest and the smallest”, laughs this pocket striker who pointed to 1.63 m under the fathom and who admitted “having suffered from his small size”, concealing his size.
“When we weighed myself, I always added two or three kilos”. In 1957, he landed in Toulouse, which had just won the Coupe de France, the club’s only title to date. With coach Kader Firoud, who places him in the center, their relationship is close. “The other players called him Kader’s son,” recalls his wife Lucette. Pierre Dorsini treats the public. He becomes “the darling of the Stadium” but also “Mr. Canon”, another nickname. “For the morale of the team, he had to play but I didn’t always agree, smiles Lucette, looking down at him. Like the time you played with sore throat against Stade Français. We lost 2-3, you scored both goals. With 40° of fever!”.
In the football hall of fame
All that was missing from his career was a selection for the Blues. But he was barred in the France team by Jean Vincent and will remain faithful to the TFC until the end. He had had the opportunity to leave Toulouse, but the club never wanted to let him go. It will be necessary for Jean-Baptiste Doumeng, the “red billionaire”, to convert the TFC to communism and merge it with the Red Star, in the Paris region, for Pierre Dorsini, at 33, to end his career.
Today, the Toulouse gunner joins the pantheon of football. To his wife Lucette, his three daughters and his son, La Dépêche du Midi sends its most sincere condolences with emotion.
