Soccer: Steel McQueen
Mike Summerbee, the endlessly combative former Manchester City and England winger, is still in awe of one collision with Jordan that left him more than willing to believe his body parts had been dismantled and distributed to various geographical locations around the country.
To illustrate his resilience and fortitude, Summerbee picked himself up and limped after his tormentor. "Is that the best you can do, big man?" he snarled.
The gap-toothed one answered, quite unambiguously: "Naw, I've only just begun."
Of course, whenever you looked over Jordan in those days with Leeds United, Manchester United and Scotland, you inevitably saw his fellow countryman and good companion in close proximity.
Gordon McQueen was more relaxed and less minatory than his friend and therefore could be misinterpreted by his opponents, yet every lesson from Don Revie's Elland Road tutorials had been absorbed.
There was tungsten underneath and, when the bugle call of machismo sounded, he was more than capable of acquitting himself with distinction.
Today, McQueen requires every vestige of his affiliation to the society of hard men for the road that lies ahead.
You find him living in a village in the fashionable hinterland of Middlesbrough Fabrizio Ravanelli was his next-door neighbour until his move to Derby. He bought the house when he was coaching under Bryan Robson at the Riverside Stadium.
While he frets for his old club, he apportions most of his concern closer to home. There is a far less publicised, yet no less decisive, battle to be fought in May when he enters hospital for what will be a critical operation on a troublesome ankle. The injury has persecuted him for more than two decades. Now it threatens him even more.
"I've had really big problems with my ankle the last couple of years," he says. "There have been four operations on it, but now I'm going in for the big one.
"I'm getting it fused, bolts are going in. That's it, the absolute last resort, there's nothing they can do after that. What if it fails? Oh, I don't know. It doesn't bear thinking about."
So how does he cope? His humour, absent for a moment, returns as if delivered by express courier. "In order to look on the bright side of life, I just normally go to the pub and get blitzed.
"I love my golf, but I just haven't been able to play for the last three or four years.
"If this operation is successful, I'll have a limp for the rest of my life, but at least it'll be a pain-free limp and I'll be able to get on the golf course again.
"At the moment, I limp with pain. I can't walk any distance, or anything like that. I can't even go back into football. If I was offered a coaching job, I couldn't take it. But, hey, it's just a bad ankle. It's no' bloody well life-threatening."
Whatever the outcome of the operation, McQueen's career in the media should not be affected. He is a forthright pundit on Sky Sport, and overpriced, overweening footballers are advised to beware when he and colleagues like Charlie Nicholas, Rodney Marsh and Frank McLintock are around.
Their analysis of football fundamentals can be brusque and brutal.
McQueen, of course, knows the rudiments of brusque and brutal, having served STV for four years during the editorial reign of Gerry McNee and having been regularly lampooned on Only An Excuse. McNee remembers a man who was capable of reciting the alphabet of football backwards, a man, essentially, after his own heart.
When Rangers beat Leeds in the Champions League at Elland Road, for instance, McNee ordered a taxi to take the crew back to the hotel. Big Gordon, so elated by the Scottish victory, insisted on canceling the order. He wanted to stand in the reception area and just gloat.
Before he was summoned to become first-team coach at Middlesbrough, McQueen had the shortest of managerial terms at Airdrie. He had been there only weeks when McNee advised him: "You're a Scotland legend.
"Don't hang about. Get out before they sack you." As it happened, McQueen shared his office with the club secretary. He asked the chairman whether he could have his own fiefdom to afford him some privacy. He was given a tiny room under the main stand.
McNee recalls: "Gordon managed to get a desk in after removing a couple of plastic cones and old bits of goal nets.
"The place was so small he was stooped even though he was sitting. He approached the chairman again and asked if he could get some carpet tiles. Six would have covered the available space. The chairman was humming and hawing because of the expense.
It was at that point, plus what I'd been saying to him, that he decided to get out."
McQueen had never been accustomed to such frugality in his English playing days. Elland Road was more like Hollywood in 1972 when he left his St Mirren roots.
Walking into the dressing room for the first time, he was immediately hypnotised by football's A-list of Bremner, Giles, Hunter, Lorimer, Madeley, Clarke. "It was unforgettable, just like opening a football magazine. All the faces and names were there. I was speechless.
"I was made to feel very welcome. There was no problem settling in. Joe, of course, had come down the previous summer.
"There were English, Irish, Scots and Welsh, but there were no separatist groups, no cliques. The team spirit was fantastic. All the Scottish lads were great, Billy Bremner in particular. I had a great rapport with him.
"I'm not really bothered what anyone thinks of him now. He's a man I thought the world of, one of the best competitors I've played with in my life. You could get Billy different ways on different days. It wasn't always plain sailing with him.
"He could be vociferous, argumentative, he often wanted his own way and he could be awkward, I suppose. But equally he could be kind-hearted. The legend stuff is generally nonsense, but Billy is a true legend. You just need to go down to Elland Road to see his statue. You can't get more than that."
Bremner, aside, there was the alternative of Revie's warm embrace. "Don was fantastic, the master of man management. All the parents loved him, thought he was the bees knees. The wives who were having babies were put into private nursing homes, and they always got flowers. He was so far ahead of his time."
Leeds, for all their myriad skills, were infamous for putting themselves about in those days, with Bremner, Giles and Hunter claiming as much notoriety as the Dalton Gang had in America's Wild West.
But Jordan and McQueen graduated with honours into the big boys' league. Was McQueen ever ashamed of anything he had perpetrated on a football pitch? He ponders for only a couple of seconds.
Taking you back to the semi-final of the European Cup, at the Nou Camp, in 1975, he reveals: "There were 10 minutes to go and one of their [Barcelona] players spat on me. I had time to count to five, but I just whacked him anyway and got sent off.
"The repercussions were pretty severe for me. I got a bollocking and I also missed the European final through suspension. But I'd put Leeds in a terrible predicament, for they were under a lot of pressure from Cruyff, Neeskens and company. Yeah, that made me ashamed."
Nowadays, it is virtually impossible for McQueen to equate the Leeds of the 1970s with the team who are hanging on to Premiership life with their fingertips.
Can this be the same club that seemed to have a divine right to achievement?
"I think it's an absolute disgrace," he ventures. "I think the people involved should not be let near another football club. The trouble is they are. I mean, Peter Ridsdale's away to Barnsley. Mind you, it wasn't entirely Ridsdale's fault. The plc had given him the money.
"You're talking about financial experts who didn't know what they were doing financially. That club could sink into oblivion.
"It could be another Fiorentina, and all because of mismanagement. Still, I think it'll get saved at the last minute. Maybe someone will put some kind of package together. It would be sad to see anything worse happening to that club than what's already happened over the past couple of years."
But what of the immediate future? You ask McQueen to consult his crystal ball and predict what will happen to Mark Viduka and Eddie Gray, the caretaker manager alongside whom he once played?
"I think Viduka will be out during the transfer window. I wouldn't let him go. He can be lazy at times and I think he'd be a frustrating player to work with. But the thing is he does what most people find difficult to do and that's stick the ball in the net.
"As for Eddie, I can't see any mileage in bringing in a new manager. The players and the fans are behind him. He handles the whole thing brilliantly. OK, so he hasn't got his pro licence for Premiership management, but Eddie's got 40 years' experience of playing and coaching."
McQueen, who made his debut for Scotland in 1974 and stockpiled 30 international caps in spite of injuries, has been a fairly vociferous critic of Berti Vogts in the past.
Do not expect him to offer any repentance. "When people who are directly involved or want to be involved in football get on television, they're very cautious with their comments. I tell it how I see it.
"The last few games, excepting the game in Holland, there has been an improvement. Initially, when we were covering some of the matches, some of the people at the SFA were upset.
"Vogts and people like that. But, Christ, the performances were so poor things had to be said at the time. They were honest opinions, and opinions, incidentally, that were shared by the fans.
"At the outset, there was an awful lot of experimenting going on, with players who should never have been near a Scotland squad. Others were out of position and the system was not quite right, but I think, as things have gone on, the squad's got much more settled.
"A couple of young players in McFadden and Fletcher have emerged and that is always nice.There's absolutely no question that Vogts will be in charge of the World Cup qualifying campaign."
McQueen established himself under managers like Tommy Docherty, Willie Ormond, Ally McLeod and Jock Stein. He liked them as men and found them inspirational. You ask if Vogts would have inspired him? "I just think it's sad that we've got foreign managers for our national team.
"We're suppose to have this wonderful coaching system, yet we can't find a Scot to manage the national side. I know that's tunnel-visioned on my behalf, because football is a cosmopolitan game. But me ... I would like my manager to be a Scot."
Plain speaking, as ever, from Gordon McQueen. It is the kind of plain speaking Torquemada would have appreciated.
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