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as tough as everand he was staking everything on a career-making third main-team appearance at Ibrox.
    But, at the start of the following season, he was told it was never going to happen. Jock Wallace and his assistant Archie Knox called the 19-year-old into their office at 10 am on a Friday and broke the news. It was all over. Gordon was out of the main team and his contract wasn’t being renewed. He remembers the words hitting him like a physical blow – and to this day he refuses to hold business meetings on Friday mornings in case the memories of that initial rejection come flooding back. At the time, he just gripped the edges of his chair and tried to hide his feelings. ‘I sat and thought, You bastards, looking at them both, and while I wanted to cry I wouldn’t give them the pleasure of doing it in front of them. The whole meeting probably didn’t last more than five minutes but when it was over every dream I’d ever had had been taken away.’
    And Gordon was convinced that the dream really was over. Wallace and Knox suggested he do more rehab, move down a league, join another club to get match-fit and then prove he was good enough to play for Rangers again at a later date. The door, they said, would always be open for him. But Gordon refused even to think about it. ‘I said no, straight away. I’m an all-or-nothing guy and I knew that, if I couldn’t play for Rangers, then forget it. I wasn’t about to scrape £45 a week for the next ten years. I didn’t want to play for some Sunday team somewhere else instead. I wanted to throw my boots away and to retire from football altogether.’
    But first he wanted to get over the shock of being rejected. ‘I went home, sat down and finally started to cry.I wanted to attack the whole world. I really thought I could make it with Rangers because I knew I was one of their better young players. It was devastating and I had a serious breakdown. I was too upset to talk to anyone and bawled my eyes out in private for the whole weekend. I thought, Christ, that’s it. All my mates know. What do I do now? The sense of rejection was humiliating, awful, and I took the failure very, very badly, like any 18-year-old would. I couldn’t move on and I wanted to forget about it.’
    What he needed more than anything was support from his dad. But he didn’t get it. ‘Dad had been sitting in his van just outside the grounds when I got the news from Wallace and telling him was the worst thing I had done. Again I wouldn’t give him the pleasure of seeing me cry. He never said anything good, and from the moment we left Ibrox his attitude was clear. “You get yourself into another club,” he said. “You continue hounding Rangers. You get your knee working, start kicking with your right foot and stop putting so much emphasis on being a naturally left-footed player.” Even though he had hardly come to watch any of my matches, Dad wanted me to continue living the dream. He would have been happy to have me playing in a lower league – part-time footballer, part-time insurance man or something. But I’d learned the football was never really going to work. I was always going to be stuck with the label “gammy knee”. So I had to let go of what I loved first, and that was hard. I’d been so close. And I felt so bitter for so long.’
    The embarrassment of seeing his dad try and fail to make it in the music business was another reason why Gordon was determined to make a clean break fromfootball. ‘He had followed a dream everyone knew was never going to come true and I already knew that I didn’t want to turn out like him. I dropped football like a fucking lead balloon because I knew it wasn’t going to come true either.’
    And, while Gordon tried to work out what the hell he could do instead, he saw his family and his personal life start to fall apart. His dad’s drinking had hit new heights, while the way he treated his wife and family had hit new lows. He was having an affair