Terry Yorath was a resolute footballer, a title-winning midfielder for Leeds United and a formidable warrior in the red of Wales. Football and all the challenges presented to a player in his position in the muck and nettles of the 1970s and 1980s never came close to leaving a scar.
But when life dealt Yorath the cruellest blow in his own garden on a sunny day almost three and a half decades ago, he perhaps never really recovered.
Yorath – who has died at the age of 75 – lost his teenage son Daniel to an undiagnosed heart condition during a back garden kickabout in 1992.
‘The moment I saw Daniel's eyes, I knew he was dead,’ Yorath wrote in the Guardian in 2005.
‘That afternoon will never leave me.’
Yorath dealt with the tragedy in the same manner in which he played his football for Leeds, Coventry, Tottenham and Wales. Stubbornly, stoically and without outward fuss or complaint. But the stranger – a lady – who came to his door a week after Daniel’s death and told him he would never get over it was right. By his own frank and heart-rending admission, he never did.
In terms of his generosity of spirit, his love as a father and indeed his commitment to the sport he adored, Yorath did not change. To the outside world, he never really broke stride.
Had it not been for a missed Paul Bodin penalty in Cardiff in 1993, for example, Yorath would have managed his country to the 1994 World Cup Finals in America.
He went on to work diligently at Cardiff and Sheffield Wednesday and even had a successful spell as coach of the Lebanon national team. Meanwhile, when a journalist he knew had a health concern around one of his own children, Yorath was the first to pick up the phone.
But if grief didn’t entirely define Yorath through the second half of a life that began in the Grangetown area of Cardiff in March 1950 then it presented a persistent and at times destructive shadow. Alcohol was a particular problem for a while.
‘I was stubborn and decided against counselling,’ Yorath said.
‘I know now that I should have gone.
‘I did go to see a medium but I'm no great believer and I never went again. All I had done was cry anyway.’
Yorath’s football upbringing was exacting. A Leeds apprentice at 17, his brand of intelligent and astute defensive midfield player was perfect for what Don Revie was building at Elland Road and would have been ideally suited to the Premier League today. Unfortunately, two players called Bremner and Giles stood in his way.
His time took a long while to come. In his formative years at the club, he hardly played. But Yorath was a quiet and unfussy learner who came to understood the cultures of 1970s Leeds. By the time he broke through for good he was well-versed in matters of unity, collective spirit and – above all – the importance of finding a way to prevail.
Yorath won a league title at the age of 24 and in doing so stood shoulder to shoulder with the greats of that Revie side. Hunter, Lorimer, McQueen, Cherry, Gray. He understood disappointment soon enough, too. A European Cup Winners’ Cup final was lost controversially to AC Milan in 1973 and a European Cup Final similarly to Bayern Munich two years later.
None of that team, nor indeed Revie, shed the cloak of those perceived injustices easily. But, sadly for Yorath, real perspective was to arrive over time.
After a playing career comprising almost 350 league appearances and 59 Wales caps – 42 of them earned as captain - ended in 1986, management was a natural calling for a man of empathy, deep thought and understanding.
But the first great loss of his life was felt at Valley Parade, Bradford, on a desperate spring day in May 1985. Manager of the club at the time, Yorath threw a chair through a window of the directors’ lounge to escape a fire that was to kill 56 people.
‘He didn’t sleep very well for a long time after that,’ Yorath’s daughter the TV presenter Gabby Logan told an ITV documentary.
‘It was a terrible, terrible tragedy and it was never going to be something my father just walked away from.’
Logan – present at the stadium as a 12-year-old that day – was presenting Match of the Day last night when news of her father’s deterioration was passed to her. Colleague Mark Chapman took her place in the chair.
Yorath was a father to four children – he also had another daughter Louise and another son Jordan – and a statement released jointly pointed to the difficulties endured by a family shattered by loss.
‘To most he was a revered footballing hero, but to us he was dad; a quiet, kind and gentle man,’ said the missive.
‘Our hearts are broken but we take comfort knowing that he will be reunited with our brother, Daniel.’
Yorath’s campaigning for awareness about Daniel’s heart condition - hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – was admirable and will have saved lives. Equally, he never sought refuge in excuses for some of the life patterns that followed his son’s death.
In 2004, driving home from a golf club dinner over the legal alcohol limit, Yorath struck a young girl in his car.
‘After Daniel, I can't believe that I almost killed somebody else's child,’ Yorath wrote in the Guardian a year later.
‘Spending the night in a police cell was a humiliating experience and the thought of going to prison horrified me.
‘When I read my probation report I was mortified.
‘In effect, it said: “I recommend that Mr Yorath does not receive a custodial sentence because in his current state of mind he may commit suicide.”
‘Not for one minute do I think I would have, but you never know, do you?
‘A friend of mine, Alan Davies, a player I signed three times, committed suicide. I didn't see that coming, so who knows what would have happened to me if I'd gone to prison?
‘I was lucky that I ended up serving my community service on a farm, helping disabled children ride horses. The experience opened my eyes.
‘I was humbled by my time there. Life goes on.’
For Yorath, life did move on even if it was never remotely the same. He remains revered at all the clubs for whom he played. In particular Wales legends such as Ian Rush, Neville Southall and Kevin Ratcliffe will mourn a leader, a mentor and a man who came within one penalty kick of leading them to the greatest summer of their lives.
Typically, Yorath never blamed Bodin for that shot driven against the crossbar at Cardiff Arms Park against Romania. He had never been one for shifting responsibility. It was his team and therefore his failure. The Football Association of Wales clearly thought so as his contract as manager was not renewed.
That decision angered the same Welsh public that will lament the loss of one of their genuine heroes today. Yorath was a wonderful footballer bent over not by his sport but by life and there is no shame in that.
The title of his 2005 autobiography was ‘Hard Man, Hard Knocks’. On reflection, maybe only half of that was true.