U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL LOS ANGELES 1991 : Jordan’s Fire Returns After Her Fury Eases : Softball: After family tragedy, former CS Northridge standout recovers from injury to make it back to the diamond.

The North softball team of the U.S. Olympic Festival calls her its spark plug, and she appears to be the same bundle of ferocity who used to pick up a bat, bang it against a chain-link fence and bellow, “We need hits.”

But it has taken a long time for Barbara Jordan to regain the fire that helped Cal State Northridge win NCAA Division II national softball championships in 1984, ’85 and ’87.

Jordan was filled with rage and bitterness after her sister Beverly was murdered by Beverly’s fiance in November, 1988.

“It was such a blow,” Jordan said, fighting back tears. “She was my inspiration. She was like everything I wanted to be. A giving person, a leader. She had personality and she was very loving and caring. And the thing she always gave me was confidence.

“I’d come home from ball--she didn’t play sports--and I’d say, ‘Bev, I stink,’ and she’d say, ‘Barb, you can do it, I know you can.’

“When she died, I had a hard time. I lost a lot of confidence.”

Jordan’s immediate reaction was to spend less time with her softball friends and her sorority sisters.

“I closed off because there was so much bitterness in me,” Jordan said. “Someone just took the biggest piece out of my heart.”

She cried then, yet it was the tears that came later--after a series of knee operations--that unleashed a flow of emotions and enabled Jordan to regain her spirit.

“The best thing about my surgery was that I cried,” Jordan said. “It was so painful, sheer hell. I think I cried more tears with my knee than my whole life up until then. I got a lot of anger out. I cried when my sister died but so much of it was anger, so much of it was hate, and having her not with us.”

Jordan was joking around with friends after classes at CSUN when it happened last October. She was trying to go around one guy while being chased by another when she heard something pop and felt her right knee collapse.

Her anterior cruciate ligament was completely detached, cartilage was torn and a piece of bone broke off.

To repair the damage, Dr. Jerome Friedland removed one of her hamstring muscles and used it, along with staples, to hold in place an artificial ACL, essentially a polymer graft.

After two months of physical therapy, Jordan underwent surgery again, an arthroscopic procedure to cut through adhesions that were preventing her from bending her knee.

The acid test, after physical therapy sessions three days per week, twice-daily leg exercises at home and a swimming, cycling and weight-lifting program, was her first attempt to jog.

Her knee wouldn’t bend enough between strides and she landed on the wrong part of her foot.

“I went out and forgot how to run,” Jordan said. “It freaked me out because I used to run five days a week.”

A few sessions with CSUN track and field Coach Don Strametz and Jordan remembered what her body forgot.

Eight months after her first operation, she was ready to take her place in center field.

Friedland credited Jordan’s rapid recovery to the skills of her therapists and her work ethic.

“An athlete is more motivated than the average person,” Friedland said. “She’s a tough gal and a good patient.”

Before her knee injury, Jordan was not only a base-stealing threat, she had the speed to routinely beat out a bunt or a slap hit.

Now that she has lost that quickness, she is trying to drive the ball.

“It is quite an accomplishment for someone who has been bunting and slapping their whole life to come up and be able to swing away,” said Cindy Cooper, who plays on the North team with Jordan.

If Jordan’s parents had their way, she wouldn’t be patrolling center field for the North team.

Elmer and Gloria Jordan thought their daughter’s softball career was over when her knee collapsed. So great is their concern that she will reinjure herself, Jordan didn’t tell them that she was playing in the Festival.

When they saw her name in a newspaper article and thought it was a misprint, Jordan fessed up, and was only too happy to tell them about shaking hands with Nancy Reagan at the opening ceremonies.

Jordan also feared that she would never play softball again; that’s why her main concern, initially, was making her knee mobile enough to pass the Los Angeles Police Department’s physical requirements.

Beverly’s death sparked Barbara’s interest in law enforcement.

“What happened to my sister, and things like it, I’m sick of,” Jordan said. “We don’t need that in this world. I’m not saying I’m a super hero and I’m gonna stop it, but I want to help.”

Not long ago, Jordan couldn’t see past softball to consider a career. She fit the stereotype the NCAA’s reforms are designed to undermine, the student-athlete who is on campus solely for athletics.

“When I played ball at school, I never went to class,” Jordan said. “I just cared about softball, I just wanted to win. I did just enough to stay eligible and I regretted it later.”

When Jordan’s eligibility ran out in 1987, most of her associates didn’t think she would return to finish school, but her sister Beverly, among others, told her she needed to graduate. So she made it her goal.

The first step was switching majors, from speech communications to kinesiology.

“I started jammin’ with A’s and B’s,” Jordan said. “I was freaking myself out going to the library and studying at home. It was a neat feeling. I was smart. I just wasn’t a ballplayer.”

After Beverly died, Jordan took a semester off.

“I was glad I did it. I needed the time, but when people asked me what I was doing and I said I was not in school, I felt like a loser,” Jordan said.

She returned to class in the fall of 1989, and a year later, within two months of finishing her degree, her knee gave out.

Jordan missed two weeks of class when she was hospitalized, and spent the rest of the semester hobbling around campus on a brace and juggling her classes between doctor’s visits and physical therapy sessions, but she made it.

“The teachers reached out and helped me,” Jordan said. “At Northridge they are so great. I was there for so long, and I’m not saying they gave me nothing for free, but I think they wanted me to graduate and I wanted to graduate.”

Jordan’s hard-fought degree will probably come in handy eventually. For now, while she is waiting to resume her LAPD tests, street smarts are in demand in her job as a private investigator.

So far, she has found a missing baby for a child-custody case, repossessed a car, and delivered subpoenas.

One woman who did not want to be served tried to pull away in her car, but Jordan stepped in front of the car and wound up on the hood, knee brace and all.

Staring through the windshield at the bewildered woman, Jordan said: “Don’t run me over,” then she threw the subpoena through the car window.

Jordan also served an alleged drug dealer by staking him out, then pulling her car in front of his and cutting him off.

She is living out the detective television shows of her youth that still have her glued to the set, and her elusive powers have already paid off at the opening ceremonies.

The handshake with Nancy Reagan didn’t come easy. It required an end around through a team of security guards. It was vintage Barbara Jordan, minus the bat.