These boots were made for winnin’ the big games

For a USC kicker, there is no better feeling in the world than splitting the uprights with a late field goal to defeat Notre Dame.

Unless it’s kicking a game-winning field goal against UCLA.

Frank Jordan did both.

And on the same date, no less, one year apart.

Each time with :02 showing on the Coliseum clock.

Says he, “I guess I couldn’t have asked for much more.”

Only the distance of the kicks differed -- by one yard.

On Nov. 25, 1977, in a Friday night game, Jordan kicked a 38-yard field goal to give the Trojans a 29-27 victory over UCLA, knocking the Bruins out of the Rose Bowl and sending Washington instead.

A year later, Jordan’s 37-yard field goal defeated Notre Dame, 27-25, keeping USC on track for the only national championship it would win for the next 25 years and spoiling a remarkable comeback led by Joe Montana, whose pinpoint passing had rallied the Irish from a 24-6 fourth-quarter deficit.

Jordan, who had transferred to USC from UC Riverside, never kicked in the NFL, his playing career ending with the Trojans’ 17-10 Rose Bowl victory over Michigan on Jan. 1, 1979. Cut by the Los Angeles Rams before the 1979 season, he was released by the Oakland Raiders before the ’80 season and, though encouraged to keep kicking, gave up on a professional football career.

“It sure would have been nice to play in the NFL,” he says, “but I’ve got memorable experiences from college that will last me a lifetime.”

Married and the father of two boys, ages 11 and 8, 50-year-old Jordan lives in Orinda, Calif., and for the last 26 years has worked as an insurance agent for New York Life in San Francisco.

But his real passion is military history. Jordan is a Scottish-born son of a paratrooper who jumped into Normandy on D-Day with the British Sixth Airborne Division. For the last 15 years the former kicker has cultivated a side business: leading European tours of World War I and World War II battlefields and sharing his knowledge.

“It’s just an incredible experience,” says Jordan, who first started making the trips on his own more than 20 years ago and five times has been accompanied by his 85-year-old father, Bernard.

“People ask me, ‘Don’t you get bored doing the same thing over and over?’ But every trip is different because what makes the trips are the people that go.”

Many of his clients carry diaries handed down from fathers or uncles or grandfathers, Jordan adds, “and we actually go to the spots where they’ve made diary entries and read excerpts. It’s a very, very moving experience.”

His are not by-the-book tours.

“We go to spots that are way off the beaten path so most tourists would have no idea where the spots are,” he says. “What I like to do is get off into the woods and visit the trenches and the bunkers. What’s amazing after all these years are the number of battle artifacts that are still lying around -- hand grenades and artillery shells and bullets and barbed wire. It’s just amazing.”

Also amazing, in its own way, was the circuitous route that brought Jordan to USC. He was a soccer player and golfer in his sophomore year at San Francisco Riordan High when the school’s football coach, Bob Toledo, held a school-wide kicking contest in the spring. Jordan won the job. Then, after two seasons with the varsity, he enrolled at UC Riverside, where Toledo had been hired the previous year.

As a freshman in 1974, Jordan won three games with late field goals, one giving the Highlanders a 17-15 victory over Cal State Northridge and the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. championship. But after his sophomore season, the NCAA Division II program was dropped because of a lack of funding.

Toledo, who later coached at UCLA, then joined John Robinson’s staff at USC. The Trojans weren’t looking for a kicker, so Jordan enrolled at San Jose State, where he kicked the winning field goal in the spring game. After a mid-spring coaching change at the school, however, Jordan was not offered a scholarship.

Undaunted, he stayed in touch with Toledo. Then, after sitting out the ’76 season, he rejoined his former coach, this time at USC.

Jordan, whose younger brother Steve was the Trojans’ kicker from 1981 to 1984, did not make an immediate impact. He was not even part of the traveling squad for USC’s 1977 conference opener. But after kicking three first-half field goals in the third game, a 51-0 rout of Texas Christian at the Coliseum, he finally heard Robinson mouth the words he’d been waiting to hear: “Jordan, you got the job.”

He kept it for two seasons.

Winding up in a position to knock off the Trojans’ two most bitter rivals with a swing of his right leg, he says, was the cherry on top of the sundae.

“You dream of things like that,” Jordan says of his nearly identical game-winning kicks, “but not against Notre Dame or UCLA. I just happened to be lucky. Right place, right time. And, fortunately, called upon to do it.”

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jerry.crowe@latimes.com