His goal-scoring record was phenomenal for a winger. Best was quick, brave, and a sublime passer of the ball when he could curb his natural inclination to hold onto it for as long as possible. At his best, he gave the impression that thought and execution were a seamless whole, and at all times he approached the game with the passion and excitement of a young boy. Even the incomparable Pelé once called him “the greatest footballer in the world”.
Best secured his status as a footballing legend in the great Manchester United team of the 1960s, outshining even Sir Bobby Charlton and Denis Law in a side which won league titles in 1965 and 1967 and which in 1968 became the first English club to win the European Cup. He made 464 appearances for the club, scoring 178 goals, and also won 37 caps for his native Northern Ireland. Yet at the age of only 26, driven to distraction by the media hysteria that surrounded his every move, and frustrated beyond the point of return by the decline of his team, he walked out of Manchester United for the last time, effectively ending his career in top-flight football.
The conventional wisdom is that Best’s early departure from the game was the result of the weaknesses in his personality, which became abundantly apparent as he sought to fill the gap his retirement left in his life with alcohol and womanising. He was seen as the paradigm of the flawed genius, impelled towards self destruction by the same forces from which he derived his greatness. But although there was truth in this interpretation, Best’s decline did not happen in a vacuum. He and every aspect of his life was simply subjected to a level of scrutiny from the press which was unprecedented in that era, familiar though such intrusion into the private lives of sportsmen has become since.
Best very much reflected the era of social, industrial and technical revolution that was the 1960s. The abolition of the maximum wage for footballers slowly, and greatly, transformed the game. The increasingly well-rewarded players had more autonomy and more money to spend, and in liberalising times, more opportunity to live raucous lifestyles. Although he was an extreme example, George Best epitomised the transformation of footballers into good-time boys, semi-pop stars. His long hair and good looks led to his being dubbed “the fifth Beatle”, a reputation enhanced by the novel sound of screaming adolescent girls wherever he played. Treated like a pop star, he began in time to live like one. He opened a boutique, drove a series of E-type Jaguars, advertised every imaginable product and had to employ three full-time secretaries to field the 10,000 items of fan mail he received per week. Something eventually had to give, but it was to Best’s credit that he held his game together as long as he did.
Decline when it came was mercilessly chronicled in the press. Although he was to make a number of comeback attempts (notably at Fulham, Hibernian and in the United States), it was for an increasingly rudderless playboy lifestyle rather than for his sporadic footballing exploits that Best became renowned. The column inches that had once eulogised his performances on the pitch began to chronicle a seemingly endless succession of drunken binges, women and episodes of gambling and brawling. The nadir came in 1984 when Best was imprisoned for two months for drunken-driving and evading arrest. But no amount of infamy could undo the truth of the observation made by his friend and fellow player Rodney Marsh that “everyone, deep down, wanted to be George Best”.
The skills that were to make Best the most exhilarating player of his era were learned on the sprawling Cregagh estate in Belfast, on which he was raised. He was the eldest child of a Protestant shipyard iron turner and his wife, Anne, a quick and skilful amateur hockey player from whom Best believed he inherited not only his athleticism but also his tendency to alcohol abuse (his insistence on the genetic provenance of the latter trait sat rather uneasily with his considerable guilt about the contribution the notoriety that came to surround him made to his mother’s early death).
Best was obsessed with football from infancy. At 14 months - an age when most children can barely walk - he was photographed with a ball at his feet, and for years he insisted on taking a ball to bed with him. Every year he received exactly the same Christmas present - a new ball, kit and boots. He was an able pupil, the only one in his year to pass the 11-plus examination, but he gave up his place at the Grosvenor High grammar school when the daily ordeal of passing through sectarian Roman Catholic areas marked out as a Protestant by his school uniform became unbearable. He rejoined his former classmates at the local secondary modern and put his hopes for the future on being spotted by one of the talent scouts who frequented local matches. This dream began to fade as he was continually rejected on the grounds that he was too small and thin ever to make it in the professional game, however dazzling his performances. Best resigned himself to finding a manual career and, at 15, left school and passed an examination to be taken on as a printing apprentice. One week later, he was approached by Bob Bishop, the local scout for Manchester United, with the offer that every young player dreamed of. Bishop sent a telegram to Manchester which simply said: “I have found a genius.”
Within 24 hours of his arrival at Manchester, overawed by the experience of meeting the players and riddled with self-doubt about his size, Best staged his first walkout. On finding that his son regretted this impulsive decision, Best’s father telephoned Matt Busby, the United manager, and persuaded him to give him another chance. Busby nurtured his shy new charge and was to find his faith amply repaid long before the turmoil of Best’s later years at United. His first match was a home tie against West Bromwich Albion in September 1963.
In the early days Best applied himself to honing his natural talent with a dedication that flatly contradicted his later reputation for skimping on training. As a child, he practised kicking a tennis ball against doorknobs until he had mastered striking them dead-centre, the precondition for the ball returning to him rather than flying off at an angle. Later on, he would aim to hit the crossbar at least nine times out of ten from the penalty spot, then from 20 yards, then 30 and then 40 before repeating the process with his weaker left foot until it became as reliable as his right.
The world first noticed Best at his best in Manchester United’s 5-1 defeat of European giants Benfica in 1966. The Belfast boy scored twice in the opening ten minutes in what was the Portuguese side’s first home defeat in the European Cup. One supporter ran on the pitch with a knife, wanting a lock of Best’s hair. The press dubbed him “El Beatle”.
Having helped United to the league championship in 1967, Best starred again in Europe when the Reds became the first English side to lift the European Cup, beating Benfica at Wembley in 1968. In the second half, with the score level at 1-1, Best walked the ball into the net to put United on their way to a 4-1 triumph. Other outstanding performances included his double hat-trick against Northampton Town in an FA Cup fifth-round tie in 1970, and what may be considered his parting shot, a 1980 strike for San Jose Earthquakes, in which he tormented and worked his way around four defenders before placing the ball beyond the reach of the goalkeeper.
On the international field too, there were memorable moments: in 1971 he scored a hat-trick against Cyprus in Belfast and in a home tie against England had an audacious goal against England disallowed. Goalkeeper Gordon Banks had been bouncing the ball a couple of times before taking a kick, when Best nipped in to steer a shot into the net. The referee, however, had adjudged Best to have kicked the ball while it was still in Banks’s hands. There was controversy too. In 1970 he was sent off against Scotland in Belfast for throwing mud at the referee. More seriously, the following year, he briefly withdrew from the squad after threats from the IRA.
