Smash hit

They clapped as the hearse passed. Everybody kept insisting this was a celebration, not a wake. The cars arrived at the steps, discharging the family — Dickie, the father, an absurdly small figure; Angie, the first wife, in furs; Calum, the son, sharply almost sinisterly suited. They looked oddly expensive and powerful. This was their day. But it wasn’t really, it was George’s.

As he said, both his wives may have slagged him off, but both kept his surname. All the real power was in the coffin.

A surreal formation of robed dignitaries and two rows of boys in white football strips had formed on the steps. Agonisingly slowly the coffin was carried up. We flocked back down the hill to watch the events inside on the three big screens strung out along the avenue. I watched in wonder.

In truth, I had been watching in wonder ever since I had arrived in Belfast on Friday. I asked everybody if they had expected such a fuss over this man who played football like a god 40 years ago and then spent the rest of his life in flamboyant, absurd decline.

“George, you lived your life like a football match,” said a sign left at an impromptu shrine at the City Hall, “a game of two halves. The first half goals, flair, excitement; the second yellow cards, fouls and hurt.” It was left by the Cregagh boys’ club from the estate where Best grew up.

At the Red Devils pub on the Catholic Falls Road, 53-year-old Tommy Price from Stalybridge in Cheshire tells me he’s seen 3,000 United games in 27 countries.

“It’s a religion,” he says, fixing my eyes like the Ancient Mariner, “everybody in this bar — we’ve never met before but it’s like we’ve known each other for ever.”

And Best? His face crumpled and the tears flow. “I loved him and I still love him.”

There were also darker thoughts in the air at the Red Devils. Barry and Sean tell me they won’t be going to the funeral, though they would turn out if Roy Keane was dead. Keane, of course, comes from the republic and Best came from loyalist east Belfast.

The route of the cortege stays firmly in the east.

“Why isn’t the funeral coming through here?” says Sean, “This is where all the Man U supporters are. There are 100,000 Catholics in east Belfast, this is not for them.”

“I couldn’t go down there,” says another drinker, “and wave a tricolour. They’d cut my throat.”

The older fans are tolerant. Best was for everybody, they say, a beautiful thing, a saint who transcended all tribalisms. But, alarmingly, the sectarian flames burn as brightly as ever in the eyes of the young.

The service is a strange affair, mixing sobbing sentimentality, fierce religiosity and, from Law, dignified, tear-stained good blokery. “We would be on the phone for half an hour,” he recalled. “We didn’t talk. He cried at one end and I cried at the other end.”

Everybody from TV anchor Eamonn Holmes to old Best pal Bobby McAlinden said a little too much. Calum and sister Barbara McNarry both choked up. One of his doctors — Professor Roger Williams — was suave and funny, the other, Akeel Alisa, clumsy and unconvincing. Pastor Roy Gordon, meanwhile, seized the moment to go for converts, demanding we all turn to the best friend of all, Jesus Christ.

Of course, this was not just a funeral, any more than Best was just a footballer. This is popular religion. “A legend” they keep calling him. But what they really meant was a myth, a story of a titan who sinned, fell and was then, in death, redeemed.

But did it work, did this funeral do anything for this still troubled land? Maybe. But, in fact, it failed by the appallingly high standards set by local expectations. Police and local officials had spoken of possible crowds of 500,000 with 32,000 in the grounds of Stormont. In reality there were probably fewer than 30,000 in Stormont and only about the same lining the streets. Hunger-striker Bobby Sands earned 100,000 for his funeral and Diana 3m.

Well, it was cold, wet and perhaps they all watched it on television. But in truth I felt there was something a little forced about this strange event. They were willing Best to mean more than he did. They were willing him to be good, which he wasn’t. One friend of mine, who knew him all too well in his later years, described him as “the most complete bastard I have ever met”.

But, as they say, when the fact becomes a legend, print the legend.

So let him be good in every sense. The northern Irish have suffered enough, they deserve their soccer saint. They deserve better than Stormont’s cold and ugly walls. They deserve “George Best”, the myth.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Fern Britton: 'I still can't see that I was wrong'
• Extreme cooking
• Easy French: Tarte Tatin