NATURALLY, when I was in Basle this week for the Henman-Murray match, I bumped into John Roberts, Tennis Correspondent of The Independent, and I was reminded of a famous joke he made, many years ago. At the time, Kevin Keegan was the hottest thing in football and people were asking what we now know to be a fatuous question. Is Keegan better than George Best?

Best sighed and explained that Keegan wasn’t fit to lace his boots. So JR topped this remark: “Kevin Keegan is not fit to lace George Best’s drinks.” It was a good joke then. Now, as Best moves from crisis to crisis, ever closer, it seems, to (let’s not mince words here) dying of drink, the joke gets grimmer by the day. Alas, poor George.

We hear a lot about drugs in sport. We are regularly moved to a righteous fury when we are told of the latest athlete to get caught. A whiff of nandrolone and a reputation is gone for ever: no, it wasn’t me, someone spiked my drink at a party, I’m not like that, the urine sample must be wrong, the labelling on the supplements tin never said anything about this.

And woe betide the athlete who gets caught with a drug that may have given a moment of pleasure. Attitudes to cannabis have softened since Mick Jagger was sentenced to prison for skinning up. But if an athlete gets stoned, he has to be punished vindictively. Cocaine is still more sinful. Chelsea hounded Adrian Mutu out of the Premiership in a moral frenzy after he was found to be using cocaine.

All this is carefully designed to mask the fact that the most dangerous drug in sport is the one that is killing Best. All this pouncing on drug-users is a way of legitimising alcohol, sport’s drug of choice. Don’t even call it a drug. That way, we might see it for what it is.

Sport and alcohol: ham and eggs: Morecambe and Wise: Burke and Hare. Sport and booze were made for each other, quite literally so. Each enables the other. Sport provides an opportunity for drink and drink provides an opportunity for sport. This is a perfect symbiosis, a partnership that brings benefits to each side. Find the sport and you have found the drink.

Win or lose, on the booze. No matter what happens in sport, it provides an opportunity and a reason for drinking. You celebrate or you drown your sorrows. Sport is real life exaggerated and, therefore, sport provides exaggerated opportunities for drinking. It is an endless cycle and — let us be frank — for most of us, it is a very pleasant one. So it should be. Drug-taking is supposed to be pleasant.

In Hong Kong they hold an annual sporting festival, the Hong Kong Sevens. It has become a great expat shindig, a boozy fiesta in a notoriously boozy place. It brings two long days of gorgeous sport, a gathering of the rugby union clans and a thousand bars that never close. I have been there as a punter and had a marvellous, giddy time of it. I have also been there to work and found it deeply strange to be one of the few sober people amid thousands.

The Monday after the sevens is the busiest day of the year for Alcoholics Anonymous. The sevens bring a boozy lifestyle to a peak. Naturally, in the grisly aftermath, a fair number wake up in holy terror. A friend of mine went straight to hospital in a taxi, pausing only to get tanked up, arriving with the immortal words: “Let me in! I’m pissed!” When last encountered, he was settled, sober and sorted: a hero, in short.

Most sports, whether you are playing or watching, are based around the consumption of booze. When the England cricket team won the Ashes, they went on a corporate bender. “They deserve it,” the country responded fondly. The question of who it was that threw up in the lav at 10 Downing Street was never, as it were, cleared up.

If you attend a live sporting event, the first thing that happens is that your bag is searched. We are used to the sad, demeaning routines of terrorism and we accept it stoically. Of course, they are not searching for weapons. They are searching for alcohol. Alcohol is not permitted at sporting events.

The second thing that happens is you walk straight into the most enormous bar you have ever seen. Twickenham, Lord’s, Wimbledon: all the same. This is not security but profiteering. “We know everybody is going to drink. Far better they drink at our prices.” The walk from Twickenham station to the rugby ground is paved with beer cans. Empty them before you reach security. Into yourself, naturally.

Football has the most ferocious drinking culture. The main square of any town in Europe with an English team playing that day is a deeply alarming exhibition of mass drunkenness. Among players there is a culture shift taking place, but Tony Adams’s unforgettable autobiography, Addicted, tells the story of the traditional pairing of drink and football.

Drink is part of the game. Every game. Pimm’s at Wimbledon, champagne at Lord’s, beer everywhere else. You play cricket, you meet at the pub. Roy Harper’s marvellous song of cricketing nostalgia, with its brass bands and the old cricketer leaving the crease, ends with the glorious thought that it could be the sting in the ale.

And it’s great. Really great. The stumps are uprooted, the boundary markers collected, the rope strung around the square, the scoreboard and its white numbers put away and you lock the pavilion door and amble across the grass and over the road to the Plume of Feathers, where someone has already bought you your first, and you raise it to the man who got the wickets, and the men who shared the partnership, and the duffer who held the catch, and we drink, and we laugh, and we drink. Blessed days.

More lives are ruined by alcohol than by anabolic steroids, or cannabis, or cocaine. Road accidents, household accidents, fights, family violence: again and again, alcohol is the cause. Alcohol is the most readily available route to degradation and disaster. It is the great contradiction of Western sport and, by extension, Western society. We drink for comfort and for joy, and many go on and drink themselves to misery, horror and death. And yet we pretend that alcohol is not a drug, thereby allowing it to slip beneath our guard.

Drink is one of the best things about Western life, and one of the worst. And sport is an inextricable part of the great culture of the bottle. Those of us who saw Best play would certainly wish to celebrate the extraordinary joy he brought us. Should we raise a glass to him? A prayer is at least as appropriate. One that begins: there but for the grace of God . . .