George Best had come in along the goalline from the corner flag in a blur of intricate deception. Having embarrassed three or four challengers, he drove the ball high into the net with a fierce simplicity that made spectators wonder if the acuteness of the angle had been an optical illusion.
“What was the time of that goal?” asked a young reporter in the Manchester United press box. “Never mind the time, son,” said an older voice. “Just write down the date.”
The date was in the Sixties, and by 1974 Best had walked out of first-class football at the age of 27 and headed into another life shaped by a painful and continuing struggle with alcoholism. Yet when I accompanied him to a Tottenham Hotspur-Manchester United match recently, he stirred more excitement in the main lounge at White Hart Lane afterwards than any contemporary player other than Paul Gascoigne could have expected to generate. “I never do this, but I’ll do it with him, ” one middle-aged Spurs supporter said as he joined the scramble for autographs. “That,” he told his son, “is the best player that ever lived.”
The assertion is a shade excessive. Pele, who had a stunning impact on the World Cup finals of 1958 as a 17-yearold and was the orchestrator of the best team I ever saw when Brazil won the Cup again in 1970, has irresistible claims to being considered the supreme footballer of all time. Diego Maradona would be a popular nomination as the principal challenger and Alfredo Di Stefano would have his advocates, as would the elegant and cerebral Dutchman Johan Cruyff. But Best could run Pele as close as any. Where Pele was superior was in his far broader awareness of the imperatives of team play, his refusal to do anything complicated where something simple would cause more damage.
Yet even Best’s extravagances were a joy, so long as you weren’t Denis Law making a killer run, only to find that the ball had not arrived because Georgie had opted to beat the defender twice.
With feet as sensitive as a pick-pocket’s hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic. The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves, sudden stops and demoralising spurts, exploited a freakish elasticity of limb and torso, tremendous physical strength for so slight a figure and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple. It was Paddy Crerand (whose service from United’s midfield was so valued by Best) who declared that the Irishman gave opponents twisted blood. Best was also an excellent header of the ball, a courageous, effective challenger when the opposition had it, and he reacted to scoring chances with a deadliness that made goalkeepers dread him.
That was an attribute emphasised by Alex Ferguson, the present United manager, when he talked about the stupidity of likening Ryan Giggs to Best. “He’ll never be a Best,” said Ferguson. “Nobody will. George was unique, the greatest talent our football ever produced — easily! Look at the scoring record: 137 goals in 361 league games, a total of 179 goals for United in 466 matches played. That’s phenomenal for a man who did not get the share of gift goals that come to specialist strikers. Best nearly always had to beat men to score. At Old Trafford they reckon he had double-jointed ankles. You remember how he could do those 180-degree turns simply by swivelling on his ankles? As well as devastating defenders, that helped him to avoid injuries because he was never really stationary for opponents to hurt him.”
Best, of course, was always capable of hurting himself, with help from the girls willing to accompany him all the way through long boozy evenings and sexually hectic nights. “If I had been born ugly,” he once said to me, “you would never have heard of Pele.” In fact, he was never remotely as vain as the joke makes him out to be. The warmth felt towards him by so many old players is not merely a tribute to a man who embodied a beautiful fulfilment of the dreams they all started out with. It is a recognition of the extent to which, for all his pride in his gifts and his certainty that they were unique, he remained essentially unspoilt.
One night when, after a European Cup match at Old Trafford, a bunch of us gathered in the Brown Bull, a pub near Manchester’s Granada television studios. By the time the after-hours session was under way, hunger was a problem. At least it was until Best went round taking fish and chip orders. He returned half-an-hour later, not merely with all the orders accurately filled but with plates, knives and forks for everybody. The waiter seemed less like a superstar than the appealing boy who had worked small miracles with a tennis ball on the streets of the Cregagh housing estate in East Belfast.
For those who witnessed Best’s brief zenith in the Sixties, the effect went beyond the realisation that we were seeing the world’s most popular game played better than all but two or three men in its long history have ever played it. Sport at its finest is often poignant, if only because it is almost a caricature of the ephemerality of human achievements, and Best’s performances were doubly affecting for some because they coincided with an uneasy suspicion that football was already separating itself from its roots. It would be dishonest to claim that we foresaw the pace and extent of the separation that was to occur over the ensuing 20 years. How could we?
The true working-class foundations of the game were still articulated all around us by managers like Bill Shankly, Bill Nicholson, Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Alf Ramsey. English football still contained dozens of highly gifted players and they, like the managers, were bonded by shared background with the mass of ordinary supporters on the terraces.
From the vantage point of such an era no one could accurately predict the hurtling decline in standards and the cynical distortion of priorities that have brought us to the lamentable mediocrity of the Premier League. The elevation of the unreconstructed hod- carrier, Vinny Jones, is a lot less remarkable than it would have seemed two or three decades ago. In the intervening years a shameless emphasis on making the field claustrophobic with clattering bodies, has established his kind of negative physicality as a viable commodity.
Paul Gascoigne, on the other hand, would undoubtedly have been recognised as an immense talent in any period, but the messianic status now accorded him could be interpreted as an alarming confirmation of the scarcity of exceptional performers in our national sport. If the midfields of England were peopled, as they once were simultaneously, by Bobby Charlton, John Giles, Martin Peters, Colin Bell, Billy Bremner, Alan Ball and a few others nearly as distinguished, a Gascoigne would still be outstanding but he could not possibly have been singled out for the idolatry that was lavished on him before he moved to Italy. Mention of Best, of course, introduces another dimension altogether.
English football has not become an absolute wasteland. There are still entertaining players, matches that offer more than clamorous vigour, and apologists believe the fact that these are painfully rare must be set against evidence of a worldwide drop in standards. But blaming global conditions for the technical impoverishment of England’s domestic game is about as valid as making the same excuse for the state of the nation’s economy. Diagnosis must start with the twisted values on and off the field.
The Premier League itself is an unsightly symptom. Having instantly reneged on the original concept of reducing the number of clubs to raise the quality of play, the founders have done nothing to obscure the truth that their overwhelming priority is profit. The regular fans feel left on the edge of the sport their commitment built. They can hardly avoid a yearning for happier days and the longing does not have to reach back as far as the prime of George Best.
Long after he had made his disenchanted exit, Liverpool produced a team worth cherishing, constructed around Hansen, Souness, Dalglish and Rush. A later version, with Barnes, Beardsley and Whelan prominent, was rather memorable, too, and Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest did their bit, but as we lament what has gone, perhaps forever, it is inevitable that Best, the greatest player ever bred in these islands, should be the most potent symbol of the loss.
Within the legend, a life has to be lived. Since the Brown Bull days, Best has owned the odd bar and nightclub and helped to pay for dozens of others. Having tried drying out in clinics, attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and taking alcohol-deterrent drugs, he convinced himself that the best compromise is an attempt to shorten the binges and lengthen the periods when the craving is under control. “I’d be sitting in AA meetings longing for them to end, so I could get to a bar,” he admits. “When I was supposed to be swallowing those tablets that make you allergic to alcohol I was sometimes hiding them behind my teeth and getting rid of them later. Even when I had the implants, I was saying to myself: when the effect wears off, I’ll have a good drink. So those therapies didn’t have much chance of working. Now I have a drink when I feel like it and concentrate on preventing things getting out of hand.” The fear is that this is another of the convenient rationalisations in which alcoholics become expert.
Best was in America from 1975 to 1981, combining his football commitments in Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale and San Jose with spells on this side of the Atlantic with Fulham and Hibernian. But the talent was eroding and the drinking became cataclysmic. When he returned to Britain he was met with a tax bill for £16,000. He offered £10,000 immediately and the rest in six months but was told that was not acceptable. The result was a marathon wrangle which, he estimates, cost him 10 times the original debt, and made him bankrupt. It was a tunnel without the smallest glimmer of light until he found a solicitor who reached an agreement with the revenue men. Tax wrangles were not his only problem. After failing to appear in court on a drunk-driving charge in 1984, he was violently arrested at his home by a posse of police. When he appeared at Southwark Crown Court to appeal a prison sentence imposed earlier, his counsel somehow reasoned that it would be of assistance if Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail and I turned up as character witnesses. In the court canteen, I told George that having us on his side might make him the first man to be hanged for a driving offence. But such feeble efforts at cheering him up were stifled by the realisation that he was probably going to jail (he did, for two months). Then he glanced across with a smile. “Well, I suppose that’s the knighthood f****d,” he said.
He thinks he can specify the day when his career at the top reached a similar condition. It was in January 1974, on a Saturday when Manchester United were at home to Plymouth Argyle in the FA Cup. Best, following the most prolonged of several defections, had been persuaded into one more comeback by Tommy Docherty. Then he missed a morning’s training in midweek. He went in and punished himself the same afternoon and, when Docherty made no complaint, assumed the lapse had been forgiven. But shortly before the kick-off he was told he would not be playing. “When he (Docherty) left me, I sat in that room and cried my eyes out,” Best recalled. “After the match I went up into the empty stands and sat alone for about an hour. I knew I had ceased to be a part of United and it was a desperate feeling.”
Considering he was at United before he was properly into his adolescence, the reaction was inevitable. Equally natural, perhaps, is his assertion that disenchantment was entirely responsible for the shortening of his career. “It had nothing to do with women and booze, car crashes or court cases. It was purely football. Losing wasn’t in my vocabulary. When the wonderful players I had been brought up with — Charlton, Law, Crerand, Stiles — went into decline, United made no real attempt to buy the best replacements. I was left struggling among fellas who should not have been allowed through the door. It sickened me that we ended up being just about the worst team in the First Division.’
His conviction must be respected but the case is an over-simplification. Had his life and his personality not been in such confusion, he might have withstood those miseries on the field and refused to let the mediocrities who had invaded United drive him away from the most important means of expression he would ever know. His rationalisation is no more convincing than the argument of those who tell us that disillusionment with football provides a total explanation of his alcoholism.
There is no doubt that great sportsmen are immensely vulnerable when their gifts begin to fade. Research suggests that there may well be a relationship between heredity and alcoholism and, whatever other factors have been at work in the case of George Best, there could be significance in the sad fact that his mother died an alcoholic.
Best loved his mother, Ann, and his father, Dickie, who gave him a carefree childhood on the Cregagh council estate. Although a Protestant, he was not troubled by sectarian bitterness and his lack of bigotry shows in consistent advocacy of a united Ireland on the football field. He is proud of his origins and dreams of having a house that would enable him to be near his father. He also has another dream, one that comes to him repeatedly. “The theme is always basically the same,” he says. “I am the age I am now but I have been brought back to play for United, along with some of the players from my own time and others of the present day. Sir Matt’s in charge and I am worried about whether he will pick me. Bryan Robson is often involved, and big Steve Bruce and young Giggs. And Paddy and Denis are nearly always there.”
If George Best concentrates hard in his dream, he will see quite a few of us on the sidelines, straining to catch a glimpse of a footballer whose like we may never look upon again.
