Two days after Manchester United had come back from the dead to beat Bayern Munich and win the European Cup, and 31 years after he d helped the club come back from the dead to win that glittering prize for the first time, George Best was still making front page news.
GEORGE MISSED GOALS! screamed the red-top headline above a story relating how Best, apparently fearful that he would be mobbed by autograph hunters, left his seat in the Nou Camp in Barcelona a minute before full-time and was marooned in the car park when United staged probably the most audacious smash and grab raid in football history.
Depending on how your read it, the headline was both unlikely and entirely predictable. An active alcoholic for the guts of 25 years, George has missed many things in his time from training to television appearances. But goals? No, George Best didn t miss goals. At least, not often. And even when he did miss, like Pele in the 1970 World Cup, his most extravagant failures were generally more breathtaking than the routine successes of others.
The distinction has been made between great goalscorers and scorers of great goals not the least of George Best s achievements as a footballer was that he rendered that distinction obsolete. In his prime, it seemed that there was nothing he could not accomplish on the football field, which only made his absence from the game s ultimate stage, the World Cup, all the more galling for him and us.
Unfortunately, Best burned brightest in a wilderness time for Northern Ireland football, his appearances in the green shirt occuring for an all-too-brief spell during the twenty-four years which separated the team s appearances in the 1958 and 1982 World Cup finals. While the debate as to who was the greatest of them all rages on, there is no question but that George Best s was the finest talent never to be exhibited at the Mundial.
Instead, by accident of birth, as football writer Joe Lovejoy puts it in the newly published paperback edition of his impressive biography Bestie, a player on the same plane as Pele and Cruyff was forced to scratch around with the no-hopers of Northern Ireland and missed out on all the major tournaments. Recreational football is how he describes an international career in which he could be bothered to turn out thirty-seven times between 1964 and 1977.
And Best may have suffered more than just disppointment and frustration at seeing the World Cup door shut fast against him. Lovejoy again: By universal agreement, George would have been less likely to reach for the self-destruct button had he sensed even the hint of a chance to prove himself on the stage where true greatness is measured.
And there s the rub. In 1982, when Northern Ireland availed of the chance to cover themselves in glory in Spain, George Best was still only 36. If he had been able to maintain his fitness and his appetite for the game, it is quite conceivable that a player of his intelligence, vision and skill could still have contributed to the cause perhaps as a sweeper or in some other specialist or selective role. The legs might not have carried him with quite the dash of yore, but he could still have illuminated the proceedings with flashes of brilliance. One of the best-ever players gracing one of the best-ever World Cups: what a football fantasy come true that would have been.
But a fantasy it was destined to be, because by then, George was already locked in battle with a far more formidable opponent than anything he d ever encountered on the field of play. And that battle, with the drug which has disfigured his life, is one that s still taking its toll today.
The Genie From The Bottle . . .
The natural no, make that unnatural footballing talent that was evident in the Belfast boy from an early age and which made Manchester United s Irish scout Bob Bishop famously telegram Matt Busby to the effect that he d found him a genius , was always going to mark George Best out as something special in any company. But it wasn t enough for George himself. He desperately wanted to live up to the boast implicit in his surname, and from his arrival at Old Trafford as a scrawny 15-year-old, set about achieving that ambition with a perfectionist s zeal.
Deemed too young and too frail to play for the youth team in his first year, George challenged himself with an rigorous course of self-improvement that meant he was always the first on the training pitch and always the last to leave.
Looking back from the present day era, when an Irish international like Mark Kennedy can earn acclaim for being able to play a bit on the wrong wing even though, in the game against Macedonia, his most effective crosses invariably required that the ball had to be pulled back onto his left foot George Best s recollection of his own ambition as a young pro makes for instructive reading.
When I was 15, United were playing Real Madrid, and I remember seeing (Francisco) Gento do something I had never seen before. It was during the pre-match warm-up and the goalkeeper was drop-kicking the ball to him. Gento had a great left foot and he pretended to shoot, but he put such backspin on the ball that after it had gone about ten yards it would spin back to him. I watched, spellbound. I had never seen anything like it.
The next day, in training, I had to do it. I was right-footed but Gento had done it with his left, so I had to do the same. That was probably the start, the thing that made me determined to be genuinely two-footed. I made up my mind that I was going to be able to do everything with my other foot. From then on, I worked on it all the time. I tried to keep the ball up with my left foot: if I could do it ten times then I wanted to do it a dozen. After training, when everyone else had gone, I d take out six or seven balls and keep working at it. I set myself tasks. I would take corners with my left foot and try to score direct. Then I would stand on the eighteen yard line and try to hit the crossbar time after time. By the time I was 19 or 20, most people couldn t tell which one was my stronger foot.
The young Best showed similar diligence in his attitude to bettering his heading, tackling and general fitness and when all that improvement was applied to an extraordinary dribbling ability and a sense of balance that meant he could ride even the most ferocious tackles, the effect on the game was sensational.
At just 18, Best started the 1964-65 season as a fully-fledged member of what was to prove the best team in the country. Already, his dazzling skills had excited much attention in grounds around England, but it was in the capital, on September 30, 1964, in front of the national press, that Best truly announced his arrival.
League leaders Chelsea were the glamorous hosts at trendy Stamford Bridge, the perfect stage for the birth of a star. All involved recall it as a watershed; Best himself says: The more I wonder when it all began, the more I keep coming back to that game.
The match statistics baldly record that United won 2-0 with George Best getting on the scoresheet, but those who were there remember something else again, something close to a one-man tour de force. What they witnessed, in fact, was sports history in the making.
The Daily Mirror reported: At the end, they stood and acclaimed him. They gave him their hearts because he had won them with every bewitching swerve, every flick of his magic feet. Not yet 19, the boy from Belfast showed 60,769 fans why he seems destined to become one of the great wingers of our time.
According to The Times: He was unstoppable. He even had the Chelsea crowd, it seemed, longing for him to have the ball and float his way past man after man. (Best s marker) Shellito, in particular, must have felt that he was trying to push back a genie into a bottle.
Much later, Matt Busby would reflect: It was one of many great displays George gave at Chelsea. Something about the ground used to lift him. But I shall always remember that first time. After that, whenever we went to Stamford Bridge I thought I ought to phone the police and warn them that a murder was about to be committed.
And it was that fateful match, too, which inspired Paddy Crerand to famously observe of his young team-mate that he could give opponents twisted blood .
George Best would go on to tie many more opposing corpuscles up in knots for a heady period which, though comparatively short in duration, will live long in the memory of anyone who loves the game of football. In 1966, it was Europe s turn to be dazzled, Georgie turning on the style before 90,000 in Benfica s Stadium Of Light, first heading his side into the lead and then scorching though the defence to set United on their way to a stunning 5-1 victory. Now the good-looking, long-haired national idol had a new international profile El Beatle , the first pop star of football, was born.
Two years later, Benfica were on the receiving end again, as the 1968 team finally realised the dream that almost died at Munich, Best jinking around the keeper to slot away the breakthrough extra time goal that helped give United a 4-1 European Cup victory at Wembley.
With dark personal clouds already gathering on the horizon, there are those who judge that 1968 triumph to be the pinnacle of George Best s career, the high point before the long and sad decline. Certainly, it was the ultimate honour the game would bestow on him, as well as being an occasion of unprecedented emotion although, still the impossible perfectionist at that point, Best maintains he didn t do himself full justice on that night of nights. But, even if only intermittently, he would still conjure up performances of breaktaking magic for a few years to come, including a swaggering six goal show-off in an 8-2 FA Cup demolition of poor old Northampton Town in 1970.
Indeed, bearing in mind that earlier reference to Northern Ireland s World Cup in Spain, it s striking to note that it was as late as 1981 long after the glory days at United had been followed by a mad, mercenary, rollercoaster trip through clubs as diverse as Fulham, Hibs, Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Cork Celtic and even Dunstable Town that George Best scored one of the greatest goals of his entire career.
It happened during a spell of renewed vigour and purpose when he was was briefly on the dry and playing for struggling San Jose Earthquakes in the NASL against his old club Fort Lauderdale. The televised footage of the goal can still inspire an I ve-seen-it-but-I-can t-quite-believe-it response, as Best teases and torments what appears to be the whole Fort Lauderdale team, twisting and turning to beat some players not once but twice before finally, in the chaos of the goalmouth, offering one last extravagant feint before leaving the keeper, like the rest of his defence, on his backside.
Begrudgers may advance the somewhat sub-standard nature of the opposition in an attempt to dilute the quality of the goal but, as Best once indignantly told an interviewer: If you scored a goal like that against 11 year-olds it would still be a great goal.
Joe Lovejoy agrees and finds it extraordinary for another reason too.
It was a truly breaktaking goal, reminiscent of the supreme footballer at his very best, he writes, and it is difficult for the layman to imagine how a raddled alcoholic could reach so far back to dredge up such a gem.
He then quotes George: I can answer that in one word. Pride. Once I got out on the pitch, I put everything else to the back of my mind. I wanted to show these people, who had never seen me at Manchester United, what I was capable of. I was still enjoying playing because it was my only release. Everything else was a shambles. I was behaving like a lunatic, my marraige had gone wrong and my personal circumstances were a nightmare, but my football was one thing I knew I could still do well.
Supreme Footballer 1, Raddled Alcoholic 0. Sadly, in this definitive life of two halves, the dark side would insist on making comeback after comeback.
The Genie In The Bottle . . .
You could endlessly speculate about the origins of George Best s alcoholism, citing any number of possible factors, from the genetic (his mother, Ann, who had not taken a drink until she was past forty, died an alcoholic aged 54) to the unique and unprecedented combination of pressure and temptation which assailed the first pop star of football at a tender age.
But in many ways, the cause matters less than the effect which, from about 68 onwards when his binges began to spin out of control has been frequently catastrophic, curtailing his career, scuppering relationships, rendering him bankrupt and, at the lowest point, landing him in jail for the Christmas of 1984. And, less visible on the surface but all the more insidious, has been the damage to his own sense of dignity and self-regard. It s telling, for example, that while George now plays his drunken appearance on the Wogan show for laughs on the after-dinner circuit, according to his then partner Mary Shatila he was actually so mortified by the experience that he has never been able to bring himself to view a tape of that 1990 debacle.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Best s alcoholism is the way in which it has befuddled an uncommonly intelligent and sensitive person, and corrupted what Eamon Dunphy correctly identifies as his essentially decent, courageous soul.
Joe Lovejoy captures this all-too-familiar Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon in a passage designed to answer the perennial fan question: what is George Best really like?
He is an alcoholic, Lovejoy writes, and like all addicts his chosen poison has a profound effect on his personality, causing huge mood and behavioural changes. He can be rivetting company, or taciturn to the point of embarrassment, engagingly witty at two o clock, boorish drunk at half past. He is a tender, giving lover according to those in a position to know, but he has physically abused most, if not all, his women. An incorrigible flirt, he is fiercely jealous if his partner (second wife Alex) so much as looks at another man. He is careful with his money these days (casinos notwitstanding) but can also be incredibily generous, producing #2,000 in cash to pay off the bailiffs when they called at his favourite pub. The greatest conflict of all is that the bane of his life is also his greatest enjoyment. Drink. Therein lies the solution, if only he could find it.
It s not as if George Best hasn t at least attempted to face up to his problem. Cold-turkey, the wine diet , drying-out clinics, medication, even anti-alcohol pellets sewn into the skin (he waited until they d worn off and went back drinking): he seems to have tried everything and always found some reason why it doesn t work for him, dismissing his spell in Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, with the lame Me? Anonymous?
Since it s obviously not a case of deep denial, the fundamental problem appears to be that George Best really lacks the critical desire to stop drinking, the only starting point from which any progress can be made.
Which is entirely his prerogative, of course, even though it means that those who love him, like his father Dickie, worry constantly about his well-being and his future.
With a reasonably lucrative career as a celebrity-for-hire and tv pundit bubbling along, the adulation of millions still an ever-present feature in his life, and an upcoming movie, starring John Lynch, set to increase his stock even more, it should be pretty good being George Best. And maybe it is, at least on those better days when he isn t sick and sweating and just about getting through.
How will the best footballer of his generation end up? asks Joe Lovejoy. Sadly, the prognosis is not good. He continues to drink in quantities that that would kill most of us, with the result that, like (the late) Jeffrey Bernard, he is often unwell . . . He says he is a happy man, but alcoholism and lasting happiness are incompatible, and those tormented eyes tell a different story.
George s old mate, the former Manchester City star Mike Summerbee, expresses the nightmare scenario for many who know and care for Bestie: My fear is that one day I ll wake up and it will be on the news that he s been found dead somewhere. Mind you, we ve all been saying that for twenty years.
George Best may have lived longer than even he himself expected but, at just 53, it s depressing to think that some of those who know him best feel time is fast running out for him. But the important point surely is that, like the gargle itself, Best s destiny is a matter not of quantity but of quality. It s often been posited that his self-destructive tendencies were exacerbated by the absence of anything in his life, even his beloved son Calum, to replace the sense of purpose and meaning which playing football gave him. Hence, his almost obsessive penchant for the minor competitive challenges presented by crosswords, quizzes and games of pool.
But if George Best still hasn t found what he s looking for, bitter experience suggests he s unlikely to find it in the bottom of a glass. It s a recognised feature of alcoholism that it fuels the fantasy of the elusive buzz even when the reality is, manifestly and often painfully, more spills than thrills. But once the distorting prism of the glass has been removed, it s possible to see that, allowing for the normal vicissitudes of life, such concepts as peace and happiness and contentment are not only attainable, but offer their own exciting and uplifting rewards.
After all the joy he s given the world and all the grief he s inflicted on himself and others, you d love to think that those are goals that Georgie Best won t miss before the final whistle blows. n
Bestie by Joe Lovejoy, published by Pan, is now available in paperback, priced #8.05.