George Best was aptly named.
A Manchester United great whose skills as a winger, dribbler of the ball and finisher were without parallel. But with that magic came an explosion of fame and privileges which, for ‘Georgie’ – Britain’s first celebrity footballer – had baneful effects.
“If you’d have given me the choice of going out and beating four men and smashing a goal in from 30 yards against Liverpool or going to bed with Miss World, it would have been a difficult choice,” he once noted. “Luckily, I had both.”
Best was the prototype for the modern football superstar, with a swagger on the pitch and a showbiz profile off it, his allure as prominent now as it was when he was laid to rest almost sixteen years ago.
There is some difficulty in the George Best story, though, and that comes down to the split persona: George Best the footballer, and ‘Bestie’ the playboy, both of which became intertwined in a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place as he climbed to the pinnacle of his profession.
Best’s upbringing was unspectacular, growing up as one of six children in a working class family in Cregagh, Belfast. His father, Dickie, worked in a shipyard and had been an amateur footballer in his younger days, while Best’s mother, Anne, was a talented hockey player.
So devoted to football from his earliest years that every Christmas he received the exact same gift: a new football, a pair of boots, and a kit.
“He walked before he was 10-months-old and always had a ball with him, outside, in the living room – he even took the ball to bed with him”, his mother later revealed.
His affection towards football was plain to see, but nobody foresaw the potential that had been unearthed when Bob Bishop, United’s Belfast-based scout, attended a Cregagh boys’ club fixture and telegrammed Matt Busby: “I think I’ve found you a genius.”
Best arrived at Old Trafford as a scrawny, introverted fifteen-year old, in a period where manager Busby and striker Bobby Charlton were rebuilding the club following the Munich Air Disaster two years prior.
After just one night in Manchester, a homesick Best flew back across the Irish Sea to his family, reluctant to ever return. He eventually did return and at the tender age of 17, just two years after signing as a schoolboy, he made his first-team debut against West Bromwich Albion at Old Trafford in a 1–0 victory.
At the time, Best was living in digs in the suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, under the watchful eye of one of the club’s long-serving landladies, Mrs Mary Fullaway.
A 10:30 pm curfew was enforced as part of Club rules, though young George took advantage of the fact that Mrs Fullaway’s next-door neighbour was a window cleaner, who stored his ladders at the back of his house.
Best arrived back late so often – at times by way of a bedroom window – that Mrs Fullaway gave him his own key.
Just twelve months after his debut, the 18-year-old had established himself as an integral part of Matt Busby’s team, helping United claim the 1965 First Division title ahead of Don Revie’s Leeds United. From there, it wasn’t long before the Belfast boy was making a name for himself on the European football scene.
It was arguably the winger’s extraordinary achievements in the 1967/68 season that propelled him into the sphere of all-time greats, managing 32 goals in all competitions from the wing – a tally not matched by a United player until striker, Ruud van Nistelrooy, accomplished the feat the following century. It was also the year of the famous Benfica finish that put United on their way to European Cup glory.
By the age of 22, he was already a double First Division winner, had won a European Cup, scooped a Ballon d’Or and became the youngest-ever Footballer of the Year winner.
Those accolades attracted a colossal wave of media attention and ‘madness’, as Best would later describe it, which would eventually derail him.
During his time in Manchester, he had transfigured what had become a banal, working-class sport for the era of hedonism and pop culture.
Prior to Best, footballers were humble, self-effacing men, far removed from music, fashion and advertising.
“I was making big money,” Best said later of those years, “but I didn’t know what to do with it.”
By the end of 1968 – at a time when he was dubbed the fifth member of The Beatles for sporting glowing black locks – the Manchester United star’s weekly earnings, supplemented by his modelling and commercial commitments, amounted to £2,000. The national average at the time was £23.
It was ‘Bestie’s’ seven-day truancy from United’s training practice, which he later revealed was to spend time with Miss Great Britain, Carolyn Moore, that led to a falling out with manager Tommy Docherty in the 1973/74 season. United went on to be relegated that year, and the footballing star subsequently bid Old Trafford farewell.
It wasn’t just Docherty that failed to contain Best either, Busby, the fatherly figure who had been persistent in his efforts to protect the prodigy from errant influences, had also professed his struggles. Best would later say that when called into Busby’s private office to be rebuked, he would look beyond the manager and count the emblems on the wallpaper.
“I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak,” he confessed.
“Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.”
By his own admission, the Northern Irishman could never muster up the willpower to resist a tipple, and it was that crippling addiction that marked the end for Best; the peak years of his playing career in Britain all but over by the time he reached 27 and his life tragically cut short in 2005, returning to the footballing gods aged 59.
“Drink is the only opponent I have been unable to beat,” he confessed in his autobiography.
He was laid to rest at his family home in Northern Ireland, as the world watched and wept. At his public memorial service, the television camera zoomed in on a rain-soaked banner with the phrase: ‘Maradona good, Pelé better, George Best’.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair even weighed in upon hearing the news of Best’s passing, calling him “probably the most naturally gifted footballer of his generation and one of the best footballers our country has produced,” reported CNN.
To this day, football fans of a certain epoch feel nostalgic at the mere mention of George Best the footballer, an errant blue-eyed icon whose artistry set the world alight in the swinging sixties.
Others, though, will get maudlin over the sense of loss he evoked as he spiralled down from the apex at just 26 years of age – his increasingly heavy drinking and womanising catching up with him all too quickly.
The debate remains wide open and his recent omission from the list of the 10 best footballers, published by BBC Sport in 2020, supports the view that his footballing feats weren’t quite as impressive as they could have been due to his carousing.
How should we remember Best?
Do we remember the joy he brought to football supporters across the globe and the glimpse he offered of a more beautiful direction for the British game? Was Eusebio, one of the best footballers of his generation, right when he hailed Best ‘a genius’ and ’the best player in the world’?
Or do we stick to the narrative that we are often taught: a wasted talent whose brief supremacy is belied by thoughts of what could have been; tales of alcoholism and violence marring everything he ever accomplished on the field?
