How do you remember George Best?

Football genius or demonised alcoholic? Daniel Gordon’s new documentary asks if the footballer can be separated from the man he became.

‘Just remember me for my football.’ George Best’s final public request, as quoted by his first wife Angie, in Daniel Gordon’s new documentary, George Best: All by Himself, which is released on DVD this week.

Angie, the most intriguing contributor to Gordon’s character study, explains, ‘he came up with that expression because he had to find a reason to deflect away from who and what he had become.’

Gordon’s examination of George Best’s life serves up a narrative football fans will be overly familiar with. Best arrives at Old Trafford a shy, skinny fifteen-year old whose supreme talent quickly sees him lighting up the English and European football stage for a relatively short period at the end of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. With rock star looks and a magnetic swagger with which he played the game, Best was ripe for a media and nation who, following England’s World Cup success in 1966 and along with the dawn of sixties celerity culture, were ready and waiting for a new kind of football hero.

For a quiet, sensitive and by many accounts lonely young man, this colossal wave of attention and ‘madness’, as he would later describe it, would eventually derail him, the press attention and media storms, along with a dozen other factors, ultimately alienating him from the one constant throughout this upheaval, his love of football.

In much the same way that Elvis Presley as the the first rock star, never recovered from the sheer enormity of his initial fame explosion, George Best, the first footballer as celebrity, never recovered from his preliminary mauling at the hands of the fame machine. Neither superstar was given the protection their situation, or their personalities, required.

The first half of Gordon’s documentary takes us through Best’s familiar story from his United debut in 1963, through his glory years and up to the early seventies when, following Sir Matt Busby’s retirement, things started to sour for Best. Although the narrative might be frayed, the beauty of Best’s genius is as fresh as ever. Football fans hold an almost subconscious acknowledgement of his abundance of skill, yet seeing him again swan past countless flailing defenders with unnatural balance and control given the conditions he played in, still offers a shock factor, still a certain degree of awe to an audience living in an era of Messi and Ronaldo.

The theatrical tricks Gordon pulls out as he reconstructs the 1968 European Cup final are welcomed. The film maker switches from black and white to colour, editing together archive footage of the the final like the climax of an action film. A musical crescendo and a dozen alternative angles accompany Best, as he rounds Jose Henrique to score his iconic goal against Benfica, and effectively win Manchester United their first European Cup. Gordon’s final freeze frame of many is Best’s greatest moment on a football pitch, wheeling away from goal, one arm raised in the air in recognition of his own brilliance. He looks down the pitch towards his grateful, celebrating team mates and in the background, Wembley’s dark vastness.

Although this look back at Best’s glory days is always welcome, it’s something we’ve seen many times before. All by Himself’s relevance and originality is to be found after Best’s United days, as he flees to the United States and begins a relationship with Angie.

It is around this time that Best would appear to have realised he had a drink problem. The attention on him was no longer constant, no longer intrusive, but he was still going on benders that lasted for days at a time. Angie recalls many new beginnings, fresh starts with new clubs in new cities, pledges to stay sober, but Best always finds a reason to start drinking again.

Best’s Mother, Anne, passed away in 1978. George would blame her death, brought on by Anne’s own struggle with alcoholism, on the pressure his celebrity brought on his working class Belfast family.

Angie Best explains that she eventually left George after one bender too many, when driving their baby to see a doctor on a rainy night, she saw a drunken Best stumbling up the middle of the road. ‘After that he drank every single day for the next thirty years,’ she offers.

Many of the interviewees in Gordon’s film, including Paddy Crerand, point to the initial absence of anyone in George’s life to warn him of the perils of the path he was following. This is a fair analysis of the complex subject of what caused Best’s downfall, considering the non-existent protection in the early days at United.

Angie best however lays the blame solely on George. ‘Today people say it’s a disease. It’s not a disease. You choose to have a drink, you don’t choose to have a disease.’

Angie Best was married to an alcoholic for eight years, so her point of view presumably comes from intense experience and remembered anger, and is therefore wholly understandable. Yet that does not make her right. Alcoholism is a disease and as with any addiction, it consists of an inherent absence of choice.

The late actor Heath Ledger described his approach to playing a character addicted to heroin in the 2006 film Candy, as imagining the feeling of being extremely thirsty and not being able to have a glass of water — for the rest of your life.

The final sequence of Gordon’s documentary shows Best giving his last ever interview, two months before his death. He is asked what he wants people to think of him. ‘Well I know what they will think,’ Best replies. ‘They’ll forget all the rubbish when I’m gone, and they’ll remember the football.’

Renowned sportswriter, Hugh Mcllvanney is unsympathetic to Best’s wish. ‘That’s a forlorn hope,’ Mcllvanney summerises. ‘For people to look at it as a career perfectly executed would be madness. We just have to hope that the glory far outweighs and outshines the rubbish, and for me, it does.’

It’s important in life to reserve the ability to separate the artist from their art. George Best the man was stricken with a crippling addiction which caused great pain and suffering in his life. George Best the footballer lit up the pitch for a short time and soccer, and the world, is better off for his brief genius. He wanted us to remember this, and not the rubbish. Perhaps football owes him that.