Two years later came Best’s annus mirabilis – 28 league goals in a season when United came second behind rivals Manchester City but won the European Cup three weeks later as sweet redemption. United’s No. 7 would be crowned the First Division’s top scorer and FWA Player of the Year and six months later named Europe’s best player. Best was hungry for more glory but, sadly, his life had peaked. If Best’s haircut and demeanour lubricated his fame, it was his genius that cemented it. His was a pure form of footballing beauty, no critics or writers required to explain its brilliance. All you needed to do was watch. Best was a supreme dribbler, his close control actually improving as the opposition closed around him. As Busby once said, “He was able to use either foot – sometimes he seemed to have six.” The difficulty of the task only heightened Best’s senses, like a master escapologist at work. The balance of most players is decreased at high speed, but Best’s body seemed designed for cruising speed. Hugh McIlvanney once wrote that Best had “feet as sensitive as a pickpocket’s hands”. He was where energy and elegance combined in heady harmony. On the miry, heavy pitches of English football’s 1960s, this wasn’t just a glimpse of the future but something ethereal. Crowds would rise whenever Best was in town, providing a 90-minute escape from both the working week and the average standard of footballer on show. If you’d have polled them to change the rules of the game and permit Best his own ball, even traditionalists would have ripped up the rulebook.
The line between playboy and addict is so very slight. The truth is that Best was never strong enough to cope with his raucous lifestyle and never brave enough to say “no”. His mother Anne died from an alcoholism-related cardiovascular disease at the age of 55, and Best’s relationship with addiction was just as tragic. As early as 1966, Best admitted in an interview with the Daily Mail that he was covering up, rather than curing, his urges. “Wednesday till Saturday is murder,” he said. “I know I’ve got to stay off the town and get to bed by 11. But it drives me nuts. I don’t read. The only thing that keeps me sane is remembering that there’ll be a party on Sunday and Monday and Tuesday.” “I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak,” he would later admit. “Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.” That personality trait would lay his mind open to the rigours of addiction. The stories of Best’s antics grew legendary, but had an increasingly dark twist. He was reported to have talked a just-married bride into his hotel room from the downstairs bar as a wager while his teammates plied her husband with alcohol. He also went AWOL from United training sessions, and even matches, Matt Busby and subsequently Wilf McGuinness losing patience with his unreliability. In his magnificent biography of Best, Duncan Hamilton lays some of the blame at United’s door, however indirectly. Rather than alcohol ruining Best’s career, Hamilton believes that it was the game, and United’s lack of success after the 1968 European Cup win, that drove him to drink. It’s a hypothesis that Best himself alluded to in later life: “Instead of revolving around me, the team began to depend on me. I lacked the maturity to handle it. I began to drink more heavily to cope.”
Yet the most obvious conclusion is that Best became a waste product of his own celebrity. He was the perfect image to serve as the cultural icon of the 1960s, but the imperfect personality. An accelerated journey from the streets of Cregagh to the floodlights of Old Trafford and the spotlights of Manchester and London leaves no time for maturity to catch up with the lifestyle. The Beatles had each other; Best had only his demons. “He didn’t know how to open up,” his son Calum said after his death. “It wasn’t his style to say what the problem was or to talk about that problem. All you could do with my dad was support him when he needed it.” It is always the trailblazers who suffer most, unable to follow the track of white pebbles that leads them safely through the forest. Best came before the age of media training and lifestyle coaches, before the warnings of what lies at the side of the path. Some footballers still do falter, but they have far more assistance and are much better prepared. Best was not just a cultural icon but a cultural experiment; he became a case study on the dangers of fame. Best peaked at 23, and stopped playing regularly at the top level at 26. As the noise surrounding him became all-consuming, he blocked it out in a semi-permanent alcoholic haze. By the time retirement was enforced upon him, drink was Best’s comfort and his crutch. “Football has lost one of its greats, and I have lost a dear friend. He was a marvellous person,” said Bobby Charlton at Best’s funeral in 2005. Half a million people lined the streets of Belfast to see him pass by. Charlton’s first two points ring true, but that last sentence jars.
Best might have been a marvellous player, but he was not a marvellous person. He was an addict, and that addiction led him to do terrible things. He was twice convicted of drink-driving, he physically abused his first wife Angie on multiple occasions, and he committed robbery in order to maintain his habit. He was given a new liver on the NHS in 2002 despite showing no ability to break his habit without the assistance of medication – an exceptional case. As someone whose loved one has had a liver transplant (for medical reasons), I know that 14 per cent of the people waiting for a liver transplant die before receiving a donation. Less than 12 months later, Best was drinking again, later to be arrested for driving once more while over the limit. Whether you can separate George Best the footballer and George Best the addict depends on your own interpretation of his story, but all must come together to salute one of the greatest players Britain has ever produced, and to mourn one of sport’s most tragic tales. “They’ll forget all the rubbish when I’ve gone and they’ll remember the football,” Best said before his death. Unfortunately for him, most will remember both. Best stood astride the line of sport and celebrity, guaranteed footballing immortality yet painfully mortal away from the field. Gorgeous George welcomed in the modern cultural age, but nobody prepared him to survive in it.
This is an extract from Portrait of an Icon, a study of 58 footballers and managers. All proceeds from the book go to the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, a charity set up after Bobby’s death to find new ways to treat and beat cancer.
