The rise and fall of a tabloid hero

GEORGE BEST’S death yesterday will kick start a certain type of eulogy. There’ll be plenty of obituaries to read for the next few days, with the usual interchangeable ingredients: Belfast, El Beatle, Matt Busby, Miss World, Fulham, America.

As we said here last week about another Manchester United great, anyone who’s lived through the last 40 years could make a fair attempt at a potted biography themselves.

Our advice is to steer clear of anything containing the dreaded words, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’

Best’s death carries a greater significance, but not the lazy question of talent fulfilled or unfulfilled.

Best’s downfall was his timing; 10 years earlier or later he might have survived, but he was the first great tabloid hero, the first person whose fame transcended the back or front pages, and Best stories flowed inexorably into the maw of British redtops as a result. During the week, as some pretty disparate characters queued up to give their ‘insight’ into Best’s slow demise, author Gordon Burn pinpointed a key fact, that Best was such a tabloid regular the newspapers had their own codename for the bizarre twists and turns of his life: BestEnders.

It was drink that killed George Best, but it was celebrity, the 21st century disease par excellence, that complicated matters. Best’s white-hot fame was such that nonentities like his most recent ex-wife were able to publish autobiographies. What did she have to offer the most distracted reader but her loose, short-lived connection to a man who didn’t kick a ball meaningfully for over 30 years? That was the attendant wattage of George Best’s fame. It was beyond stratospheric: it was solar - no, stellar - and singular.

Problems arise with fame’s dual nature. Tales abound of the happy-go-lucky Belfast boy buying chips for journalists at the height of his career, a courtesy that in this day and age qualifies as more fantastic than anything JRR Tolkien ever dreamed up. There are plenty of other stories about Best, this time cast as violent drunk, as cranky barfly.

Those who spent the last few days sharing their happy memories of an unaffected sportsman were offering refutations of those stories in parallel, as though the latter were an unwelcome shadow on the brighter tales, or dismissable as the results of muckraking by the gutter press.

The scientist Stephen Jay Gould had the perfect riposte to this kind of denial. Writing about baseball, he said: “I do not look for moral instruction from my sporting heroes. The pursuit of athletic excellence will suffice.”

It’s a lesson most of us would do well to remember. It’s hard to draw the line at which a person’s abilities on the pitch, on the court or on the track cease to bleed into their life in plain clothes, as it were. The moral lessons of sport are supposedly dedication, commitment and team play, but there are others which successful sportspeople display.

Selfishness, ruthlessness and, often, an overbearing competitiveness. You can’t have one set of qualities without the other.

So it was with George Best. Talented and inept, graceful and boorish. Flawed: in other words, human.

The rogue ingredient that did it for Best was the hot gaze of publicity, the attention he drew even when he didn’t want it. Older readers may remember the far-out, space-age house he built in Manchester, complete with floor-to-ceiling windows. Best had to move out because of the crowds who gathered just to watch him.

If you doubt it, consider the medical consultant who was treating him and giving his daily bulletin about the footballer’s health. During the week, two English newspapers published profiles of liver specialist Dr Roger Williams. Even the man who counted off the hours to George Best’s death became famous by association.