THE BEST OF TIMES

I’M SITTING HERE at the laptop, with one eye on the television where Sky News has just announced that George Best has died. And I have a great big smile slapped across my face.

I can’t help it: the screen is full of images of George in his prime, George in the green of Northern Ireland scoring against England; in the red of Manchester United crashing a spectacular half-volley to the net; and an even younger George, in various shades of fuzzy black and white, but still vividly illuminating all those dated TV pictures with outrageous body-swerves, darting runs and flashing headers.

And, as often as not, the final image is of the ball in the net, the keeper and maybe a couple of defenders flat out on the muddy turf, and George, walking away grinning, one arm aloft, the crowd in raptures, his fellow players - great names like Charlton and Law and Crerand - rushing to mob him with hugs and handshakes.

Amazing stuff - but just business as usual for football’s Mr Entertainment.

So you can’t help but smile or, better still, swoon. Or, if you were someone like a young Roy Keane, be inspired.

Twelve years ago, I interviewed Keane in the Manchester hotel which he was temporarily calling home after making his then record-breaking transfer from Nottingham Forest. At the time, a creeping media revisionism had sought to create the impression that Roy was a life-long Man Utd fan.

Not so, he’d actually grown up supporting Spurs (and Celtic, of course), but when I asked him about his favourite all-time player, his answer left no room for confusion: George Best.

“I was too young to actually see him play but I’ve seen tapes,” he told me, “There’s one, his story, which I’ve seen hundreds of times. I met him once when I was younger. He was opening a betting office in Mayfield so I went down and got a picture taken with him. I’ve still got it back home in Cork.”

Inevitably, perhaps, people have drawn comparisons between George Best and Roy Keane, two Manchester United legends who have hogged the headlines these past few weeks. Keane, in some quarters, has been dubbed Old Trafford’s greatest ever player, but I suspect that, with his boyhood idol in the running for that accolade, the Corkman would be more embarrassed than flattered by the praise.

Keane sometimes undersells his own merits as a footballer but he got close to the truth of the matter when he once opined that while he wasn’t the most technically gifted of players, he had learned there was a lot you could achieve in the game through sheer desire.

Which is true. Keane may be one of the great all-rounders, a player who mastered all the basics and harnessed them to a relentless quest for something close to perfection - but he is no George Best.

Best, in his early years at Old Trafford, worked hard on his game too, putting in long, solitary hours on the training pitch to make himself a genuinely two-footed player. And it was that achievement which gave him the right to be critical in later life of someone like David Beckham or, in one particularly memorable phrase, to say of the typically over-hyped modern footballer: “He could trap a ball further than I could kick it.”

Through the sweat of his own self-improvement, Best earned those bragging rights. But Georgie was so much more than a self-made man. Roy Keane has elevated the ordinary into the extraordinary, but George Best transformed the natural into something bordering on the supernatural. What made him so outstanding were talents you have to suspect were innate. The swerves, the feints, the remarkable balance under the heaviest of challenges - all the qualities which would light up the great football grounds of Europe had to have been there on the streets and in the school yards of Belfast. The essence of his greatness was not something that was coached into him, not even something that could ever be learned. George Best just was.

On Sky, they are showing split screen images of Best bewildering another defence and Best pouring champagne over a pyramid of glasses. Which seems oddly appropriate because Best’s is a story of two lives, one of staggering genius on the football field and the other of, well, just staggering.

I have beside me, as I write, a slim volume with a picture of George looking impossibly handsome on the cover. The book is called Fall of a Superstar. Nothing new there - except that this was penned in 1973, and finishes with George quitting United and high-tailing it to Spain for some R&R in the sun.

The author, John Roberts, used to ghostwrite Best’s column for the Daily Express, although on one occasion George was persuaded to have a go himself. The book reproduces that hand-written column, alongside George’s admission that he found the exercise hard-going and kept having to resist the temptation to abandon it and “go downstairs for a game of snooker.”

But he finished the job and submitted the copy and - with the exception of just two grammatical corrections - the Express were able to run it word for word.

Just to give a flavour of the thing, here is George, in his neat handwriting, responding to some comments made by an ‘ex’ - the actress Susan George.

“She was being interviewed by a well-known columnist when my name cropped up and she very kindly explained to him that when we knew each other all the passes came from me, adding the nice little note, ‘How can a boy be interested in anybody else when he is so interested in himself.’

“Somewhere along the line she forgot to mention that when we met it was she who invited me to the studios to watch her rehearse, it was she who invited me to stay with her parents, and when I went on holidays it was she who sent me a telegram saying she was arriving a week later. Mere details I suppose.”

So there’s a little glimpse of George back in the heyday: extravagantly gifted, uncommonly bright and clearly in need of no spin doctor to help him trade barbs in the press. A man, you would think, who could turn his hand to virtually anything. Unfortunately, for him and for those who loved him, he turned to drink.

By the time that book was written, George Best had already peaked as a footballer and though there would be further glimpses of his magic in places as diverse as the United States and Craven Cottage, the fall of the superstar had begun.

John Roberts quotes Johan Cruyff near the end of the book: “He is looking for something,” says Cruyff insightfully. “Something that isn’t there. I know life must be difficult for him, but he must sort himself out before it is too late.”

Serenity? Oblivion? A buzz to replace football? We can’t be sure of what George was looking for, but it’s painfully clear that he thought he could find it in the bottom of a glass. And, maybe, fleetingly, he did. And that was enough to keep sending him back, again and again, despite humiliation, violence, illness and a term in jail. Despite the fact that he had become an alcoholic.

When people ask where and how it all went wrong for George Best, the answer is as simple and as complicated as that. Alcoholism got a grip on him and never fully let go.

Those who argue that he didn’t deserve his ‘liver transplant’ are missing the point. I don’t doubt that every time George Best insisted he would never drink again, he meant what he said. The annals of alcoholism are full of false dawns. But they are also full of people who sooner or later conquer it, recover and go on to lead fulfilling lives, coping with the bad stuff as best they can and making the most of all the good things that come with a life no longer burdened by the consequences of self-destruction.

But, for anyone who knows anything about addiction, all of that is a lot easier said than done. It should therefore be a matter for sadness, not moral outrage that unlike Jimmy Greaves and Tony Adams, George Best was unable to reach his own dry land.

But his essential generosity of spirit was evident right to the end. When he could no longer help himself, he chose to try and help others by authorising release of distressing pictures of himself on his deathbed and then donating his organs for transplant. In his life, he enriched ours and maybe in his death, he will do the same.

In remembering George Best, it is right to shed a tear for the dark times and the lost years. But when the crying time is over, we should stick the tapes in the machine and, like the young Roy Keane, watch them, oh, at least a hundred of times.

And smile.