Best’s family says farewell

THE STORY is told of a stunning individual goal scored by George Best shortly after he broke into the Manchester United team in 1964.

As the crowd raved and Best accepted the plaudits of his team mates, a rookie scribe in the press box looked up and asked: “Did anyone get a time on that?”

A wiser owl replied: “Never mind the time, son, just write down the date.”

From the outset, George Best was more than just a bright new talent. For all those who fell immediately under the spell of the slim, dark-haired kid from Belfast, it was clear they were watching something more like history in the making, the starburst arrival of someone who already had it in him to go on and challenge for the title of Greatest Footballer The World Has Ever Seen.

Manchester United’s Irish scout Billy Behan summed it up in his famous telegram to manager Matt Busby: “I think I have found you a genius.”

Pretty soon, there would be no “I think” about it.

But though Best may have been blessed with supernatural gifts, he didn’t make it to the very top in football on his innate talent alone.

The emphasis in later years on a career cut short and a talent squandered tends to paint the picture of a man who perhaps didn’t care enough. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The young Best was regarded as one of the hardest workers at Old Trafford, an already extravagantly talented kid who still spent long hours on his own on the training pitch trying to improve his game. In particular, Best was determined to make himself a two-footed player; that he succeeded so completely is the truest measure of the sweat and toil which underpinned the skill and swagger.

But it’s for the latter that football fans will always worship at the shrine of Best. He was, inarguably, the most talented footballer to come off this island, but his place in the world pantheon has always been open to lively debate. For those who would downplay his claims, Best’s absence from the finals of the World Cup is cited as the major question mark on his career. True, the likes of Pele and Maradona confirmed their claims to sporting immortality on the greatest stage of all.

But it hardly needs to be pointed out that they hailed from, respectively, Brazil and Argentina, two countries with a bit more going for them in the soccer stakes than Northern Ireland.

Anyway, no one would argue that a song needs to get to number one in the charts to have greatness conferred upon it. You either have the Right Stuff or you don’t and, in Best’s case, he had it in such abundance that this writer would rate him above Maradona, Cruyff and Zidane, and below only the supernaturally gifted Pele, in the all-time top five.

The great Brazilian edges it, not least because of his heightened awareness of the demands of team play, but even he would have had to play second-fiddle to the Belfast Boy when it came to running with the ball at his feet.

Dribbling, it used to be called, and you don’t see too much of it nowadays, in an era when some of the greatest footballers are admired more for their “engine” than anything else. You certainly don’t see anyone like Best in his prime, a balletic blur of logic-defying twists and turns and feints, a player who gave defenders what his United team-mate Paddy Crerand called “twisted blood”.

So bewildering was Best’s control over body and ball that there were those at Old Trafford who swore he had uniquely double-jointed ankles.

Any analysis of Best’s greatness must also take account of the time in which he played. Unlike today, a lot of First Division football matches in the ’60s and ’70s were played on pitches that bore more than a passing resemblance to a bog. Flick through any book of photographs of top-class football from back then and you’ll find any number of shots of mud-encased superstars doing their thing on playing surfaces that were sometimes bereft of even a single blade of grass.

But they didn’t stop Best working his magic.

Nor did the attentions of some of the most physically uncompromising defenders the English game has ever seen. This was the era of Norman ‘Bites Yer Leg’ Hunter, Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris and Liverpool’s iron man Tommy Smith, men whose brute-force approach to the tackle wouldn’t see them last five minutes in the modern game.

Best came up against them week-in and week-out, took more than his unfair share of punishment and, invariably, had the last laugh by leaving them sitting on their backsides as he found yet another novel way of putting the ball in the net.

There’s one piece of footage from the early ’70s which sums it up. Best is bearing down on the Chelsea goal when Chopper Harris races across and launches a waist-high tackle that looks like a convincing audition for a role in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Best is almost horizontal in midair from the wild force of the challenge but somehow, on landing, retains his balance and his control of the ball.

Then, just to rub salt in the wound, instead of blasting it past Peter Bonetti, he drops a shoulder, rounds the stranded ’keeper and almost casually taps the ball into the empty net.

That was the kind of thing that made George Best an idol to those of us who grew up with his legend. And it is why, despite all the lost years and lurid headlines, he remains a hero to many.

I met him only the once. It was late in ’93 and he was due to be the guest of honour at a sports dinner in Belfast. At the hotel the night before, he held court in the bar, sitting beside his father Dickie, and happily entertaining friends and journalists.

But he was restless too. The competitive streak that found no outlet after football was evident in his obsessive playing of general knowledge quiz questions - and rarely did he get one wrong.

Tiring of that, he suggested we all move to the pool room where, yet again, he trumped all-comers. He was sipping steadily on white wine, and by the time it was my turn to play him - “Let’s make it more interesting,” he said, slapping down a £10 note - the hour was late and his cue action getting a little wobbly.

I fluked a win, Best paid up but it was clear he wanted to stay at the table. Which suited me fine. He was George Best after all, and I already had my yarn to tell the grandkids. But as his judgment on the table grew worse, the drink turned sour in him and, after he’d lost yet another game, he threw the black ball down the table and went off to bed in a huff.

The next morning, he was up far too bright and early for a man in his condition, but even with beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, he was as considerate and articulate as you would wish any interviewee to be.

It was no mystery, this little journey from the light into the dark and back again. At least for another while. There is no room for greatness in alcoholism, and the bottle rendered George Best as ordinary as the next struggling boozer.

But, on the pitch, in his prime, he rose above the crowd, elevated football to new heights of wonder and entertainment, and made the rest of us just glad to be alive.

For those enduring memories, he deserves nothing but our heartfelt gratitude.