Football hero George Best is remembered

The legend of the late George Best’s off-the-pitch exploits has been a sadness in my life ever since I stood in an East London bookshop in 1975 reading chapters of Michael Parkinson’s revelatory book, Best: An Intimate Biography.

His reputation as a footballer on the pitch was established; but the self-destructive boozing and philandering he got up to off it shocked me.

Best had left Manchester United in 1974, but had another eight or nine years in the game ahead of him.

Gordon Burn’s 2006 book Best And Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion, renewed my acquaintance with the darker side of Best’s decline. Burn juxtaposed Best’s lifestyle with the life led by the clean-cut kid Duncan Edwards, who died of internal injuries two weeks after the Munich air disaster.

Burn’s book is grim and saddening reading as he recounts how the once-beautiful Best drank himself into bloated and bleary-eyed oblivion.

In an attempt to redeem Best’s legend, Menston-based writer Duncan Hamilton has fixed on the forthcoming 50th anniversary of his United debut as a shy 17-year-old in September 1963 for the publication of his biography.

“The misconception about George Best is that alcohol alone wrecked him and his career. It ignores the reason why he drank. The football was to blame,” he says at the start of chapter nine.

He says Best started to go off the rails shortly after United’s 1968 European Cup final victory over Benfica. Matt Busby’s failure to rebuild the team led to a slump in results and to Best’s increasingly wayward behaviour.

Hamilton, who has two award-winning biographies of Brian Clough and Harold Larwood to his name, believes that the beguiling Irishman never recovered from leaving United after 474 games and 181 goals, even though he went on to notch up another 240 games and 71 goals with 11 other clubs (Best’s vital statistics are listed at the back of the book).

It’s plausible, compelling even; but attributing Best’s behaviour to Matt Busby’s retirement and United’s fall from power is as tendentious as blaming the violence in Best’s Belfast hometown from 1969 or his mother’s alcoholism.

Best could be an unreliable witness, liable to amend or embellish aspects of his life according to his need for ready money from newspapers prepared to pay.

It may seem trite to ask whether Best was his own worst enemy or a victim of a too rapid rise to international fame, fortune and celebrity.

Hamilton’s insightful and touching narrative is charitable. You can find passages, compiled from interviews and a mass of publications, that contrast the post-war austerity of the short-back-and-sides 1950s, when boys looked like men, with the Swinging Sixties, when men looked like boys.

“He didn’t look as any other footballer had looked before. He looked instead like a singer from Top of the Pops or a guitarist on Ready Steady Go! Compared to his predecessors he inhabited a different, fresher world... Old conventions were disappearing as new conventions were established.”

I don’t think Best was a greater footballer than Maradona or Pele; but in his time he was certainly the first of a new breed. Mercifully, the dross of his private life – Best called it “rubbish” – fell away with his death in 2005, leaving the brighter memory of his years of brilliance.