Why Best doesn’t belong in the dead box

It’s been said that when George Best left Manchester United it marked “the end of football in England”. He scored 28 league goals in 41 matches for the club in the 1967-68 season, when they finished as league runners-up, making him the team’s top scorer of the season; a position he also held for the following four. He made 361 league appearances for United, scoring a total of 136 goals, and holds their record for the most goals scored by one player in a non-wartime match: six, against Northampton Town in the fifth-round of the 1970 FA Cup.

But it wasn’t about the goals, and I couldn’t care less about the supposed demise of soccer. With Best, it was all about the vibe.

In the far less complicated 1960s and 1970s, I was a Man United fan. This was neither because I loved football as most boys of my age did, nor because at the time the club had one of the finest teams in British soccer history — among them Bobby Charlton, Brian Kidd, Alex Stepney, Pat Crerand, David Sadler, Nobby Stiles, Denis Law and Willie Morgan — but because Man U gave the soccer world glamour, in the form of the first player who genuinely was a star, on and off the field.

Where for a previous generation there had been Stanley Matthews and Duncan Edwards, where in future there would be Kevin Keegan and David Beckham, the Baby Boomers’ poor white trash hero was always and can only ever be George Best. In Michael Parkinson’s book BEST, an intimate biography, a photo caption describes the 1960s-era Best as having “the physique of a toothpick and the pallor of a child raised on chip butties”. Yes, he was just like any of us chip buttie kids, if only we’d been born prodigiously talented instead of just scrawny.

In the 1970s, along with pictures of Paul Kossoff (Free’s heroin-damaged guitarist), Susan Stranks and other stars cut from the pages of Look In magazine, I had a Best poster on my bedroom wall for the better part of the decade. The “hard knocks” at school tended to support Leeds United or Liverpool and, even in those days, being a Man U fan earned you a dead leg or a Chinese burn. Best was not above their derision; a popular taunt on the terraces at the time, sung to the tune of Jesus Christ, Superstar, went: “Georgie Best, superstar / Walks like a girl / And he wears a bra.” The name-calling may have hurt the odd fan, but it clearly didn’t do Georgie any harm.

He must have been one of the first soccer players to warrant his own annual and, of course, I owned one. George Best’s Soccer Annual (No 3) — with its sharp black and white photos of Best posing in one of the fashion boutiques he co-owned, wearing rock star clothes and sporting his Beatle-ish haircut — didn’t make me long to be a soccer player. I was, however, fascinated by shots of George hugging a brace of rangy models in hot-pants: if “walking like a girl” could score you women like these, I was ready whether my country needed me or not. The idea of soccer groupies was so rock ‘n’ roll — and Bobby and Nobby from the combover-club didn’t seem to be getting any.

Apart from that, I was shocked, bemused and a little excited by Best’s disrespect for authority — the time he threw a clod of mud at a referee, for example, only to be sent off in disgrace. (A newspaper cartoon of the time suggested the mud had contained an affectionately thrown lucky shamrock.) Oh, to have had the balls to do the same to my sadistic PE teacher, whose favouritism for the sports-mad thickos was pointedly political. The idea of being Best (the disrespectful individual who gave his best for the righteous Captain Busby but probably no one else), was far more attractive to me than being “best” (the team player, blindly following orders from a fascist thug but displaying no character or panache).

I watched TV avidly, as Best (who had just come off a month’s suspension for some other misdemeanour) scored a double hat-trick and ran rings around the outclassed opposition during Man U’s fifth-round FA Cup game against lowly Northampton Town on 7 February 1970. I was ten, but even a pre-pubescent soccer novice and sports agnostic could see that this was more than just a game of footy; Best seemed supernaturally gifted, appearing to glide around opposing players, inches above the pitch, with a boot locked on the ball until he decided it was time to release it, goal-bound. The BBC Sport website sums up the phenomenon, when it describes how he scored his final goal of the match:

“He skipped through the Northampton defence, rounded keeper Kim Book, and stood on the ball on the goal line, saluting the United fans before knocking the ball into an empty net.”

At the time, critics focused on the fact that Northampton Town was an inferior, fourth division team. Pelé — probably the greatest player of all time and all-time top Brazilian goalscorer — holds the world record for hat tricks (92). He played against many substandard league teams in his day; scored five goals in a game six times and four goals 30 times, but the statistics show no record of him having scored a double hat-trick, ever. And no England player has ever scored more than five goals in a single match. As I said, though, it isn’t the goals, it’s the vibe: the élan with which he scored them. Best’s display against Northampton Town was poetry; but he wasn’t boring old Betjamin, he was ballsy Lord Byron. Without the limp.

Man Utd, incidentally, didn’t even get to the cup final that year (Chelsea won it, beating Leeds 2-1 in an Old Trafford replay following a score draw at the first attempt), but the only important score that season was MUFC 8, Northampton Town 2 (Kidd kicked United’s two other goals).

For a generation of kids, Best’s defining image as the 1970s soccer star pre-dated the musical revolution that happened in 1976. In the days when most players still wore their shirts tucked into their shorts and their socks hiked-up to their knees, Best played with rumpled socks and his shirt hanging out, to the disgust of your grandparents and old fogeys alike. His shirt would billow behind him as he ran; persistence of vision leaving, like his long, windblown hair, a blur of speed-lines behind the ball. Some of us were less impressed by the fact that he left other players for dead than we were by the way he wore his number 11 or 7 red shirt. He epitomised that same Britishness that the Beatles, the Clash and Oasis have at various times represented.

Some have cruelly said the best thing that could happen to George now would be for him to die quietly. I don’t think it’s a matter of him deserving anyone’s sympathy, or their liver. But, along with Pastorius, Hendrix and Belushi, Best helped to define a particular kind of 20th Century style — the eccentric outsider whose flamboyance distracts you from his brilliance just long enough for him to pummel your senses into a pulp. And critics will say that, like them, Best wasted his talent. But the brightest flames burn fastest, and Best in his heyday encapsulated the game’s appeal with the elation of an on-pitch magic show.

I’ll leave the pundits arguing over whether he really was the best. George Best has never lived his life by the book but, even with his best behind him, he’s been far more fun to watch than people who do.

Updates
2 November 2005:
George Best ‘out of bed’
George Best: the waster who became patron saint of drunks
Now George Best is on kidney dialysis

9 November 2005:
Best out of danger

20 November 2005:
George Best still on life support as he battles severe infection

22 November 2005:
Legend Best ‘partly conscious’

23 November 2005:
George Best is ‘better than he was’

25 November 2005:
‘His hours are numbered’

Friday 25 November 2005, 12.55pm:
George Best dies, aged 59
The long goodbye