Of course I don’t know much about football, but November seems to have been a bad month for soccer players called “George”.
George Weah collapsed on the penalty line just when he thought he had a chance to become the next president of Liberia, beaten on overtime by an elderly lady called Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who, it seems, got the job instead, on merit.
And then, on top of that, George Best died.
So, not a good month to be a footballer called “George”.
I happened to be in London when the newspapers were doing a kind of hovering vulture play-out on George Best’s last hours. It was all rather distasteful. But the general public, for whom this whole thing was being played out anyway, were rather excited. Would he make it or wouldn’t he? The surgeons stepped out onto the forecourt of the open doors of the hospital and said: “It’s not a matter of days, it’s a matter of hours.” Bobby Charlton, a serious looking old geezer with a grey face, was at the bedside. Best’s father and his son were also there, but as a kind of afterthought. George himself was out of it, beyond comment. It was a media event.
So, who’s to blame? The public or the media? It’s all quite irrelevant.
But like I say, I, personally, fail to understand all this passion about football, and why the imminent, long predicted death of a football star from long in the past should arouse so much passion across the world.
And yet George Best’s death, when it came, moved me. Why?
Georgie was one of many reluctant, involuntary icons of the Swinging Sixties. You could tell that by his enigmatic smile, the smile of a kid from the equivalent of a South African township transposed to Northern Ireland who was suddenly thrust into the public gaze, and then had to stand out there and sign autographs, clutch people’s babies, and have a definitive opinion about everything, from nuclear disarmament to the crisis in the Congo. And, of course, irresponsible sexual behaviour in an age of new-found promiscuity.
They loved him and they hated him. They loved to hate him, just like the Beatles. They linked him to the age that was blossoming and changing the world, with his shaggy, sexy black mop of hair falling onto his shoulders, and dubbed him “the Fifth Beatle”. He didn’t stand a chance.
But above all, they loved him. The cameras loved him and didn’t give him a moment’s rest. The television crews hung around as irresponsibly as the gangs of Irish and Manchester and London and Liverpool township urchins who barracked his apartment wherever he was holed up, chanting, “Georgie-Best-is-in-the-nest!” thinking they were being witty. Why can’t a man have a bit of peace?
So there I was, travelling on the clattering London Underground, thinking about what all this means, while people were laughing and smiling all around me, avidly reading the Evening Standard and wondering when the end would come for the much-loved and totally irresponsible George Best. It was kind of ghoulish.
The next day, when the end did come and the papers were finally able to throw out the banner headlines that it was all over, there was something of an atmosphere of collective release. There were endless replays on the television of his most extraordinary manoeuvres into goal. And they were certainly pretty impressive, even for an agnostic in the football religion. You had to be impressed.
But where was the man? It had been close on 30 years since he had kicked a ball in anger against an opposing side. Having played for Manchester United and England or whatever, he had simply dropped out. He had done what he had set out to do and had no further ambitions.
It didn’t cross his mind, as it would that of George Weah (who might well have been named after him in distant, icon-seeking Africa two generations down the line) that he should or could shuck off his football boots and run for Parliament or higher office in his own right, in his own country.
As I imagined it, inserting myself posthumously into his head, he just couldn’t give a damn. The game was the thing, and he had been its best-living up to his name: “The name’s Best: George Best,” he might have said to himself in the reverberating James Bond lingo of the times as the ball hit the back of the net.
He’d done it. He’d shown his stylish, back-street, working-class licks and made a name for himself on the old-fashioned, recently televised, outrageously commercialised football field, moved the game on from Bobby Charlton’s Brylcreamed hairdo falling over the embarrassing, ageing, pre-war cranium, with no judgement and no regrets, and made a life for himself. And we all loved him for it.
So, yes, I have no feel for football and the violent and irrational passions it brings out in so many millions of otherwise ordinary, seemingly rational people. But it is hard not to have a passion for what George Best brought to it.
And at the same time, it is hard not to feel for the anti-social, artistic side of him that made him push it all aside and cock a snook at the world that wanted him to be something else — politician, role model, family man, whatever.
He was, simply, the Best. While it lasted. He wasn’t claiming anything more. And I hope that’s why, in the end, they gave him such a grand and gracious send-off — in spite of himself.
He, himself, personally, in my opinion, couldn’t have given a damn.