When I met George Best, the greatest footballer to emerge from these islands was more interested in talking about snooker. I was in Osterley, west London, to interview Sky TV football presenter Jeff Stelling about his Sports Saturday programme, which would become the successful Gillette Soccer Saturday.
Frank McLintock, Chris Kamara, Rodney Marsh and Best were on Stelling’s panel. After the show, the first three mooched off, but Best remained.
“This is George Best,” Stelling said to me, with a big smile, as if I didn’t recognise him. He was shy (once shy, always shy), charming, funny and brighter than most footballers.
I asked him which of the many trophies he had won he valued the most. “That’s easy,” he said. “It’s the big, ugly plastic thing I won for being the champion snooker player at my local club in London.
RM Block
“Only I don’t have it any more,” he added, ruefully. “My son, Calum, was over from the States and we went out for a few drinks. When we got back, I asked him to choose one of my trophies to take back with him. I don’t think he wanted to deprive me of my European Cup winner’s medal, or my European Footballer of the Year trophy, or my First Division medals. So, instead, he chose this snooker thing. And it broke my heart. Everyone knows that I played football a bit. But not many people know that I’m really good at snooker. And now I can’t prove it!
“In fact, I’m only the second-best player at my club. There’s this kid who’s really shit hot, better than me. Only when a crowd of 80 or 90 people turned up to watch us in the final he fell apart. He couldn’t take the pressure. But me, I love crowds, the bigger the better. And I’m used to playing in front of 50,000 or more. So it didn’t bother me.”
That first meeting with Best took place in the 1990s. A few years later, in 2001, he decided to rent out his Chelsea flat and returned to Northern Ireland. He and his second wife, Alex, bought a large house in Portavogie, Co Down, and converted the garage into a snooker parlour, with a full-size table and a bar in the corner, so he could burnish two skills at the same time.
“The man I bought the house from also offered to sell me two acres of land. And when I told him I didn’t have that sort of money, he told me, ‘George, if you can afford a pound an acre, the land’s yours’. So I bought the land for two pounds.”
Best, in fact, was a total natural at ball games. In the early 1970s, I interviewed his first manager at Manchester United, Matt Busby.
“George had phenomenal talent,” Busby told me. “Not many people realise that he’s a fantastic goalkeeper, one of the best at Old Trafford, a bit short, maybe, but with great reflexes and anticipation. We sometimes play him in goal in training. And I was tempted to play him there in matches, but it would have been a bit of a waste, wouldn’t it?”
Denis Law said he once persuaded his great friend and team-mate to play a game of golf. “The first hole was a long, challenging par 4. Georgie managed par without any fuss and then said he’d had enough of golf and headed to the 19th hole for refreshments.”
One of my closest friends in sports journalism was Roy Collins, who ghosted Best’s autobiography, Blessed, as well as a weekly magazine column. They would meet every week in a wine bar in Chelsea to talk about the column.
Roy told me that on one occasion a very large man came up to their table. “You’re George Best!” he said, with an extremely loud voice. “I want to buy you a drink.” Best’s tipple at this time was a white wine spritzer, which he was sipping very carefully.
“No, thank you, I’m fine,” said Best. But the man insisted. When Best continued to politely decline, the man eventually said: “Oh, I see, I’m not good enough to buy a drink for the great George Best!”
‘Why don’t you f**k off?” said Best.
“Why don’t you make me?” said the man.
One of the qualities that made Best such an outstanding sportsman was his total fearlessness. He stood up and punched the man in the face. But he barely flinched. Instead, he clenched his own fist and moved menacingly forward. Whereupon Best, very quickly, said: “Oh, go on then, I’ll have a half.” Which he duly did.
Back in Osterley, one of the production assistants on the Sports Saturday programme approached Best for an autograph. “Why did you pack up playing when you were still young?” he asked him
Best replied: “I used to go missing sometimes. Miss England, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World …”
Yes, sometimes Best would bring out his most famous one-liners for fans.
#OnThisDay 1946: George Best was born. In 1985, he spoke to Barry Davies about his famous disallowed goal against England. pic.twitter.com/A7SyarZPdx
— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) May 22, 2020
He left us yearning for more. But he left us with plenty to remember him by, a decade or more of sublime football, a miracle of speed and balance, of cheeky-sod dribbles and unbelievable goals. The remarkable thing is that he would have been even better today, playing on proper pitches, instead of quagmires, and with referees who would have given him proper protection. There would have been a flurry of red cards for the brutal treatment he received.
The writer Matthew Engel said that when Best started playing the game, it was televised in black and white – but by the time he left, it was in vivid colour. He was, perhaps, at his best in his monochrome moments, when his hair was short and his shirt tucked in. His outstanding game for Manchester United was in 1966 when, at just 19, he starred in the 5-1 demolition of Benfica and scored two early goals. And his greatest game for Northern Ireland was The George Best Match, against Scotland in Belfast in 1967.
Hugh McIlvanney, perhaps the greatest of all British sportswriters, summed Best’s genius most memorably, highlighting his “bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves,” his “freakish elasticity of limb and torso,” and “balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple”.
Best would have been 80 in May – but he was never going to make old bones. He died, instead, 20 years ago, on November 25th, 2005, at the age of just 59. Like his mother, Anne (who was 55), he died of alcoholism-related disease. Best once remarked, “Kevin Keegan is not fit to lace my boots”, to which John Roberts, the celebrated football writer, quipped: “Keegan isn’t fit to lace Best’s drinks.”
As we reflect on one of the most memorable weeks in Irish football, we should double up and celebrate the memory of the island’s finest player.
