Tributes #1.

George Best: a football player for everybody

by

Robert L. Fielding

George Best died yesterday, a sick man until the end, and that is undoubtedly how some will remember him – his gaunt, yellowed face staring at the camera for the last time.

For those of us lucky enough to have seen him play though, he will be remembered for his dazzle, his runs down the touchline and his fierce shots, usually on target.

To me personally though, George Best represents the potential of human kind – to be the very best at something, to use one’s God given talents to create something wonderful and new, and humanity’s potential to destroy what it has created – to plunge talent into the abyss.

George came from humble origins, as we say – from a working class family from Belfast, and he rose, by dint of those talents only God can bestow, and by his own hard work, to reach the top in that most spectacular, most public of sports; professional football, and he did it in the arena that receives the most intense glare of media spotlights, the ‘theatre of dreams’, Old Trafford.

Week in, week out, Best shone. Some days he went missing, like a child playing truant from his classes. His second manager, Wilf McGuiness, who followed in the steps of the late, great Sir Matt Busby, once famously said of Best, “If I could have found him, I would have dropped him.” But he couldn’t find him, and he didn’t drop him from the team.

Best was rarely dropped – who could do such a thing when he had the ability to single handedly destroy the opposition with goals that came thick and fast.

His performance away from home against Benfica, prior to his side taking the European Cup at Wembley the following year, by beating them again – Eusebio and all, was complete and masterful.

It earned him the accolade in the Portugese press, “El Beatle”. People have since called him the ‘fifth Beatle’.

But Best wasn’t the fifth anything – he was always first, though his name comes third in the trinity of Man United greatness: “Charlton, law, and Best”. If you saw those three together, you saw everything there was to see in football.

But in George Best you saw something else – you saw true greatness in a sadly fleeting glimpse, and you saw the man who epitomizes the 60s every bit as much as the fab four – you saw human frailty and genius.

Saying goodbye was like saying goodbye to a part of my own life, which George Best was, of course.
Robert L. Fielding