Best: His Mother’s Son (BBC 2, Sunday) was, for those of us from a certain place and time, almost unbearably poignant. Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris — such a charming soubriquet — was a defender with Chelsea in the 1960s. He tells the story of his manager, Tommy Docherty, briefing him before a match against Manchester United. ‘They’ve got this new player called Best. Apparently he’s good. I want you to take him out.’
Harris pointed out that if he was too rough, he might get himself sent off.
‘Put it this way, son,’ said Docherty. ‘They’ll miss him more than we’ll miss you.’
And it is still true today. We miss him more than any other footballer. Soccer is actually a fairly boring game, since the aim is to get the ball somewhere without using a logical way of doing it, whether with a bat, a racquet, or your hands. If you had a team of armless footballers they would actually be at an advantage, since they couldn’t be accused of handling. But George Best was different. In my youth in Manchester I often watched him play, and the sense I had was that he didn’t really pay much attention to the other side. Their players were too clumsy to inconvenience him, so he played a sort of private game with the football, like a boy taking a frisky puppy for a walk. I swear that at times he would run in front of the thing, and it would roll loyally back to his feet.
But the booze had already snared him. He sometimes drank at a pub in Manchester called the New Grapes, and he’d sometimes join with Guardian folk. He didn’t mind much who joined him. You’d think that half a dozen large rums were too many for a man who had a match the following day, but nobody was going to tell him, or fail to buy another for the most loved footballer in the world.
Later I worked in his hometown, Belfast, and for the tabloid reporters the instruction they feared most came when Best had done something exciting, like getting a new girlfriend, or missing a train — he was the Jade Goody of his day, except that in those days celebrities usually had a talent of some kind — and they were ordered to the Protestant estate where his family lived to ask his mother for a comment. They were generally greeted by a tirade of drunken and foul-mouthed abuse, which was unusual, since the people of Northern Ireland are the most courteous in the UK, except when they’re trying to kill you.
What we didn’t realise till later was that his mother, Ann, had the alcoholic gene which she passed on to her son. It wasn’t triggered until she was in her forties and she took a small sherry at the christening of her youngest child. It was the first drink she’d ever had. George was already whooping it up in the stews and flesh pots of Manchester, skipping training, missing games, leaving a trail of bottles around his house.
The play caught the elegiac mood perfectly; the warm, poised, competent mother reduced to an incapable harridan, the controlling father desperately trying to cope with a wife and a son suddenly beyond that control, and the boy’s talent spluttering and disappearing like a roman candle in the rain. At the age of 27 he retired, pissed. She had died when she was 54. It was a beautifully judged programme and dreadfully, unbearably sad.
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