From the moment he walked into the house he was full of questions. It was as though he had thought to himself, ‘Well, who knows, I might pick up a few things from old Bobby Charlton.’ He wanted to know about everything, the running of the house, the running of the family, the keeping of the dog, the garden. As the evening wore on, I saw a different George, inquisitive, warm, and maybe a little insecure in himself. It made me think that behind all the glitter and the headlines here was just another young man trying to find his way in life.
Eventually, I drove him into town. The scampi had not been a towering success but I got the feeling he had enjoyed his visit to another world – and it was interesting that soon afterwards he bought himself a dog. He also had a house built in the Cheshire suburbs – though accompanying newspaper stories said that it was designed by him, and it was radically different from the conventional detached house he had visited in Lymm. Also, amid much publicity, he acquired a Danish girlfriend, Eva Haraldsted.
It was enough, certainly, to encourage my belief that George might indeed be considering the idea of getting permanently hooked up. Partly, I suppose, I thought this was because his life seemed to me to be stretching out towards a quite predictable futility. Of course he told the famous joke about being in the hotel room with Miss World and champagne and a fistful of cash, and the waiter asking him where it had all gone wrong, but there were days when you had to suspect that he was in search of something he might never find.
Stories about our differences were often taken as fact, but the truth was they were exaggerated. I didn’t agree with some of the things George did, I didn’t think his lifestyle was compatible with being a professional footballer, but for a while at least I accepted that he was doing extraordinary things on the field. As long as this was so, it was maybe understandable, if not right, that Matt Busby refused to lay down an iron hand of discipline. I couldn’t see that there was much I could do, other than follow the Old Man’s approach. This could be summed up simply enough; take the best that George had to offer – and live with the rest.
So often, of course, living with George was a glorious existence, and it started with that amazing performance against my Geordie friend John Angus. He sold that excellent full back so many dummies it was staggering to think he was still just seventeen. There were so many passages of play like that, most famously when he destroyed Benfica three years later in the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, and all of them reminded you that apart from anything else George Best had a constitution that was hardly believable.
This was no doubt the reason that the Old Man mostly – until the very end, when George’s behaviour made the situation untenable if the club was to retain any pretence of discipline – took a lenient view of so many of the transgressions. For me, certainly, an important factor in my decision not to get involved in any of the often heated debates within the club was that at the peak of his success George, when he trained or played, never fell short of what you would expect from one of the world’s outstanding footballers. Of that time I cannot recall a moment when George did something on the field that made me think, ‘Uh-oh, George overdid it last night.’
When eventually he did become a little ragged in the mornings, when his absences from training were more frequent, and finally you could see that he was beginning to lose some of that brilliant edge, my own overwhelming reaction was one of sadness. Partly, it was because the fans loved him so much, had set him up on a pedestal so high, that when he came down, as he must, the disappointment would be terribly cruel. Down the years when we spoke about this, it was the one thing that he never denied. It was true, he conceded, that his way of life had robbed millions of fans of a pleasure that, when you consider the normal span of a playing career, was much too brief. As his life progressed, when maybe a drink was more important, maybe a girl was more important, it made you think that you don’t get truly great players so very often, and if you do it’s heartbreaking when, as a result of their own actions, they don’t fulfil their potential.
When he left Old Trafford at the age of only twenty-six, I was seeing a real tragedy, for football and for him. I couldn’t believe that a player of all his gifts was so soon leaving the big stage, where he was loved so much. Maybe in a way my argument is weakened when you recognise that, whatever had happened, the public really could not have adored him any more than they did – and continued to do so in all the years since he stopped playing.
Today, when I park my car and go to my place at Old Trafford, and see parents taking their children to watch the likes of Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, I am always reminded of the faces of the kids of the sixties. You could see on them the anticipation and excitement when Georgie Best was playing. But then, suddenly, he was no longer there. You had to regret it, as you did the fact that in his prime George never had the chance to perform in a World Cup. You can only speculate on what that exposure would have done for his legend. Yet, here again, you
