Exactly half a century ago, the 20-year-old George Best was on his way to collecting a medal for a championship that would be his second and Manchester United’s last for 26 years. And of all the first-hand memories of Best in his prime, one that remains startlingly vivid is the noise of the crowd.
Not the Old Trafford delirium that greeted the goals and the darting dribbles but the sound at an away ground whenever he received the ball: the sudden low growl of apprehension from home fans fearing the imminent demolition of their hopes, a strange half-hush pierced by the squeals of girls expressing the kind of ecstasy previously known only to fans of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
Football had been slow to embrace the cultural revolution of the 60s. For a while Best’s hair, lengthening week by week, was unique in the Football League, a heretical gesture in a world where only the occasional greased Eddie Cochran-style quiff interrupted the parade of regulation short back and sides. At a time when social change was occurring with bewildering speed in the clubs and high streets, football took years to catch up. Best was where the signs of change began to show themselves.
The reaction of the opposition fans to his genius is a reminder of a description by the late Geoffrey Green, the football correspondent of the Times, who wrote of Best “performing in a kind of radiance”. Green befriended the young Ulsterman and remembered having a drink with him in a crowded bar under the main stand at Old Trafford 20 minutes before the kick-off of a European Cup match, when all the rest of the United team were changed and warming up. The drink on that occasion was Bovril, but advances in Best’s refuelling habits and a flexible attitude to keeping his football appointments were the principal factors that would begin to undermine his career when he was barely midway through his twenties.
The radiance of which Green wrote can be seen in a new documentary film, titled Best, devoted to the player’s life and work. It is unmistakably present in the footage of the night in 1966 when the 19-year-old scored twice against Benfica in the Estádio da Luz, of the European Cup final at Wembley two years later against the same opponents, when he dribbled through the Portuguese defence and around the goalkeeper to break the deadlock in extra time, and – in a last flaring of genius – of a remarkable slalom through a mesmerised Fort Lauderdale defence before scoring for San Jose Earthquakes, the last of his three North American Soccer League clubs, in 1981.
For these glimpses alone, the film is worth seeing. But in recent years the ante has been seriously raised on documentaries about sport. Amid the shenanigans at the Oscars last weekend, probably not many people noticed that the award for best documentary went to Ezra Edelman’s OJ: Made in America, an eight-hour epic that told its story with style, resonance and investigative subtlety while tackling the big subjects of OJ Simpson’s role in the civil rights struggle and his eventual trial for spousal murder.
The film that recalibrated the sports-doc genre, back in 2010, was Asif Kapadia’s Senna, in which the director completely avoided the use of talking heads, demonstrating that any kind of archive footage, no matter how rough in quality, is likely to be more compelling than the sight of talking heads. Two years ago Kapadia employed the same technique in his Amy Winehouse documentary, for which he won an Oscar; no doubt the approach will be applied to his next subject, Diego Maradona.
It was a lesson lost, however, on Daniel Gordon, the director of Best. In a film lasting only an hour and a half, we spend too many minutes watching close-ups of witnesses – including Paddy Crerand and Mike Summerbee – giving their commentary on Best’s life. Why can we not be watching more of that sublime ball-play while listening to them?
Gordon’s film doesn’t go much deeper than the tabloid headlines, but it is inevitably rich in tragic ironies. “I don’t let anything get in the way of my football because that’s what put me where I am,” Best says in an early television interview, probably meaning it. One of his associates remembers the flood of offers to involve the young footballer in photoshoots for advertising campaigns: “He didn’t really want to do those things, unless there was a girl involved. And usually there was.”
But the boy who had arrived in Manchester from Belfast at the age of 15 was a more complex character than the headlines suggested. “He wasn’t big-headed, but he wasn’t falsely modest, either,” says an early girlfriend, Jackie Glass, a 60s model who has spent the past 20 years as a Buddhist nun. “A drink made him confident,” says Crerand. “The sober George was the best husband you could hope for,” says Alex Best, his second wife, but in drink he could beat her up.
A friend of mine in the rag trade got to know him in the early 70s, after being asked to help out with his boutique in Manchester. “I think we got on well because I didn’t know much about football, which is what everyone else wanted to talk to him about,” he says. “George used to come and stay with me in London and we had conversations about all sorts of other things. He seemed to enjoy that.”
There’s a clip in the film of Best sitting on a stool in a bar, talking to a girl. As he drains his glass, a man standing next to him – looking, in a jacket and slacks, like a young accountant or estate agent – eagerly jumps forward with the offer of a refill. How many times must that proposal have been made by casual acquaintances or complete strangers? “If 70,000 men wanted to have a drink with George,” Angie Best, his first wife, points out, “that’s one drink for them and 70,000 for George.” But one was often all it took, like the one that began undoing the work of the medics who had given him a new liver. The transplant was in 2002. Three years later he was dead.
His decline, which had begun when he started missing United’s training sessions, is described by Crerand as “downhill on a toboggan”. There is another scene in the film, towards the end of his time at Old Trafford, in which he drives away from the ground in a black E-Type Jaguar. Some toboggan, that, and some ride.
