Читать книгу The Magnificent Sevens - Frank Worrall - Страница 13

‘Not only have I lost my dad … we’ve all lost a wonderful man.’

CALUM BEST, GEORGE’S ONLY SON, 25 NOVEMBER 2005

‘Anyone who has seen him as a football fan will never forget it.’

PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR, 25 NOVEMBER 2005

For me, it will go down as one of those ‘Where were you when JFK died?’ moments. Friday, 25 November 2005, the day the genius with the twinkling feet died; the day George Best could fight on no more. I was in the offices of the Mail on Sunday, writing something up, when the news flashed up on the television screen around lunchtime. In thick red capital letters: ‘GEORGE BEST DIES! GEORGE BEST DIES!’ Sky TV’s coverage made me feel like throwing up at that moment. Capital letters and an exclamation mark, as if it were relaying the numbers from the lottery or some bingo show. Hardly subtle, even less compassionate. All morning there had been updates, with earlier messages across the screen stating, ‘GEORGE BEST CLOSE TO DEATH! GEORGE BEST CLOSE TO DEATH!’ The exclamations somehow reduced the tragedy of the event to the level of a freak show.

Arguably the greatest footballer these shores have ever produced gave up the fight for life at the tender age of 59 after multiple organ failure. The private Cromwell Hospital near Earl’s Court put out a statement saying George’s death ended ‘a long and very valiant fight’. George had been treated in the hospital since entering with flu-like symptoms almost eight weeks earlier. He then suffered a kidney infection and, towards the end, his condition deteriorated sharply with the development of a lung infection that led to internal bleeding. He had been particularly susceptible to infection because of the drugs he had had to take after his 2002 liver transplant.

It had ended in tears – ours – as we had always known it would. Given George’s emotional make-up and his self-destruct mechanism, the final script could not have been any different. Of course, the tributes were predictably fond and caring. Republic of Ireland Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said, ‘George should be remembered as the very best at what he did. He was quite simply a football genius.’ Sir Bobby Charlton said his former Manchester United team-mate had ‘made an immense contribution to the game, and enriched the lives of everyone that saw him play,’ adding, ‘Football has lost one of its greats, and I have lost a dear friend. He was a marvellous person.’ A statement from Manchester United said, ‘For the goals, the audacious dribbles and all the wonderful memories, Manchester United and its legions of fans worldwide will always be grateful.’ And it was announced that a minute’s silence would be observed at every Premiership football match the following weekend in George’s memory.

Yet you could argue that the tributes – worthy and warranted in a football sense – were rather over the top if you looked back at his life and cast a more critical eye over the trail of misery he brought to himself and others; the fights, the boozing, the affairs, the drink-driving, the prison spell, the abuse of a second chance with the new liver. But George Best would not be tainted by all that; he would ultimately be remembered as a hero – he would even have Best Belfast City Airport named after him and be given a virtual state funeral in Northern Ireland!

Why? Because of his God-given talent, but also because we accepted him for what he was. A genius, but a mischievous, wayward, immature man, a Peter Pan of football. We excused him many of his misdemeanours precisely because he was George Best, and because he lived a life that few of us would have been able to survive without some deviations from the straight and narrow. He was football’s first pop star and even Busby would admit it was something he as a manager had never been faced with before, saying, ‘What were we to do, shoot him? I always looked for a cure with George. It would have been easy to have transferred him, but that wasn’t the answer. Special rules for George? I suppose so, but only in the sense that he was a special player. I mean, you make it different once you say someone is a good player, and the man next to him is a genius … George is a genius.’

I first saw George Best when I was a young boy, sat on my dad’s shoulders in the Scoreboard Paddock at Old Trafford. It was the late Sixties and I felt a shiver go down my spine as he swirled past defender after defender in a league match against Chelsea. My memories of the night are always in black and white, but George would bring colour to my life for many years.

His downfall was his character – his unwillingness to face reality. It was always preferable to take a drink and return to his own fantasy world, a world of safety and warmth that takes many alcoholics to their death. In November 2001, George emerged with what would be his final autobiography, Blessed. It was his first attempt on paper to deal with the demons inside his head, demons that, he would finally admit, only went away when he’d taken enough alcohol on board. I was lucky enough to be asked to review the book for the Sunday Times and wrote these words: ‘Where did it all go wrong, Mr Best? This brilliantly raw book on the life of arguably Britain’s greatest footballer gives us some of the clearest clues yet. The Belfast genius lays bare his tortured soul, his battle with the demons and his fears. Above all, it is an immensely sad book, belying its uplifting title.

‘Blessed? It reads more like a tragic obituary penned by George himself, though, God willing, it won’t come to that for some time. But make no mistake, it could. And Georgie, in his heart, knows that. The 15-year-old boy who arrived at Manchester United and promptly rushed back to Northern Ireland, homesick and full of trepidation, is still running. From himself. Let’s get one thing straight, right now. George Best’s problem was never alcohol, it still isn’t. As Jimmy Greaves, another alcoholic (thankfully, still recovering) would tell you, George’s problem is alcoholism – that aching inner loneliness and spiritual turmoil that takes him to that life-threatening first drink. Only by confronting the alcoholism will he ever kick the bottle and find that elusive peace.

‘This book is 366 pages long but only in the last 30 does he deal with the alcoholism, the onset of liver sclerosis, the admission that he is in the last-chance saloon, the revelatory discovery that he may be the problem, that the bottle is but a symptom of his inner illness. Sure, the first 336 pages are entertaining, with anecdotes focusing on his magical European Cup Final goal in 1968 … But they are countered by the pathos of the wrecked relationships, the squandered thousands, the jail term and his deep unhappiness.

‘Alcoholism is essentially an illness of ego, and George still has plenty of that. He mocks AA, claiming it could not work for him because he is too famous. How could he, the great George Best, be anonymous? Well, it worked for Greavsie, Tony Adams, Anthony Hopkins and Eric Clapton, and they are hardly nobodies. Maybe the answer is staring Bestie in the face, and maybe it’s not having anti-alcohol tablets stitched into his stomach.

‘Yes, this book is a good read, but it’s also a tortured one. Blessed? Only if you’re still around in a few years, Georgie.’

I still consider it my best review, although I take no great pleasure in being proved right with my analysis and ultimate prediction. I knew what George was going through and had an understanding of why he could not find a way because I shared his journey for many years. I, too, was diagnosed as an alcoholic and, indeed, remember many drinks with George and his cronies in the Phene Arms, just around the corner from his flat in Chelsea. I recall he was a good pool player but that he would also become deeply morose after the drinks set in, and would end up arguing over nonsense. Inevitably, the landlord would help him home at closing time, or whenever he could take no more, whatever the time of day.

Then I remember going to Alcoholics Anonymous and seeing George there. He had been in first in the early Eighties, but this was a decade later. It was his second attempt at AA, something he kept secret – something that has not been revealed until now. If he were not dead, I would not have mentioned it; AA is an anonymous programme after all.

He often told the story that he went to AA but did not continue going because people would come up to him and ask for his autograph. I can tell you that is simply untrue. No one asked for anyone’s autograph at the meetings. There were bigger ‘stars’ than George Best who used AA – Clapton and Hopkins for two.

No, it was just Georgie playing silly buggers, making up a story for his ever-growing anecdotal library, and, if truth be told, also making up an excuse. George Best did not leave AA because he was being pestered; he left AA because he did not want to stop drinking – because he could only tackle his demons so far before it became too painful.

Looking at it another way, George Best left AA because he was not pestered enough. I remember one night at London’s biggest meeting near Knightsbridge when George was sat a couple of seats away from me. Film stars and pop stars were sat in front of the two of us. The format is that a selected person ‘shares’ for 30 minutes on their life – basically telling how they got to AA, how they are ‘recovering’ and their hopes for the future – and then the meeting is thrown open to the ‘audience’. This particular night, George’s hand kept shooting up, but he could not get in to share. After about another 20 minutes, he stood up and said, ‘Look, if you’ve not got time for me to fuckin’ have my say, I’m fuckin’ off.’ And with that, he turned and walked out of the hall in a rage. I and another couple of people went after him, trying to persuade him to come back, saying that he would get his turn. He told us to ‘fuck off away’, and made his way back to the Phene Arms.

No one had bothered him and that – rather than what he would claim was a constant pestering – would be the reason why George Best decided AA was not for him. His ego could not take it if he was not the centre of attention; his illness had him hung, drawn and quartered. He was self-obsessed to the extreme. But if we accept that, we must also have compassion for this clearly tortured man. Ultimately, he was a sick man, not a bad man.

My psychoanalyst friend puts it this way, ‘If someone said to you, “Don’t drink out of that bottle, it contains bleach, and will poison you and eventually kill you,” you would leave it alone, wouldn’t you? Yet George was constantly being told that he was drinking stuff that would kill him, but could not leave it alone. He was a prisoner of the bottle, a prisoner of alcohol, and he died an alcoholic, from alcoholism. It’s all very sad.

‘So, while in one sense George could not live with the limelight, in another he could not live without it. He needed the allure of celebrity to satisfy his illness; the illness that told him he had to be the centre of attention to quell that feeling inside him that continually told him he was not good enough.’

George knew he was trapped with the bottle, and that AA could have provided the answer if he had stayed; he was just too far gone to make a commitment. Then he would show his knowledge of the illness he was a victim of by once saying, ‘If a thousand drinks are not enough, then one is too many for an alcoholic like me.’

The alcohol had really taken a hold of George by the end of the Sixties. Many pundits believe that he lost his way when his best pals – team-mate David Sadler and Manchester City star Mike Summerbee – both announced engagements in 1969, leaving him deprived of his two ‘best social companions’. But it is likely he would still have hit the bottle big-time even if they had stayed by his side. They held him back a little from the excesses that would follow but, even by 1969, he had his own key to the Brown Bull pub in Salford.

Before George made it his local, the boozer had been struggling – a real spit-and-sawdust pit that was never full. George’s presence turned it into one of Manchester’s places to be – the landlord would look after him, and he had the pick of the bedrooms where he could take any pretty young things who took his fancy from the nearby Granada studios. George was heading nowhere quickly – by 1970, his interest in training was fading and the drink was becoming the most important thing in his life. He was banned from driving for six months after crashing his car on a boozy night out, and the fact that he was recognised wherever he went only added to his need to find solace in drink and women.

Busby was at his wit’s end with his star man – he even suggested that George should go to see a psychiatrist for help. George treated that with the contempt he felt it deserved, laughing out loud at his manager’s suggestion. In truth, Busby had come up with a sound idea – George clearly suffered from clinical depression and may have found some answers on the couch.

Unfortunately, the only couch he deemed worthwhile was one that also included a pretty young woman, and they were freely available. The women in his life were invariably beautiful and feisty but would eventually tire of his antics. He could not commit to one woman for life; his illness would not allow that. He needed fresh reassurances that he was still desirable, that he was still worth loving. He had many brief flings – what he would term ‘nameless faces on the pillow’, and he once boasted of having sex with 7 women in 24 hours in Manchester, George’s own self-confessed Magnificent Seven – but George would eventually admit that the Romeo years only left him ‘with a deep feeling of emptiness’.

The mainstays of his life were his first wife Angie, his second Alex, the model Angie Lynn and the ‘mother-figure’ Mary Shatila. Yes, there were countless others who stayed a little longer than a night – including Miss Worlds Mary Stavin and Marjorie Wallace and actresses Juliet Mills and Sinead Cusack – but those four were his strongest relationships. He had a habit of ending his numerous autobiographies during the years with a word of thanks to the woman he was involved with at the time – in 1990 he paid tribute to Shatila as ‘… my lover, my friend and my strength…’ while 11 years later he would admit that ‘I owe Alex some good years for all she’s been through….’

These women who stood by him got a raw deal. He could not stay faithful – booze, he admitted, was his constant ‘other woman’ and, under its influence, he would embark on wild affairs – yet they all retained a certain love and affection for him. The relationships would follow a similar path: he would be the naughty little boy, she would be the scolding parent; he would be the patient, she would be the doctor; he would be the one who could not be saved, she would be the one who would try desperately to bring him salvation. Then, when the woman would realise he was beyond change, they would split up. It was an unenviable, vicious circle.

The four women also had their own lives before they met George – and three of them would give it all up to try to tame him. His first wife Angie – whom George described as independent and determined before they married in 1977 – was the personal fitness trainer of pop legend Cher; Alex was an air hostess with Virgin Atlantic; and Shatila was brilliant with money – she rescued George from bankruptcy. Only Angie Lynn would continue her career as a model – much to George’s disgust – and they would constantly engage in rows over his jealousy. His wife Angie bore him his only legitimate child, Calum, but she could not live with his excesses in America – which, for a bohemian like George, was a true hedonist’s paradise and possibly the worst choice of destination – and similarly struggled with him in Fulham in the late Seventies and early Eighties. She left him with the words, ‘You’re wasting your life, George. You’re not going to waste mine as well…’ and the marriage was annulled in 1984. She would later add, ‘My priorities changed. I had a baby. I couldn’t look after another baby.’ In turn, George would also one day admit, ‘I don’t know how she put up with me so long.’

Yet, many years later, Angela would show how George retained the love of his women even after they had split by saying of his relationship with Alex, ‘Alex is a sweetheart but, of course, she is a nutcase to take George on. She is a very nice girl. She deserves a medal for marrying him. I just thank her every day for looking after him because he would have been dead years ago if Alex hadn’t been around.’ Angie thanked her for looking after her ex-husband – the patient/doctor love continued even years after they had parted.

Both Angie and Alex suffered physical and mental abuse from George, and it is telling that his son Calum, having witnessed his father’s excesses, had little time for him during his growing years and chose to live with his mother in California until completing his education.

Of the four women, Angie Lynn was the girl George could never tame, the one most similar to him in attitude and outlook. She refused to give up her independence for him and would even visit a late-night club frequented by prostitutes and addicts, much to George’s displeasure. He would ask her why she visited such a dump. ‘To get away from you,’ she would reply and, like him, she would disappear for days on end without explanation. The very fact that she was not an easy touch made him all the keener – he would admit to being ‘infatuated’ and ‘besotted’ by her. Their time together would also be remembered for George’s infamous Christmas of 1984 spent at Her Majesty’s Pleasure at Pentonville – the jail spell following a threefold sequence of events that started with drink-driving, continued with failing to appear in court and concluded with him assaulting a police officer.

After they split in 1987, Angie would eventually make a new life for herself in Ibiza, but George would retain an admiration for her, praising her for never going to the papers to cash in on their time together, saying, ‘That’s why I admire Angie Lynn so much. She’s never spoken about our relationship and she certainly went through real hell with me.’

After the tempestuous days with Angie Lynn, Mary Shatila brought a welcome period of stability to George’s life. Boasting ‘a business background’, she helped George sort out his financial nightmare – he had clocked up enormous debts through gambling and failed business ventures, including his nightclubs and clothes boutiques – and she advised him over his bankruptcy and encouraged him to begin a new career as a public speaker. Yet the leopard could not change his spots – he repaid her efforts in his usual way, this time by seducing her sister.

He was still living with Mary when he started seeing Alex, and his first words should have sent alarm bells ringing. He introduced himself to her in Tramp nightclub with the words, ‘I love you.’ Her first sight of the fallen idol had been his infamous appearance on the Wogan show, where he told the benign Irishman that his favourite pastime was ‘screwing’. The next day, he was on the front pages of the tabloids for being drunk and disorderly on TV.

George then sold the story of how he had bedded Alex on his first date to the News of the World for £15,000. The move – apart from being hardly chivalrous – was also dishonest as they had not slept together at the time. Then there was the case of their initial wedding day – it was cancelled when they stood each other up. ‘He has been on a two-week bender and has turned into a monster,’ Alex told the Sun. ‘He is being horrible to me.’ Finally, on 24 July 1995, they would marry in a low-key civil ceremony at Chelsea Town Hall. George was 49, Alex just 23. By April 2004, they had divorced, on the grounds of his adultery with an unnamed woman, although that was merely the tip of the iceberg as far as Alex was concerned. During those nine years, she had nursed him and loved him as best she could – especially when he needed her most, after his liver transplant in July 2002. A generous, loving man when sober, he could not resist the call of the bottle, and started drinking again with his new liver. It brought out the lurking, dangerous Mr Hyde from within and, as Euan Ferguson would report in the Observer, the outcome was frightening, ‘He beat Alex and broke her arm, and cut much of her hair off while he was drunk; and towards the end, after she had nursed him through and past the operation, draining the bile from his tube with plastic gloves and a measuring jug, and tried to sort out his shambolic finances, he went on a few benders and disappeared off with other women and ended up, of course, in the papers again.’

Alex would be slammed in some quarters of the press after George died when she changed the name of her autobiography from Always Alex to Loving George. Some argued she was cashing in on his memory, but she is actually OK, a good sort. She did not even ask for the title to be changed – it was down to her publishers. She did her best for Georgie-boy and showed an understanding of alcoholism and the alcoholic that could only really come from someone who had loved one in vain. She said, ‘It is, of course, a disease. It’s partly genetic, I’ve been told, and read. George’s mother was an alcoholic. And it doesn’t go away. I’ve spoken to other alcoholics, who may have had years off the sauce, but they all say that they think of it every day. Many of them, though, have had counselling, or done the steps [of recovery in AA]. George wouldn’t hear of it. He’s actually an extremely shy man, and never wanted to deal with it in that kind of confrontational way, and that’s why it was never dealt with; it just seemed to go away some times, possibly because those times he was almost dead. And to anyone trying to deal with it, I would argue very fiercely that “cutting down” is never the answer, no matter what they tell you; the only answer is a complete halt, for ever.’

More the pity that George could not even hear the truth when it came from the person closest to him in the whole wide world. Such was the power of the illness over him. It is also interesting that Alex should mention the idea of alcoholism being a hereditary illness. His mother Ann would die at the age of 54 from alcoholism – five years fewer than George – on 12 October 1978. ‘Dickie, I don’t want to live any more,’ she told her husband as she went to bed on the night of 11 October. The following morning, when George’s dad brought her up a cup of tea, she was dead in the bed.

George admitted to being racked with guilt. He had spent many of his summers in Mallorca, soaking up the sun and the women, rather than returning to see his family in Northern Ireland during the late Sixties and early Seventies; after Ann’s death, he mentally castigated himself for staying away.

George had learned from his sister Carol that Ann had started drinking and it appears that, given his own struggle with the bottle, he simply could not cope with seeing his beloved mother deteriorate, too, so he did not visit her. In Blessed, he would say, ‘I felt guilty because I knew Mum worried about me and I’d given her plenty of cause over quite a few years … I felt guilty because of all the bad publicity I had been getting, which I knew upset Mum more than anyone else in the family. I felt that her death was all my fault … that if I hadn’t gone to England, hadn’t done the things I’d done, and if I’d only gone home more often, it wouldn’t have happened. It’s a terrible thing, guilt, and it would be a long while before I could see things as they really were and accept that there was nothing I could have done.’

It is hard not to feel compassion for a man who can come out with words like that; I know he was a bounder in many ways, but even towards the end of his own life he was tormented by demons. He was still the lost little boy missing his beloved mum. It would also make him question whether he had been born an alcoholic – whether the symptoms of the mental illness that dragged him towards drink had been genetic. When talking to journalist Ross Benson in 1990, he said, ‘… my mother’s death does pose the worrying question – Is my drink problem genetic? Was I programmed from birth to be an alcoholic?’

But my psychoanalyst friend observed, ‘Really, it doesn’t matter whether he was genetically an alcoholic or not. You can argue all day long whether it is a hereditary illness or not, but the bottom line is the here and now – and finding a way out of the alcoholism. There were programmes of recovery back then, but George clearly did not want to find a way out. He did not want to quit drinking – and there is nothing more you can do if an alcoholic will not abstain.’

And the fact of the matter remains that Ann was a different sort of alcoholic to George in one sense; she was a late arrival to the bottle, never having touched a drop of alcohol until she was past 40, while George had been a sufferer from his early 20s. George would be buried next to her in Belfast’s Roseland Cemetery.

George’s other sister, Barbara McNarry, who launched the George Best Foundation in 2006, confirms Ann did not start boozing until she was 43. Barbara said, ‘She started drinking partly due to the pressures of being a hard-working mum and dealing with a famous son. She turned to alcohol for support. It started as one or two and escalated from there. Ten years later, she was dead.’

Barbara knows the power of alcohol addiction – she certainly noticed how it took a stranglehold on her famous brother. She added, ‘His addiction ended his life prematurely. He allowed alcohol to get a grip of him and it never let him go. He was only 59 and if it wasn’t for alcohol he would still be enjoying the fruits of his genius.’

The end game for George would really begin in 2002 when he had his liver transplant. In the preceding years, he had reinvented himself as a TV pundit – commenting on matches on SkySport – and a newspaper columnist (he had a weekly column in the Mail on Sunday’s Night & Day magazine). Even as the good times rolled, there had been signs that the drinking would still cost him dearly – SkySport, for instance, always had former footballer Clive Allen standing by in case George was under the influence.

By 2002, his liver had all but packed up, wrecked by years of alcohol abuse. After examination and analysis by specialist Professor Roger Williams at the Cromwell Hospital, George was accepted for a new liver. The operation – performed at the end of July 2002 – almost cost him his life as he underwent 10 hours of major surgery and needed 40 pints of blood during the transplant operation. When he recovered enough to be allowed home, George would vow never to drink again – and he also hit back at those who had criticised him being given a second chance, saying, ‘I would never say to anybody you don’t deserve to live, no matter who they are. As for calling this self-inflicted, I didn’t decide one day that I would drink myself to death. It is as a result of alcoholism. I know myself I will never drink again. The only reason I would is because I want to kill myself or I want to go through this again – and I don’t want either, so there’s no reason to drink.’

He added that he was grateful to the anonymous donor of the organ, and that he did feel guilty that someone else had to die for him to survive. He also expressed hopes for a bright future and said he was planning to have children with wife Alex as soon as he was feeling better.

They proved to be fine words, but no more; in his war against alcoholism, the final battle was looming and he was facing defeat. It was not long before he was back on the booze – and then the chaos would once again set in. Affairs resulting in a split from Alex, talk of punch-ups and debts – it was as if he were reliving the Sixties. Only now he was burnt-out, haggard, physically destroyed – the game was almost up for George Best, one of the most seminal figures in international football, now widely described in newspaper reports around the planet as ‘Britain’s most famous alcoholic’. It was the ultimate, sad footnote to the demise of a genius.

Irony of ironies – and one George, a keen observer of topical events and a talented exponent of crosswords and puzzles, would have enjoyed – a day after he died, the Government passed a law allowing bars to stay open 24 hours. He would also have appreciated the level of devotion and love apparent at his funeral when he made the final journey back home, although, no doubt, George being George, he would also have been a little embarrassed by all the fuss.

That just about sums him up – a man who could not live with the fame his genius brought, but also could not live without it. A complex, beguiling character … at the same time, gentle and bullying, generous and spiteful and loving, but feeling unloved. In his last interview before he died, he would ask to be remembered only for the joy he brought to those on the terraces at Manchester United, saying, ‘When I’m gone, people will forget all the rubbish and remember only the football.’ He was asking a lot of us all – but then he also gave us a lot on the pitch, didn’t he? Thanks always for those treasured footballing memories, Georgie-boy….