The Best and the worst

There is an interesting study to be done on the phenomenon of Belfast Protestants who threw it all away. What is the common gene that made men like Alex Higgins, George Best and Keith Gillespie such heartbreaking vaga bonds, men who lit up the stage every moment they were on it but submitted in the end to the demons inside them?

George Best was the prototype, his personality split irrevocably between George the conjuring footballer and Georgie the seedy, crumbling bon viveur. Best had as much innate talent as any player who ever laced boots. More than that, he caught the spirit of his own era, pushed the boundaries of footballing celebrity beyond the touchline and the terrace and into a glossier world the toxicity of which would eventually overcome him.

The last time I saw George Best in the flesh he was on stage in a pub in Ballymun retailing the seedier side of his life for cash. What Georgie told Bobby Charlton, how much Georgie had to drink, how many Miss Worlds Georgie brought to his bed. He was a flesh and blood tragedy, his own empty laughs at his own considerable expense merely heightening the pathos of the evening.

His stage act is a cruel and unusual punishment for any man to inflict upon himself. He takes the wretchedness of his condition and sells it: the alcoholism, the waste, the ritual beddings. It brings tears to the eyes to see the condition in which time has left Muhammad Ali, another icon of the Sixties, but Best's state is far more tragic. He is left with an empty husk of a life, emotionally disconnected from the world which created him.

Joe Lovejoy of the Sunday Times has done a fine and tender job here, running a patient finger along the line of a ruined life. It would be easy to say that the world needed another George Best autobiography as much as Best needs another boozy weekend, but Lovejoy's work mines some painful depths in a man all too easily dismissed as fatally shallow.

More than that, Lovejoy has the perception of a football lover and his re-creation of the soccer milieu which George Best entered as an unmarked 15-year-old is the book's compelling centrepiece.

Lovejoy paints a Lowryesque picture of a football world still mired in its flat-cap industrial roots, where youth players, yet to be recognised as currency worth nurturing, were treated in an offhand, almost casual fashion.

The portrait of a kid from Belfast working on his own initiative to improve the depth and range of his skills needs placing alongside that of the corpulent playboy he eventually became.

Early in the book Best recounts a tale about his 15-year-old self watching the great Real Madrid team warming up for a match against Manchester United. He studied Francisco Gento as the Spaniard performed the same trick again and again, pretending to shoot but putting such backspin on the ball that after it had gone 10 yards it spun back to him.

"The next day in training I had to do it. I was right footed but Gento had done it with his left so I had to do the same."

That one story, imbued as it is with such patience, enthusiasm and dedication has the fragrance of love about it and the early chapters as Best makes his way through the youth team to the cusp of stardom are perfumed the same way.

And then suddenly he is on his own, in a new galaxy, blithely going where no footballer had gone before. Later come the drink, the abused women, the bankruptcy and the prison spell, the painful sundering of his relationship with Mary Shatila, whose patience once looked like being Best's chance of salvation.

It's an old story, well thumbed by now and barnacled by platitudes and hasty judgments. Lovejoy rewrites it with an ear for the detail and a feel for the time. Best emerges as no less tragic but all the more understandable, with some heroism restored.

Tom Humphries is a sports writer with The Irish Times

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