Few athletes have been able to take excess to excess in the perilous manner of George Best, errant blue-eyed boy from Belfast and the greatest footballer of his generation, who is recovering from a liver transplant in hospital in west London, writes Johnny Watterson
Not many sporting figures have burned as intensely as the biggest football sex symbol of the 20th century. Many have followed his vertiginous arc and collapsed into self-destruction but few, save his Belfast compatriot, snooker's Alex Higgins, have been able to take excess to excess in the same perilous way the former Manchester United player George Best has done over a drinking career of three decades.
As ever with Best, intense media interest, more than controversy, has followed him to his sick bed in the Cromwell Hospital in West London, where, at 56, he is recovering with his second liver in place, his first having given up while his addiction to alcohol refused to dim.
Now awaiting the regenerative process and hoping that his body will cope with the new organ, Best has already sparked off a moral debate surrounding the handing over of a pristine liver to a man who has demonstrably shown such scant regard for his own.
But Best has always been seen as the errant blue-eyed boy, so sublimely gifted that his frailties were overlooked and so vulnerable that even the least prescient observer could sense the helplessness in a man, who, when he established himself on the scene in the early '60s, was called the fifth Beatle. Both his beauty and ugly side have been there for all to see and from soon after his Old Trafford arrival as a 5ft, eight stone, homesick 15-year-old urchin, it was evident that Best was emotionally ill-equipped to occupy the heights to which his talent would quickly take him.
Like any credible pop star, the Protestant working-class lad from east Belfast was a playboy, one who, in his brief career until the age of 26, when his football genius was in full spate, chose the night clubs over the training pitches. Champagne swept him away from the game just before his prime.
No one before that had married the cloth-cap Stretford End at Old Trafford with the tie-dyed cheesecloth fashion of The King's Road, or had straddled the Falls and Shankill Road chasm so seamlessly in sectarian Belfast. Best, in his lightning strike across the football firmament, made it work. His hip, model-filled lifestyle and almost feminine sensibility was coupled with macho vodka-driven binges, an athlete's sexual appetite and incomparable skill in a game, which, in the '60s and early '70s, provided individual talent with little protection from determined thuggery.
Many of the anecdotes fashioned for Best for the after dinner-circuit, on which he laboured in past years, played on the point of his countless beauty queen conquests.
"I left Old Trafford because I kept going missing," he was to say. "Miss UK, Miss America, Miss . . . " His timing was not confined to the pitch and for the swinging generation his arrival was also perfect. A 1963 debut with United the year before the BBC began its weekly Match of The Day show guaranteed stardom in a way never experienced by those before him. The growth of television brought him trophy girlfriends and cars.
At 19 he helped United win their first league title in eight years. It was followed by another championship in 1967 and in 1968 he was voted the English and European footballer of the year. To celebrate he went on an all-night drinking session and was found at 9 a.m. the next morning, asleep and clutching the trophy. A policeman put him in a taxi home. That same year United became the first English team to win the European Cup. By then, the news that had been brought some years earlier by a club scout to Manchester United coach, the late Sir Matt Busby, was beginning to ring true.
"I think I've found a genius," the hard-bitten talent-finder told Sir Matt. The world was at his feet and as people began to wonder about exactly where the future of gorgeous George lay, he announced his retirement.
Brief dead-beat comebacks kept the roadshow ticking over and spells with Stockport, Fulham, Los Angeles Aztecs, San Jose Earthquakes and even Cork Celtic mapped a spiralling decline. In 1983 he vanished off the football map and in 1984 served two months of a 12-week jail term in Ford Open prison for drink-driving and assaulting a police officer. On a Terry Wogan chat show in 1990, the presenter was forced to cut short the interview when the former player, spectacularly drunk, in graphic detail launched into one of his specialist subjects - sex.
Since then he has appeared in the media for a string of drinking feats, leading to the marriage failure to Angie, who, by then, had given birth to his son Callum, and bankruptcy. But a column in the Mail on Sunday and a position as a football analyst for Sky Sports has kept Best's profile high and public affection has never slipped. Even in his 50s, Best would stagger down the King's Road on a summer afternoon dressed in a silver shell suit and silence a buzzing pub just by entering the building.
In March 2000, the stakes were raised when he collapsed and turned yellow with liver failure. Doctors warned that one more drink would kill him. Best, resisting his beseeching body's requests to give up, then moved with his second wife Alex (29), to a new home in Portavogie, Co Down, in a despairing attempt to distance himself from the temptations of London pubs and clubs. Desperately she tried to keep him away from the booze but "Georgie" reverted to type and engaged in at least two heavy binges. One apparently lasted three days.
In April last year as his health began to seriously fracture, Best had anti-alcohol pellets sewn into his stomach at the same hospital at which he underwent Tuesday's transplant. Known as Antabuse, the pellets release a chemical which, when mixed with alcohol, make the patient physically sick. In testimony to how long he has had his chronic problem, he underwent the same treatment more than 20 years ago in Scandinavia and the US, without success. By then a liver specialist, Prof Roger Williams, had told him that less than 20 per cent of his liver was working. Since then he has been twice rushed into intensive care, first when he contracted pneumonia and again when a stomach bug he picked up in Cyprus became a life-threatening illness.
Writing in his Mail on Sunday column earlier this year, he said his energies were so low that he had to sit down to recover from a 100-yard walk, while his eyes were sometimes yellow with jaundice.
In his recent autobiography, Blessed, Best says: "Drink is the only opponent I have been unable to beat." As usual his illness is twinned with his soccer brilliance. Best's acceptance of his pathetic condition can only be faced as a twin to his magisterial talent. It has been ever so. His mother Ann, a highly talented former hockey player, died an alcoholic in 1978. It adds up to a cautionary tale, the spectacle of the collapse of the best footballer of his generation.