George Best tried Alcoholics Anonymous several times, but it didn't take. "How can George Best be anonymous?" he would ask with a shrug.
But there was a more profound problem. The programme of AA promises "a life beyond your wildest dreams", and it is hardly necessary to labour the nature of the problem this represented for George. He was, on the surface of things, a marginal symbol of the Sixties revolution. By one reading he slipstreamed on the flower-power dream that blossomed from the rock 'n' roll beat, a stowaway on the movement created by the Beatles, Stones, Elvis, Dylan and the Doors. But this is to see only haircuts and clothes, the dream as mere spectacle.
By this analysis, George adopted the fashions of his time and became a shining star in a medium not previously noted for colour or flamboyance. This is the "tragic" story of George Best: how his adoption of counter-culture values would lead to the restlessness that clung to him throughout his short, spectacular life.
The "moral" of this story is that, had he kept his hair short and his eye on the ball, he would be good for several more decades.
There are other ways of seeing it. I became aware of George in the late 1960s, not yet in my teens. I encountered him first in the newspapers, but for a while got him mixed up with George Harrison.
We didn't have TV, never mind Match of the Day, but I would see flashes of his drop-dead genius on screens in other people's houses. I didn't have much to compare him to, but saw instantly that he was incomparable.
Even before I knew the Sixties had started, his every move said: "Freedom". Though the Sixties thing is regarded now as primarily a rock 'n' roll revolution, it wasn't until punk that rock 'n' roll did what George had been doing with a football a decade before.
As much a prophet as Lennon or Jagger, what made him special was that, unlike the rock 'n' rollers, he commanded a medium we instantly understood and could immediately access as participants. The music of the Beatles or the Stones inspired us, but did not yet invite us to be active in our own liberation.
You could dream about being Lennon or McCartney, but, without a recording studio and a George Martin, couldn't actually become one.
By growing your hair, you could, however, be George Best. All you needed was a rood of space and a couple of jumpers to mark the goals. In a few objectively ungainly spurts through the mud, the dream would come alive.
To an onlooker you might be a skinny cub with shaggy locks and unconvincing sideburns, but in the cocoon of the spell you had reached a place beyond dreams.
George was a pied piper whose life became for his followers not a means to vicariously explore their fantasies, but a way into their own potential. In those moments in which you clung to the ball as though to your life, you accessed a sense of what might be possible - beyond football, music, anything. The true moral in the life of George Best has something to do with the simultaneous indispensability and limits of dreams, and the paradoxical nature of freedom. The Sixties came out of the dark, a promise of liberation from the gloom of conservatism, respectability and greyness.
The message was: it needn't be like that; freedom is within reach.
But life is a fragile condition existing between two kinds of death: the grey death of respectability and the literal death the adventurous seek to defy.
Human happiness requires a fund of dreams, but also something countervailing: balance, restraint, an understanding that the ecstatic promise, because it delivers to a point and then starts to destroy, is duplicitous.
Alcoholism is misunderstood by the Muggle world. Less arbitrary a condition than is sometimes alleged, it is prone to strike free spirits who have glimpsed infinity while remaining imprisoned in their earthly bodies.
The alcoholic, having dreamt of transcendence, cannot abide "real" life, but desires to be in heaven, right here, right now, all the time. This is, of course, for creatures of clay, a specious desire.
The life of George Best tells us anything is possible, but at a price. The world hasn't enough space for everyone's dreams, and, when you are a dream-maker like George, those whom you inspired but who failed to score for themselves will return to suck you dry, to prove to themselves that your feet, like theirs, are made of dirt. In the end, the ghouls will, if you let them, define you, and towards the end George found himself at their mercy.
He was a god-turned-man, and we know these too must die. There were other kinds of freedom he might have found and been saved, had he not glimpsed so much of the life of the gods. But he set us free, and not in a small way. Anyone who saw him play, if only for a moment, was liberated from greyness, if only for a while.
May he rest in peace eternally.