By Myles Palmer
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George Best, the great footballer, died at 1pm today.
Impish to the last, Best inconvenienced reporters and editors by not dying on Thursday.
So the hospital’s ghastly media circus is over.
At last that ghastly media circus is over, or soon will be.
Footballers didn’t live in a bubble in those days.
They were more in touch with reality, but Best, the fifth Beatle, was one of the most famous people in the world and found success hard to sustain.
He had half a career.He should have been playing for Real Madrid at 33, as Zidane is now.
I was a student at Manchester University when he first got into the United team.
I’d see him around, cruising through the city centre in his white Jag, unshaven, wearing a lavender shirt, met two strippers who knew him and Mike Summerbee, talked to a girl in a pub who said,”Yeah, I know Georgie Best, he’s just a spotty little Irish mod.”
Sometimes I used to duck out of the Central Reference Library for a toasted teacake and coffee in a cafe below a model agency and one day George was in there with Summerbee, boxer Johnny Prescott and a man I did not recognise.
The fourth man was wearing a very nice sky blue sweater which had a small, new-looking oil smear on the elbow, as if he had recently been reaching down into a car engine.
Later, in London in late December 1971, I was not long out of bed one day when I got an unexpected mid-day call from Radio Times features.
“Myles, can you interview George Best now? He will be on the 1.30 train from Euston to Manchester.Can you get down there and talk to him on the train?”
I ran out of the house and sprinted down Stroud Green Road to Finsbury Park, got a tube to Euston, bought a ticket to Manchester, waited for George to appear.
He didn’t. Called the office and was told : wait, he will be on the next train.
George arrived with a male friend and I introduced myself.
They had come from a Kings Road restaurant and George was carrying a bottle of Greek liqueur, a gift from the owner.
He was 25, relaxed, friendly, wearing a grey suit and a navy rollneck sweater.
We got on the train and I asked him some questions, made notes, chatted about football, jumped off at Derby, wrote the story on the train back to Euston, easiest feature I’ve ever written in my life.
George told me that as a kid in Belfast he used to support Wolves and kept a scrapbook on them.
He remembered having a cartilage operation the day before the 1966 FA Cup Final, Sheffield Wednesday v Everton, watched the game on TV while recovering from the anaesthetic, fell asleep after the game, and could not remember anything about the match when he woke up.
ON FRIDAY NIGHT Jan told me that George went out with a girl from Didsbury College. She remembers seeing his E-type Jaguar in the car park of Royal Ford, their hall of residence.
“We went to see him play once at Old Trafford, four of us, standing on the terraces. Let’s go and see Georgie Best! I can’t remember who they were playing. But I bumped into Brian, a guy a I knew from Oxford. He was at Manchester College of Art, he was a fantastic artist.”
Michael had not come home for dinner, and when he came in after Jan had gone to bed, I said we had been talking about George Best, as people all over the world would have been doing on the day of his death.
Now 23,Michael recalled meeting George Best at Highbury when he was a kid.
“It was my first game, I was ten or eleven. I went there with you, met Stewart, came round afterwards to the press door, met Micky the steward, came up and sat in the little bar area, having a lemonade and reading my fanzine. And George Best was the only other person there. Just the two of us. You’d all gone in to George’s press conference.
“He came over and said, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘My dad’s a journalist, he’s in there.’
‘Did you enjoy the game?’
“I’d enjoyed the game, Wrighty scored against his old club and relegated Palace. Dickov scored, Campbell. I had a good day, I’d seen my first Arsenal game and met George Best. But I don’t think he thought that a young boy would have known who he was. I’d seen him on TV, I recognised him straight away.”
I said that I didn’t remember seeing Best that day.
“No, he disappeared after about ten minutes.”
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THE SIXTIES was the Beatles and George Best.
Only two Beatles are left alive, Paul and Ringo.
But, for me, the Sixties was Denis Law and the Rolling Stones. That’s another story.
November 25th 2005