We all know the “where did it all go wrong, George?” story about the hotel waiter delivering a bottle, perhaps a magnum, of champagne to George Best’s room where he lay in bed with a gorgeous blonde. It has been told so often that you feel it must be apocryphal. Even if it isn’t you may think the question was absurd. A lot more went right than wrong for George Best. He was one of the two or three most famous footballers in the world, and, if he appeared often on the front page of the tabloids, it was his exploits, his footballing genius recorded and celebrated in the sports pages at the back of the paper that made him also front-page news, even in the day of grainy black-and white TV, long before anyone would have known what you meant by the words “social media”.
Nevertheless his career at the top level of the game was shorter, much shorter, than it should have been, especially when you compare him with his great Manchester United team-mates Denis Law and Bobby Charlton.
