Sport

That was Best, could've been better

Nobody's life in sport could have been as stunningly colourful and as despairingly complex as was Best's, writes Nirmal Shekar

George Best is fighting for his life in a London hospital and the prognosis doesn't sound good. A generation of sports fans who have celebrated the heroics of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Beckham may even ask: George who? And, what a pity that!

Put the best of the two Brazilians and the English superstar together and the potent mix would still suffer in comparison to Best's genius in the handsome Irishman's prime in the second half of the 1960s. And Beckham's contemporary celebrity would seem like schoolyard stardom in comparison to the status that Best enjoyed as the Fifth Beatle.

Ah, Bestie...what a man, what a player! The world of sport, like the realms of art and music, has had its share of complex personalities. But nobody's life in sport could have been as stunningly colourful and as despairingly complex as was Best's.

Ever since he caught a boat at Belfast to make his way to Manchester to play for the most famous of English clubs at age 15, Best has constantly had to wrestle with himself as well as the myriad forces that his very personality let loose. His extravagant gifts as a footballer combined with movie star good looks put him on a pedestal well above ordinary mortals, especially after a virtuoso performance in the European Cup final between Manchester United and Benfica in 1968.

But, then, it was a pedestal that turned out to be a precarious tightrope which Best walked heroically for a while before briefly looking down at the earth below. Just as suddenly, his legs started to shake, his head began to spin.

"Suddenly, I could go nowhere, do nothing, without people staring, trying to pick up fights, telling me how to do my job,'' Best said in the late 1960s. That was the anguished cry of a man who the whole of England loved to hate, loved to love, loved to despise, loved to adore, but most of all, hated to leave alone.

And suddenly, the music stopped. A Mozart symphony had ended abruptly. The magic was gone. A glorious career was foreshortened by the very nature of the pressures it gave rise to. For a rumbustiously human, all too human footballer, there began the spiral into the abyss.

A once-invincible, heroic larger-than-life figure had metamorphosed into a fragile, insecure, booze-craving parody of his former self. The problem is, the sports arena is such an insulated environment. It is a world all by itself, something very close to a fantasy land where the actors and the audience live and thrive in animated isolation. For many athletes, this is the only world they have and once that is gone, they are failures in life who start to seek solace in alcohol.

Destructive cycle

But, for a creature of nature, a creature of passion such as Best, the destructive cycle of drink-to-drown-the-emptiness began not after his career ended — as it often does with most stars — but at the very peak of it as he struggled to deal with his celebrity.

"You know, I could have been a contender. I could've had some class.'' Those are Marlon Brando's immortal words in one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time — On the Waterfront.

Each time Best goes into hospital to battle for life, to save a transplanted liver yet again rendered lifeless by alcohol, those words dance forward in my mind on auto-recall.

Best, of course, was no starry-eyed dockyard boxer (Brando's role in the movie) who had failed to grab his chances in and outside the ring. But, no great sportsman's life and career seem to fit that Brando lament as much as the Irishman's.

"He (Best) should and could have been the greatest player of all times, even better than Pele and Di Stefano,'' said Bobby Charlton, one of England's best loved footballers.

Could have been. Should have been. Might have been. If only...Best has heard these things time and again for the most part of his life, a life that has been one long what-might-have-been story.

No matter all that, no matter his long battle with the bottle, the several broken relationships, the arrests and the court cases, the lucky few who have seen Best at his best on a football field will only think of the timeless beauty of his art — a beauty untarnished by alcohol or human failings, a beauty that Beckham, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho together, at their best, will find elusive.

Ah, Bestie! How very human! How truly immortal!

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