Red Idols | A tribute to George Best

While everyone else wanted to live in a Georgie Best world, the childlike footballing genius at the eye of the storm was the one man who sometimes wanted to escape the pressure of the Georgie Best world.

There was no guidebook to how to handle this level of fame. No precedent. No-one at Manchester United, even Busby, knew quite how to handle this.
Off the pitch, Manchester was changing, from an industrial city to a pop city, and Best was the personification of this on the pitch.

In Morrissey’s acerbic autobiography, Best is one of the few individuals the former Smiths singer speaks highly of, being drawn to Best’s rebellious streak and refusal to conform. Compared to other ‘arbitrarily illiterate’ footballers, Best is ‘clever and witty’. He is the ‘shocking new’.

‘It is the physical and facial glamor of George Best that gains him so much love and hate, for everyone has what he has. My father takes me to see George Best play at Old Trafford, and as I see the apocalyptic disturber of the peace swirl across the pitch, I faint. I am eight years old. Squinting in the sun, it is all too much for me, and I remember my father’s rasp as he dragged my twisted body through the crowd and out into the street, causing him to miss the rest of the match.’

Manchester United, so much to answer for.

As Oscar Wilde once put it, football ‘is hardly suitable for delicate boys’.
Ian Brown, lead singer of The Stone Roses, whose song ‘This Is The One’ is played before every match at Old Trafford, was another young Red transfixed by Best, and in the late 60s would hang around outside his Edwardia shop.

“When I was seven or eight we used to go into town and he had a boutique on Bridge Street next to the barber. That was one of our haunts, hanging outside his boutique, waiting for him. I remember him pulling up in a yellow Lotus Europa with a blonde. There was a sweetshop round the corner and a few times George got us kids a bag of toffees like Fruit Salads and Black Jacks and said, ‘You can’t hang here all day, lads.’”