Paddy Crerand:
I will never forget the first time I saw George. He was playing in a youth match against Manchester City for Manchester United. It was 1963 and I’d only just signed for Matt Busby. I was a young man myself, 23, but George was just a kid. He was 16 or 17, and already doing things on the pitch I could not believe.
Because of his performance United won 4-1 and I went to Jack Crompton, one of Matt’s coaches, and said: "Tell me about that lad, he’s unbelievable." Jack didn’t reveal too much. He said the staff wanted to keep George a secret, but keep genius secret? How do you do that? Within a few months the whole world knew about George Best. By Christmas he was beside me in the United first team.
My second sight of George came soon after that youth game. We’d won the FA Cup and, as was traditional then, the players and their friends and relations had a celebration dinner that evening. George was one of the youngsters on the staff Matt invited to be with the team. We were travelling through the streets of London on our bus and there was George, alone, looking out of the window, a quiet little Irish boy with features almost like an elf. I remember thinking , "how handsome! You’re going to have trouble with that son."
George said himself that had he been born ugly, the world would have never heard of Pele. If he’d been ugly, he’d probably be playing for United still. I’m convinced his looks were part of his problem. They helped make him a superstar in an age when footballers were more or less ordinary people.
I’ve heard it said that Matt didn’t do enough to look after George, but that’s wrong. The problem was that until George, a player had never been front- page news. Nobody was prepared for it and nobody knew how to handle it, least of all George. In my day if you wanted to see stars you went to the cinema. Nowadays every player is a "star", even the ones who can’ t play. Pick up any newspaper and you’ll see footballers all over the news for doing nothing more than maybe buying a new car, but George was the first to have front page treatment.
The whole thing exploded after we beat Benfica 5-1 away in 1966 and George gave a display which was unreal even to those of us lucky enough to be beside him on the pitch. It’s not that fame made George get carried away, it’s rather that it increased the pressures on him and made living his life that bit more difficult. I had a wife and kids to go home to. George was young, living in digs, and, if truth be known, a bit lonely. Despite his image he was shy and if his parents had come over to live with him in Manchester it might have been different, but he had nobody there, so he tended to go out. And temptations were always around. He was the most famous guy in Manchester and also the best-looking one: what would you do? I didn’t feel the drinking affected him until late in his career at United. With most footballers natural fitness keeps them going until they’re about 25. After then it becomes harder and George’s lifestyle only became a problem in the last couple of seasons before he "retired" at 27.
I honestly think George took a drink because he was shy. Despite everything he had, it was to give him that little bit of confidence. Around the club he hardly said a word. Me, Denis (Law), Bobby (Charlton) and Nobby (Stiles) — especially Nobby — were loud enough for any dressing room. George would just sit there, ever the young lad, the little angel, the little Irish cherub in the corner.
was at Middlesbrough recently when the United fans sang George’s name all the way through a 4-1 defeat. I’ve never heard a single one of our supporters say a bad word about him. People looked at George, not just the footballer but the lifestyle, the looks, and said, "I wish that was me."
Those of us who played with him have suffered with him these past few weeks. We’ll never forget him. Thank you, George.
The Observer: Best's liver treatment was free of charge.
The sad truth behind George Best's final days became apparent yesterday after The Observer discovered that the football star was given free medical treatment at the prestigious Cromwell Hospital in London because he was bankrupt and unable to pay.
Medical experts estimate that Best's treatment at the Cromwell, one of Britain's leading private hospitals, would have amounted to well over £100,000.
Sources believe the prestigious hospital waived its charges for his intensive care. The Cromwell did not seek any money from Best during his first spell at the hospital in 2001, before he underwent a liver transplant in 2002. Professor Roger Williams, the liver specialist who had supervised Best's treatment since 2000, confirmed he had not charged his patient during that time, but said he was unaware what the financial arrangements were for Best's most recent period at the hospital.
The hospital's spokesman, Jeffrey Brandon, refused to discuss whether Best's family would be presented with any bill. 'I can't talk to you about the costs of people's treatment,' he said.
Best died virtually penniless. Illness meant he had little opportunity in his last few years to earn income from his two usual sources: after-dinner speaking and acting as a guest commentator for Sky Sports. 'George worked for us for about 10 years,' said a Sky source. 'We had a pay-per-play arrangement with him - he got a fee when he guested on our Soccer Saturday show. But he hadn't appeared on that for about two seasons.'
Paul Wilson in The Observer:
There ought to be nothing left to say about George Best, a footballer whose marvellous gift for improvisation and unpredictability on the pitch was mocked by a slow and sadly obvious demise rehearsed so many times that even the once-entertaining anecdotes became wearily familiar and queasily unfunny.
There is just one thing that cannot be repeated too often. He will be missed. Even by people who do not follow Manchester United. Even by people who say they have no interest in football, and even by the moralists who wanted to wash their hands of him when he began to abuse his transplanted liver.
The reason is simple. Best was unique. Never mind the arguments about whether he was the best player these islands have produced, the most talented never to appear in a World Cup or a greater artist than Pele. Best was an original, and you don't put originals on lists, in categories, or in comparison with others. Best was not like any other footballer seen before or since. He was George Best, and that was enough.
Perhaps you had to see him play to understand. Perhaps you just had to see him. Anyone much under the age of 40 could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about, given that the archive footage that has been decorating the news bulletins these past few weeks barely hints at the reason for his incredible popularity. Younger readers will simply have to take it on trust that seeing Best play was such an event in itself it frequently overshadowed the context of the match or competition taking place around him.
Hugh McIlvanney in The Sunday Times:
Lives cannot be reduced to edited highlights and the entirety invariably contains too much of the painful, the regrettable and the simply banal.
That truism applies especially to sports heroes, who are given a double dose of mortality, being forced to suffer an extra, early experience of the dark when their talents die. In George Best’s case an addiction to alcohol (from which all his other troubles radiated chaotically) precipitated the demise of immeasurable gifts and when it overwhelmed his body, too, on Friday at the age of 59 there was again a devastating sense of the premature. There was also, in spite of his relentlessly public espousal of hedonism, the profoundly sad feeling that he had allowed the rest of us to gain more from his life than he did.
In a country where sport must be credited with making a worthwhile, if often exaggerated, contribution to the national culture it would be difficult to over-value what Best delivered in his prime. It is not enough to say the light that guttered out two days ago was once the brightest flame to illuminate British football in nearly a century and a half of organised existence. Best was far more than one of the greatest of players. On the field he was the incarnation of the game’s most romantic possibilities. Trying to explain how or why the sight of men playing about with a ball can hold countless millions in thrall from childhood to dotage is a task beyond rational argument. But we never needed anything as prosaic as logic when George was around.
Miracles speak louder than words. And technically, athletically and aesthetically he was miraculous. Anybody assessing his abilities runs out of breath before justified praise. Mesmerisingly deft feet combined with an acrobat’s balance, unlimited inventiveness, nerveless insouciance and killing pace to make his running at defenders irresistible, and once he was closing on goal the clean certainty with which he struck the ball and his instinct for the hurtful option made his finishing deadly. In mentioning his total of 179 goals in 466 matches for Manchester United, it’s equally appropriate to repeat Sir Alex Ferguson’s reaction to the scoring rate: "That’s phenomenal for a man who did not get the share of gift goals that come to specialist strikers. Best nearly always had to beat men to score." However, though putting the ball in the net was always a joyous priority, Best’s entries in the goals column could never begin to calibrate his impact on behalf of his team. He stirred such awed trepidation, sometimes such naked terror, in opponents that his forays created the kind of defensive confusion in which fellow attackers could thrive, and since in his peak years at Old Trafford they included men as outstanding as Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, United scorelines were usually impressive.
Imbued as he was with a warranted belief in his own invincibility as a penetrator, and a mischievous inclination to compound the demoralisation of challengers, he did not always pass when he should, but on the occasions when he seemed to be holding on to the ball too long he tended to end up doing dramatic damage with it. And when he used his passing skills they were seen, inevitably, to be exceptional. So were his tackling and his heading, and even more notable was the competitive spirit he brought to the action. He wasn’t tall or muscular but his lithe frame harboured freakish strength and resilience and his courage was unbreakable.
Lou Macari in The Scotsman:
For three weeks I've been asked to "comment" on George Best; offer "tributes" over the life of a friend and former teammate while he has still been fighting for his very existence. To those press people and television reporters badgering me, it was easy for them to talk about George in the past tense even as he lay on a hospital bed. They saw him as nothing more than a fallen celebrity, the main attraction in a media circus in which Old Trafford became the big top.
But with George's passing we have lost a good fella, a bloke I was incredibly fond of. The thousands who actually knew him will mourn because of the great affection they held for a warm, troubled, human being. Through his footballing genius he touched millions, as the sadness expressed right across the country since his death on Friday demonstrates.
There is a perception, however, that those around George could see what he was doing to himself even from early on. That simply wasn't the case. There were more than a few heavy drinkers at Old Trafford but these guys seemed to compensate for heavy nights by training harder to work off the excesses from the evening before. The damage they were doing to themselves wouldn't become apparent in their twenties or thirties, but only much later on.
So it was with George. Latterly I worked with him on Sky Sports Extra but I couldn't tell he was failing to make good on the second chance his liver operation of three years ago gave him. People with addictions are more often than not guarded and secretive if they find themselves failing to control their urges.
George was just the same old George to me. He was always one of those people whom you could meet after a year and immediately slip into the sort of conversation that would make you think you had talked every day for a month.
Until recent weeks, he was as bright and sharp as ever. Naively, perhaps, I just kept hoping that the bravery and courage he showed as a footballer would allow him to overcome any illness.