Obituary: George Best, the former Northern Ireland and Manchester United player who has died in London at the age of 59, will be recalled as a flawed footballing legend who held an enduring fascination for the media.
Best, at 22, the youngest to win the European Footballer of the Year award following his contribution to Manchester United's European Cup success over Benfica at Wembley in 1968, effectively ended his career in first-class football when he parted company with the club five years later.
There followed an assortment of less fashionable alliances, first with American clubs and later with some modest English and Scottish teams, which did little to enhance his reputation as one of the most gifted players of his generation.
Such were his excesses off the field of play as he fought an increasingly futile battle with alcohol, as well as involving himself in numerous extra-marital affairs, that his name continued in the headlines long after he had called time on his playing career.
He was born in Belfast's Royal Maternity Hospital on May 22nd, 1946, the eldest of six children in a working-class Presbyterian family. His father, Dickie, a shipyard worker, was active in junior football in Belfast in the 1950s, while his mother, Anne, who worked on the production line in the Gallaher tobacco factory, only narrowly failed to attain international status in women's hockey.
The family would later recall that it was as an onlooker at the hockey games in which his mother played that the toddler first revealed the nimble footwork that would become his trademark as he dribbled a tennis ball between the pockets of spectators standing on the touchlines.
Growing up in the Cregagh area of Belfast was an experience to tax the capacity of even the most imaginative. There were few recreational facilities to attract the younger set, but that was no problem to the boy who spent long hours kicking a tennis ball against the big garage doors at the end of his street.
"We never had any problems finding him in the evenings," his father would recall. "He'd still be there, banging the ball against the garage, after all the other kids had gone home. So even at that early stage we ought to have had an inkling of what was to follow."
Another significant factor in developing his love of football was the proximity of his grandfather's home to the Oval stadium in east Belfast where Glentoran FC played their home games. Young George spent a lot of time there, and grew up on the folklore of the great Glentoran players of the past, as well as those of Wolverhampton Wanderers, the club he supported in England.
Not all of his time, however, was devoted to honing his football skills. Although schoolbooks took second place to match reports of Glentoran and Wolves' games, he was sharp enough academically to win a scholarship to Grosvenor Grammar School.
The problem was that they played rugby, not soccer, at Grosvenor, and while he showed distinct promise as an outhalf, it wasn't enough to compensate for his first love. Another difficulty was that in returning home after classes he had to pass through a Catholic enclave in which the Protestant emblem on his blazer attracted unwelcome attention. Apart from trading verbal insults, George had no bad memories in growing up in a mixed area.
Still, those verbal exchanges were reason enough to persuade his parents to allow him to rejoin his old friends at an adjacent secondary school. And that also helped in the train of events which eventually saw him join Manchester United as an apprentice at the age of 15.
On his own admission, he was small and disturbingly thin for his age, and it was perhaps these physical limitations that scared off some of the professional scouts working in the city for English clubs. He was never rated good enough to play for the Northern Ireland international schoolboy teams.
Thanks to that addiction to tennis balls and garage doors, however, his legs were strong, strong enough to convince Bob Bishop, Manchester United's veteran scout in Northern Ireland, that he was an exceptional talent who deserved at least a trial at one of the most celebrated of British clubs.
In time they responded with an invitation for Best and Eric McMordie, another highly- rated Belfast lad, to put their talent on display for the approval of those in charge of the club's youth programme.
Neither had ever been out of Ireland previously, and after a long boat and train journey there was nobody to meet them when they eventually arrived in Manchester in July 1961.
A subsequent taxi ride took them mistakenly to the Old Trafford cricket ground instead of the football stadium nearby, and when they eventually met up with those who had invited them the glamour of joining a big English club had already begun to wear thin.
It can scarcely have surprised club officials when they discovered the next day that, unannounced, their guests had upped and returned to Belfast. Best subsequently received a telegram to return, this time by air, but Dickie Best was so upset by the treatment his son received that he advised against an immediate response.
He had already secured an apprenticeship for George in the printing trade in Belfast, and, given the high failure rate among the Irish youngsters who had gone on trial to British clubs, he wasn't unduly anxious to send him back to Manchester.
In the end it was George himself who took that decision, thus beginning a partnership that is destined to figure prominently in any comprehensive history of the club.
Those already at the club at the time recall him as a shy, introverted lad who seldom volunteered conversation, even on football topics.
For all his reputation back home, Best soon discovered that he was just another player in an exceptional youth team which tended to look to David Sadler, later to win four caps for England, for its inspirational moments.
Gradually, however, his skills came to the fore, and when United won the FA Youths Cup in 1964, Best's name was imprinted on the success.
It was at that point, it seems, that Sir Matt Busby, the man credited with building the club into one of the biggest in the world, was convinced that he had a rare talent on his staff.
A year earlier Busby had offered Best a full-time professional contract, and during the 1963/64 season the Irishman made the first of his 466 appearances for the club in a game against West Brom. It wasn't the most convincing of starts for the man who was quickly to assume cult status at the club, and in the end it was Sadler who made the headlines with the decisive goal. At that point he was ahead of his room-mate in the pecking order but soon the order would change as Best emerged to challenge established players such as Bobby Charlton and Dennis Law as the fulcrum of the team.
Collectively the Blessed Trinity, as they came to be known, represented some of the most exciting talent in football. Individually, however, their philosophies on the game and how it should be played were light years apart. Charlton and Law were essentially team players who believed that there ought to be no place in the game plan for the kind of showmanship Best was bringing to it.
Instead of passing to better-placed colleagues, the Irishman saw nothing wrong in the risk of running at defenders in the manner of old-fashioned wingers.
It may have done little to endear him to either of his senior partners but eventually Best's inclination to "show boat" won the approval of Busby.
"George is gifted with more individual ability than I've seen in any other player - at times it's simply bewildering," he said in a post-match remark which didn't sit well with either of the players who had done so much to help the club regain its position of pre-eminence in Britain after the 1958 Munich air disaster. Even more distasteful to the senior players at the club were Best's excesses off the pitch. Not for him the tenets of the old regime whereby players were encouraged to lead the clean life to ensure theywere in prime condition to perform for the team on match days.
More and more, it seemed, he was anxious to burnish his playboy image. His stunning good looks ensured that he was never short of female company, and four years into his stay at Old Trafford he was already acquiring a reputation as a serious vodka drinker.
In time his late-night binges in the Brown Bull, a seedy Manchester bar which quickly became trendy because of his patronage, would consume acres of newsprint as the media homed in on the newsmaker who by now was as likely to figure on the front as the back pages of the tabloids.
Yet if the Irishman was flouting convention in outrageous fashion in the eyes of his critics, it didn't appear to impact adversely on his performances for Manchester United, and thanks largely to his skills they won the old First Division championship in 1965 and again in 1967. Even as they were bringing their post-Munich revival to full fruition in domestic competition, the club was acutely aware of the need to broaden its horizons.
European club competitions were growing in popularity by the year, and after exasperating failures against Partizan Belgrade and Real Madrid, Busby sensed they were ready to deliver in 1968.
Two years earlier Best had found a new stage for acclaim by scoring three times against Benfica. And after a victory over Real Madrid in the semi-final of the 1968 European Cup, United found themselves on course for another meeting with the powerful Portuguese club, this time in the European final at Wembley.
With the score deadlocked at 1-1 at the end of 90 minutes, the game went into extra time. And Best, deriving inspiration from the importance of the occasion, secured the most important goal of his career when moments of rich skill took him around the defence for the score which opened the way to a 4-1 win.
At international level he found fulfilment a lot more difficult. Northern Ireland, who had qualified for the 1958 World Cup finals, were in decline throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and Best, a modest international player, did little to help redress the situation.
In all he played just 37 games for
Northern Ireland, frequently withdrawing from the squad for the most spurious of reasons.
Thanks to the added profile which the European Cup win gave him, the Irishman quickly became the biggest earner in British football, demanding substantial fees for product endorsement, media work and personal appearances. Yet that Wembley success merely heightened the fall that was to follow.
Against all expectations, Manchester United began to struggle at local and European level, and Busby's surprising decision to resign as manager, followed by two doubtful appointments which saw Wilf McGuinness and Frank O'Farrell struggle to arrest the team's slide, left Best in a state of growing disillusionment.
Not unexpectedly, perhaps, he began to lean ever more heavily on alcohol to the point where friends worried abut his health.
His mother, who never drank until she was 40, died in 1978 at the age of 54 after becoming addicted to alcohol, and her plight was, it seemed, another reason for George to seek solace at the bottom of a glass.
After leaving Manchester United he played for varying lengths of time with 10 clubs, including Fulham, Hibernian, Stockport, Bournemouth, Fort Lauderdale, San Jose, Brisbane and Cork Celtic, for whom he made three appearances.
It was a sad postscript to a career which blazed comet-like for seven memorable seasons until it began to lose its momentum in the 1969/70 season at Old Trafford.
He was married twice, to Angie McDonald in the late 1970s and to Alex Pursey, 26 years his junior, in 1995.
At different times, however, he was romantically linked with a number of high-profile women who found his charm and dark good looks an irresistible combination.
The low point in a colourful if erratic life came in 1984 when he was jailed for two months after being convicted of drink-driving and assaulting a police officer. In latter years much of his income derived from media work, which he disliked, and infrequent personal appearances.
His lifestyle led, perhaps inevitably, to problems with his liver, which manifested themselves in 2000 when he was treated in Cromwell Hospital in west London.
He received a liver transplant in the same hospital in 2002, but after oft-repeated assertions that he was finished with alcohol, he was soon in trouble again, appearing in court on charges of driving while 2½ times over the legal limit in February 2003.
In an interview on the day before he went to hospital recently, he said his biggest regret in the last 10 years of life was the denial of the anonymity he craved. For a man who went out of his way for so long to court publicity, it was the final, ironic twist.
George Best: born May 22nd, 1946; died November 25th, 2005.