CONNECT: The recent media attention devoted to George Best's liver transplant has thrown a new and unfavourable light on the drinks industry's enduring relationship with sport, writes Eddie Holt
'The more I think about old age the more I find an uneasy desire to die peacefully in my sleep around the 40 mark. Old age? Ugh!" wrote a 22-year-old George Best in 1968. Well, when you're 22, "the 40 mark" represents senility. When you're 22 in the 1960s (a decade that preached "never trust anyone over 30"), a cult figure for youth, a winner of the European Cup, the player of the year in Europe and England and joint top scorer in the First Division, that "40 mark" is multiply damned.
Nonetheless, at 56, Best has had a liver transplant. It's a marriage of medicine and celebrity with implications for everybody. Best's is a critical case. If the operation is successful and he stays on the wagon, he could become the greatest ever publicity machine - or, more accurately, publicity body - for organ transplantation in Britain and Ireland. Alternatively, should the transplant fail or Best go back on the booze, this latest episode in his life will be widely seen as a final futile attempt to defeat the demon.
This is high stakes stuff - life or death for Best - and critical for thousands of others. George Best is not, of course, the only great footballer to be pole-axed by drink. The Brazilian winger Garrincha, regarded by many observers as more naturally gifted than Pelé and sometimes credited with winning the 1962 World Cup practically by himself, died a penniless alcoholic in 1983. Other players too, albeit not of the dazzling, defence-splitting skills of Best or Garrincha, have had their lives blighted by the bottle.
Paul McGrath, Tony Adams and Paul Merson are perhaps the best-known of recent years. McGrath's sobriety seems, sadly, as suspect as his knees. The recent interview he did with Paul Kimmage reveals him as a frightened man. Fear of meeting people, fear of talking in public, fear of working as a football analyst for the BBC appear to have driven McGrath to seek oblivion in drink. It's as if fear does the consuming of the person before they consume drink which, in turn, consumes them.
Yet alcoholic footballers are not notoriously more nervous about playing in front of tens of thousands and being watched by millions of TV viewers. Perhaps the communal aspect of football - it is, after all, a team game - helps super-sensitive individuals. If so, however, it's probable that a successful career in the public eye, given the plaudits it brings, is double-edged. When the allure, adulation and approval end, the void no amount of drink can fill is primed to be more voracious than ever.
There's got to be a link between sporting success and alcoholism but its exact nature remains as elusive as George Best playing in his prime. "When I first heard the cries of the crowd and the acclaim of a goal, I was four years old," wrote the 22-year-old Best, "and my mother was the sporting star of the Best family." Best's mother, Ann, played international hockey for Northern Ireland and died from drink aged 54. No doubt, there's a genetic component to George's talent and troubles.
Then again, isn't there always a genetic component to everybody's talents and troubles? News of Best's liver transplant has naturally and properly focused attention on links between the drinks industry and sport. Obviously, such "sponsorship" (a form of bought advertising) is considered financially beneficial to both sponsor and sponsored. But sponsorship can be a latter day form of simony - the selling of religious "indulgences" - which led to the Reformation. It is, in a sense, simony's commercial little brother.
Still, sponsorship is just a squad player in the overall assault of alcohol advertising. Certainly there are, albeit in varying degrees, issues of personal responsibility surrounding drink and Best will be made acutely aware of that now. But there are also issues of unfashionable communal responsibility - and advertising, unlike genetics, is in that category. A less avaricious, less primitive society could not allow much of the drink industry advertising that's tolerated in this part of the world.
Laddish conviviality, social sophistication and/or sex are usually the promises made in alcohol ads. Lash down a skinful of this or that brew and you'll have a cosy but energised social circle, you'll be ultra "cool" and supermodels or superhunks (whatever you're having yourself) will prostrate themselves in front of you. Sure, nobody believes the nonsense but in a world in which, as Humphrey Bogart suggested, "the problem is that everyone is a few drinks behind", the idea of bottled bliss is insidious and seductive.
We could consider some contrasting images of drink. Instead of laddish conviviality, social sophistication and sexual allure, how about more car crashes, lock-up wards, casualty wards, battered spouses, terrified kids, women on the game for booze, men stealing, "stroking" and even starving to get stupefied. Then think of brain damage, cirrhosis, jaundice, ulcers, gastritis, vitamin deficiencies and premature ageing - a rainbow of more conditions than there are colours of alcopops.
For added dramatic impact, we could show simulations of people going through the DTs and losing their partners, children, relatives, friends and jobs on that sexy, sophisticated, convivial path to destitution? Or, down the league, there's stuff like "the shakes", hangovers, guilt, mortification, shame and wages wasted. Sláinte, cheers, good health - such booze salutations may be appropriate for most people but they bespeak a monumental irony for a significant minority.
There would, no doubt, be alcoholics without alcohol advertising. Heroin gets a grim press - and rightly so - but people continue to become heroin addicts. Yet an ad or a sponsorship deal which boosts the sale of a drink or a range of drinks - and the ad is not succeeding if it doesn't help to do this - cannot but boost drink problems, as well as, in fairness, the enjoyment that people who can control their intake get from booze.
IT'S true that few irritants are as vile as sermons about the evils of drink. If you want to drive a drunk to the bottle, start sermonising. You'd hardly need psychologists and addiction counsellors to tell you why it works like that. If alcoholism and even the abuse of alcohol can be regarded as a reaction of certain people to a world they experience as fear-inducing and dismal, lecturing people so predisposed is rubbing their noses in the dismay they are seeking to flee. But cold portrayals needn't be sermons.
To most football followers nowadays, George Best is merely a name from history. He helped to define an era which espoused hedonism as a radical alternative to the dull security of the suburbs. He was regarded as practically fearless on a football pitch but the gnawing, grating, low-pitch hum of fear that Paul McGrath succumbs to must have afflicted him too. Superb in the public arena of professional football, such people, it seems, feel deeply inadequate in their private cores.
Perhaps there is little that individuals can do to influence communal responsibility about drink and its advertising. Our culture and business life permit drink ads to show us an idealised face of society's acceptable recreational drug. That exacerbates a very ugly reality for people like George Best, Paul McGrath and thousands of anonymous alcoholics. Yet, if enough people demand that drink ads, like those for cigarettes, carry a health warning, we should see some improvements. We have to imagine a reformation of advertising is possible. Believe.