George Best's iconic status as the most gifted sporting figure to breathe air in these parts is beyond question. The archive television footage, which straddles that generational shift from black and white to colour, has a breathless quality and the frisson of excitement continues to echo down through the years. What Best was and stood for remains untainted by the passage of time. But what he represents now is a lot more equivocal.
Last Friday night the greatest footballer Northern Ireland has ever produced was the subject of a fawning television tribute on Kelly. You know the sort of thing. Famous person walks into studio. Surprise, surprise, there sitting in the audience is a collection of people, some as famous as him, many more much less so. Famous person then feigns mild shock and even milder humility that all this effort has been put in on his behalf even though he or she has known about it for months. Or at least since his or her agent took the booking.
The show can now begin and the format is so well-established that everyone involved knows what is expected. The pattern never changes. One of the less famous people in the invited audience launches into a convoluted anecdote dressed up as a question. The sole purpose of this non-probing, uncontroversial query is to prompt yet another convoluted anecdote, this time dressed up as an answer, from the considerably more famous main act. And so it goes on as the compliments paid become ever more obsequious and the half-remembered tales get progressively taller.
Best's hour or so in the spotlight last weekend did nothing to offend against the template. The celebrity factor of the guests was never going to have the paparazzi circling around, but there was enough to keep the show trundling along as all the old yarns were given one more public airing. Why then was the entire affair touched with a peculiar kind of sadness, and why was the overall mood more elegaic than celebratory?
Part of the reason may be that today George Best reminds people about what has been lost since that short, halcyon period when he was the pre-eminent footballer in these islands and the extent to which that void has never been filled. One of the most striking things about last Friday's invited audience was the age profile.
Most of them were either contemporaries of or older than Best, and the inevitable result was that the dominant tone of the proceedings was nostalgic and retrogressive. If the history of Northern Ireland football since Best's retirement has been the search for his replacement, then this occasion was proof positive of how elusive that quest has been. In the intervening period there has been qualification for successive World Cups during the 1980s, but they were teams based on graft rather than genius. No local player has come even close to matching Best either in terms of ability or impact.
That status which Best enjoys says much about the way in which sport here has developed over the past three decades. He is the easy-option icon, forever preserved in those grainy televisual cameos. And if you're really lucky he'll now appear on this chat show or at that speaking engagement to rehash the old stories and deliver the familiar lines. He is the ultimate comfort blanket celebrity.
Maybe it's a Troubles thing. Best's golden period immediately predates the onset of the violence here at the end of the 1960s. As a result, he has come to be regarded as redolent of a more innocent, peaceful time. And as society here threatened to fall apart completely with the beginning of full-scale political violence, so Best's professional and private lives careered into freefall almost in parallel. Perhaps we see echoes of ourselves in Best's own rise and fall.
It seems to be something that we like to do to our heroes. Alex Higgins's journey has taken him along an unerringly similar path. Belfast boy blessed with fantastic natural ability takes on the world and wins, only to lose it all to his personal demons and to illness. After years in the wilderness, Higgins has also been rehabilitated in recent years and our appetite for stories of squandered genius remains as strong as ever.
Our choice of footballing heroes may tell us more about ourselves than we would like to think. Here we bathe in the nostalgic Best glow. In England they celebrate the empty, celebrity life of David Beckham. And in France they revel in the effortless charm of Zinedine Zidane. The implications of those choices are all but irresistible.
None of this is to say that nostalgia does not have its place. The tendency to hark back to supposedly better times is an essential part of every sports anorak's armoury, and our worlds would be bleaker places without it. But the real difficulty arises when that tendency is transformed into an obsession and becomes the only means by which sporting dialogue takes place. The George Best love-in last Friday was just further proof of the sporting and cultural paralysis of this place. The best-known and most revered sportsman or sportswoman here hasn't performed at a professional level for over 20 years and yet he continues to cast a long shadow over everyone and everything else around him.
It is as if sporting evolution here stopped when Best's career ran into the sidings. The momentum for change and development has never been recaptured and nobody has been able to come along and pick up Best's mantle. That in turn explains why we have a sporting infrastructure that could punch its weight among the worst in Europe. It might also explain why we parachute in ice hockey franchises and one-off rugby league World Cup games rather than concentrating on fostering indigenous teams and events that might have an outside chance of connecting with the people who live here.
The most poignant moment during last weekend's proceedings came during one of the evening's more mundane passages. In the early 1980s, so the story went, George was invited to play for a local amateur side in a high-profile Irish Cup game. The amateurs, with Best in tow, duly lost 7-0 but that was irrelevant as the main objective was to generate publicity and revenue. As George laughed along at the memory of this one-off, vacuous guest appearance it was hard not to think that all these years later he is still doing exactly the same thing.
