George
Best: A Life in the News, by Richard Williams (Editor) (2006)
NOVEMBER 2006 marked the first anniversary of the death of George Best, the most magical footballer of his generation, and the most notorious and sad example of a great talent gone to waste.
This collaboration with the Guardian represents a unique chronicle of Best's life. His whole career is told through the newspaper reports and features that appeared in the Guardian and the Manchester Evening News, from his first appearances for Manchester Utd as a teenage starlet and the European Cup win in 1968, to the long obituary assessing his sad later decline.
These compassionate, insightful pieces are written by numerous famous - and unexpected - names, from Hugh McIlvanney to John Arlott. They reflect Best's sad destiny to become more famous for his indiscretions (his drinking, his affairs, his absences-without-leave) than his football.
They also trace his transformation from the willowy Belfast boy who become a Manchester man through and through to the rotund and peripatetic football gipsy who drifted from Fulham to the US to Hibernian and even Dunstable Town, and eventually into the sad alcoholic bar habitue in Chelsea. It is a chronicle of a life lived, and as a result eventually blighted, in the public eye.
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