The Magnificent Sevens. Frank Worrall
on the Cregagh. His father Dickie was a proud man who worked in the Harland and Wolff shipyard; his mother Ann worked in a tobacco factory. Dickie enjoyed football – he played as a full-back at amateur level – while Ann was a fine hockey player.
George would take the usual route to the football field, kicking tennis balls about in the street from the moment he could walk but, surprisingly, he preferred to watch his mother playing hockey than his father on the football pitch. The young George was not affected by the sectarian troubles that would blight the province; they did not take a hold until some time after he had left for England. That is not to say George was unaware of the hornet’s nest of emotions religion could stir up in Belfast. Much to the delight of his parents, he made it to the local grammar school, Grosvenor High, but soon became disillusioned with life there.
Part of the problem was that he missed his former primary school friends and the school played rugby, not football – but he also had to face up to religious bigotry. Each day, he had to walk to the school through a Catholic area wearing his Protestant school uniform. ‘They would throw stones at me and call me a Proddy bastard,’ he said. ‘I played truant more and more often and, eventually, mum and dad let me go to the local secondary modern school.’
That meant football when lessons finished and watching Glentoran with his grandfather whenever possible. His English club was Wolverhampton Wanderers and his goalscoring exploits at youth level mirrored those of his Molineux hero, Stan Cullis. At 14, George once scored 12 goals for Cregagh Boys when they won 21-0. Inevitably, the Northern Ireland-based scouts for the big English clubs sat up and took notice and it wasn’t long before he was on the boat to Liverpool, then on to Manchester and Old Trafford.
When he finally joined United aged 15 as an amateur on 16 August 1961, George still was only 5ft 1in and weighed just 8st 7lb; Busby ordered his staff to fatten him up – quickly. Landlady Mary Fullaway, who would look after him on and off for his first five years in Manchester, summed it up, saying, ‘I wanted to sit him down and fill him full of meat and potatoes.’
George himself had worries of a different nature regarding his size and, yet again, even at this early age, they highlighted his complex character make-up. He said, ‘I knew I was good enough and that I could be a great player. But I did feel conspicuous about being so thin and small because I thought the girls wouldn’t like me! I know it is hard to believe but, at first, I was shy and scared to chat them up because of it.’ It was a ‘failing’ that would not last long as he filled out thanks to landlady Mrs Fullaway’s hearty suppers.
George signed pro forms with United on his 17th birthday in 1963, three days before that year’s FA Cup Final, in which United would beat Leicester City 3-1. His first wage was £17 a week – the shy, insecure lad from Belfast was finally on his way to a life he could never have imagined as the first pop star of football. With his delicious skills – he would jink one way, then another, that wonderful low centre of gravity taking him past man after man in the junior and reserve teams – it was only a matter of time before Busby gave him his big break.
Bobby Charlton became aware of just how good the Belfast boy with the dribbling skills would become when he asked the United coach Wilf McGuinness what he thought of the ’63 crop of youth team kids. McGuinness said, ‘Well, bloody hell, if you think you’re a good player you should see this lad who has come in from Belfast.’ He then proceeded to tell a stunned Charlton that the boy called George Best would be even better than him.
Four months after the Cup Final at Wembley – which Georgie had watched as an awestruck youngster – the boy Best was making his first team début. The date was 14 September 1963, the opponents were West Bromwich Albion and the match was at Old Trafford, Manchester. Busby had played it cool on the day of the match – in the hope of not making the youngster too nervous – giving no indication that he planned to play George. But a couple of hours before kick-off at the pre-match lunch, he finally whispered the immortal words into George’s ear, ‘You’re in today, son.’
The local paper, the Manchester Evening News, best summed the day up, commenting on his ‘natural talent’ and saying he ‘played the game pluckily and finished it in style’. It was certainly a day Albion’s experienced full-back Graham Williams would never forget. George nutmegged him and tormented him as United won 1-0 to stay ahead of Albion at the top of the table. Williams would say, ‘I wanted to kick him but I couldn’t get close enough to him.’ Years later, so the famed story goes, Williams met Best at a charity event and pleaded with him, ‘Will you stand still for a minute so I can look at your face?’
‘Why?’ asked George.
‘Because all I’ve ever seen of you,’ explained Williams, ‘is your arse disappearing down the touchline.’
Busby then employed something of the Alex Ferguson logic by dropping his protégé for a few matches – or, more accurately, protecting him against himself and an ever curious press. George was put in cotton wool until three days after Boxing Day, when he scored United’s first goal as they steamrollered Burnley 5-1 at Old Trafford. In 1990, when talking to respected journalist Ross Benson, George gave us an inkling of the ‘fix’ he would get from walking out for United. His words offer a useful insight as we try to understand what made this complex, emotional man tick. Much in the same way as Jimmy Greaves would a few years earlier admit that he turned to drink after losing the high of playing football in front of thousands, so George spoke of how he felt delirious that winter’s day in Manchester. ‘I felt marvelous … I remember walking out of the tunnel and hearing the roar of 54,000 people … It is like turning on a radio and turning the volume up … I can still recall the way the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was numbed. At the same time, I felt exhilarated.’
Yet, without that adrenalin rush when he left the game, George would be lost. He would lose the fix, and search for it in the bottle, in the bedroom, shops … in fact, anywhere he thought he might experience that same temporary, exhilarating high. It would be a journey with only one outcome – the inevitable, tragic finale in London’s Cromwell Hospital in 2005. Greavsie himself would later confirm the ‘black hole’ existence footballers felt after retiring, saying, ‘I look back at George … I look back at myself … same problem as George, same as Gazza … we all had the same problem … but I think it might have been lack of pressure, for want of a better word, why we succumbed. I think we missed it. I missed it. It wasn’t the pressure of playing that made me start drinking heavily, it was probably the emptiness of not playing.’
One other comment from his chats with Benson is worth noting – how George saw himself as much more than just a winger. He knew the importance of working for the team, tackling back and getting stuck in. He said, ‘I learned from experience … I learned to release the ball to a player in a better position and then run through, making space for the return.’
Over the years, many people have dismissed George as a genius, but a greedy one and, even worse, a lazy one. Immediately prior to starting this book, I looked over a video collection of some of George’s performances, and noted rather quickly that that simply was not true. OK, he might not have passed to Law or Charlton if the chance was on for himself, but he did his fair amount of graft for the team.
Graft … who would have thought we would be using that word to describe Georgie-boy? But he was renowned at United for his work-rate – as a youngster at United he would spend hours working on improving his left foot and, by the late Sixties, that peg was almost as effective as the right one. He was also not afraid to tackle back and give as good as he got from the so-called ‘hard men’ of the day – indeed, within the club, he was known as one of the best tacklers.
As George would say later, ‘Sir Matt always said that I was probably the best tackler at the club, and that was a hell of a compliment. I enjoyed the physical side of it. I had people trying to kick me and, if they took the ball away from me, it was an insult. I wanted it back.’ And George made it quite clear what he thought of the thuggish defenders who would try to kick him up in the air. ‘I had nothing but contempt for the so-called hard men. For “hard men” read “men who couldn’t play”.’
Busby had this to say about Best’s