Originally Posted by Tom Humphries
LockerRoom: George Best died as he had lived, with the bright lights and the media mob sucking away his dignity and his privacy.
He was George and we took him and made him Georgie and turned him into a deity and then into a cautionary parable.
I interviewed him once, in a pub in Ballymun, after an evening which he had spent retailing the tragedies of his life as bawdy yarns for boozers. He sat down afterwards, a man far too intelligent not to appreciate the pathos of his situation, and he looked at me with his beautiful ruined eyes as if to apologise for his imperfections. You could only look back and apologise for all that we took from him.
If there was mercy in his parting it was twofold. An end to what he suffered at the hands of demons and parasites. Plus the chance to sit children down and show them what true genius looked like on a football field. Those highlights reels of goals will never be produced again. That streak of dangerous genius would be coached out of any kid in double quick time.
I remember Best telling me that as a kid, he once watched Eusebio warming up by doing some tricks - the most impressive of which was to kick a penalty in such a way that the ball took off and when it hit the ground it spun back to Eusebio's feet. George went off and practised for hours and hours until he could do that. You could see love in what George Best did on the field. You see pragmatism and coaching in what almost everyone else has ever done since.
That image of an enthralled kid alone with a ball practising and playing has always stayed with me. George Best crossed a threshold not just by becoming the first superstar of sport but by beginning his career in an era of innocence and ending it in a time of cynicism.
He often described the joy of his childhood in the Cregagh Estate, running to school dribbling a tennis ball as he went, dashing home at lunch to be first back afterwards for the game in the yard and long evenings just kicking that same tennis ball against a row of garage doors.
Go to the internet and get on your Google and examine how kids lives have changed. All replica jerseys and no sweat. Every survey shows kids getting fatter and more obese and less likely to take exercise. They live joyless goldfish bowl existences, cossetted from all dangers except those we foist on them for later, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, the whole range.
Go look at the figures. A recent study highlighted as part of the Government's national nutritional plans suggested that 11 per cent of boys were overweight and nine per cent of them were obese, while 12 per cent of girls were overweight and a further 12 per cent were obese. More than half take insufficient physical exercise.
Get to the north side of Dublin and it gets worse. Girls take significantly less physical exercise and have lower levels of aerobic fitness than boys. That's what a survey of 15- to 17-year-olds for the Irish Heart Foundation established.
And we have a nutritional plan to fend off the health disaster which is coming down the chute? Here's a thing. The amount of money given to grassroots sports for girls in Ireland is a pittance when it should be an extreme case of positive discrimination. The drop off rate of girls from sporting activity in late teens is a disaster which only money and imagination will remedy.
Sport needs, as it is in Australia, to be a part not just of the national curriculum but part of a broad campaign to change lifestyle. Hopefully there will be more on that issue in the weeks to come but just imagine (in this era of burgeoning sports science departments on campuses) sports as a Leaving Cert subject requiring some fitness, some participation as well as some theory. Why not? Why is it different from art or music? Why don't we recognise the tremendous pay-off which sports will give us in terms of the mental well-being and sheer good health of future generations.
George Best wouldn't be allowed to walk to school today. He wouldn't play football on his estate until the only light was from streetlamps. We've cossetted kids so much that we've taken joy away. The lucky ones get brought to sports clubs, there to experience the thrill of sport a couple of times a week while know-nothings mutter about burnout and stress. The rest are left to fatten up like geese, their thumbs being the only body part they exercise as they frantically manoeuvre the play station joystick.
The Government will, as usual, respond with campaigns. What we need, though, is an overhaul. A sea change. A structure which delivers.
There's a small start we could make. In a few months' time the gusher that is the SSIA schemes will open. Almost literally, this country will be flooded with money. There are 1,170,208 SSIA schemes in operation. The average payout will be 14,000. I got out the calculator on the mobile phone to work out the total amount of money which will suddenly swish about. The phone hadn't enough space for all the numbers. Let's just say it's an 11-figure sum.
My friend, who understands money, brought me around a couple of books on the subject of SSIA money and what do do with it. And an idea. You can get breaks for investing your dough in just about anything from old folks' homes to sports-injury clinics. Honestly, there are great, big, long lists of things that the Government would like you to throw your cash into. They're all up for review come budget time, which leads us to the idea.
From April onwards when those lucky and prudent 1,170,208 citizens of this state start getting lump sums of on average 14,000 each we are in all likelihood going to do with that money what we did with the whole Celtic Tiger bonanza. We're going to throw it in the direction of the usual bandits. We'll allow ourselves be fleeced as we go on the rampage through the vast galaxy of consumer goods we fancy. There'll be cars, kitchens and foreign holliers for everyone in the audience.
The Government will say tsk, tsk, please get the money back to us in orderly fashion. And we will. And when we're done madly splurging the lump sum we'll find we each have some money left over in our monthly pay cheque. The cash we've been paying into the scheme in the first place.
So why not invest in sport? Why not an SSIA scheme for sports clubs? If each of us all nominated somewhere (an audited club) where we wanted some of our money to go to, could we not pay this cash in the form of a once-off payment (out of our lumps) or a standing order drawn from the income we are free to enjoy again?
Currently you get tax relief on donations to appropriately registered and audited sports clubs but why not up the ante? Expand the extent of the relief. And once the club keeps passing its audits for, let's say, two years, then top up the amount which came in on the scheme by 25 per cent.
A GAA or soccer club with, say, 100 members, pledging 100 of their newly freed-up money (or 200 members paying 50 - I could go on!) a month for a year or two with a 25 per cent lump on top of that for the club at the end of it would be in a position to make a huge difference to ordinary lives. Hurling walls, all-weather pitches, expanded mini leagues. Things clubs dream of.
There is much we can and will learn from a country like Australia about developing sport and staying healthy. There is much to be learned, too, from the childhood and adult life of George Best. Local grassroot sports, people taking care of their lives and their clubs, are where the future is at. It's time for a big idea, a grand gesture.
George lived a life where the innocence of sport ended with the theft of his dignity. There'll be plenty of flash vulgarity and very little dignity about the spending spree we're about to embark on. A little investment in innocence, joy and future good health would be an antidote.
