Sideline Cut: Snow swept from Manchester across to Belfast as people held vigil for George Best on Thursday night.
It has been a peculiar and affecting couple of days, with former team-mates, friends and fans of Best remembering him as though he had already departed the world.
After the resigned pronouncement from his doctor outside London's Cromwell Hospital at lunchtime on Thursday that Best had fallen into a state of irreversible illness and weakness, it was inevitable people should slip into the past tense. So much of Best's adult life was about looking back through the haze at the shimmering decade when he held English football and popular culture in the palm of his hand.
The terrible poignancy of Best's closing hours was lost on nobody. Weak and supine, the beautiful face sunken and ghastly, the body that was once so full of graceful, ephemeral movement broken and still. Best was helpless. That his 87-year-old father, "wee Dickie", was at his bedside and that Bobby Charlton, who survived the Munich air disaster when Best was a wisp of a kid in east Belfast, also visited was a reminder how quickly it had all passed for Georgie.
The transformation from the most adored and beguiling player in the history of the English game to a closed-down shell of a man at 59 was swift and devastating, a bad joke really. Still, it was a joke Best was happy to tell, over and over again, and that many of us, shamefully as it seems now, were happy to laugh along with. Perhaps nobody believed it would come to this: Best may have been ravaged by the disease of alcoholism but as long as he had the twinkling eyes and the laughing voice, it was easy to delude ourselves that things were fine, that he was still the Belfast Boy.
It is clear from listening to the many people who called Joe Duffy's radio show in tears to recall how much seeing Best play in the flesh meant to them, that in his God-given prime he was a magnetic and bewitching human being. Those who knew him testify to the essential kindness of his nature. This quality combined with the smouldering good looks and the most audacious presence on a soccer field that England had ever seen made Best helpless against his own power and attractiveness. It is understandable the generation that was young with Best, that saw in him the more unattainable glories of their youth, should be so saddened this weekend.
But there are also generations of people who only ever knew Best as the former genius. The times when primitive images of his halcyon days appeared on television, you were glued to them, eager to be touched by the magic.
In the main though, Best was the bearded, affectionate and sometimes tedious middle-aged man who seemed happy to oblige a generation of TV and radio broadcasters intent on asking him the same questions. On form, he was a brilliant conversationalist, bright and sharp and self-effacing, but too often on public appearances, he was asked to spin out the great lines for old times' sake, about the glamour girls and misspent cash, and he obligingly went through the masquerade. Sometimes you would watch Best cheerfully recount how much he had lost until it came to the Miss World line, at which point you would flick over to Magnum PI.
Best has repeatedly been referred to as soccer's first superstar. And although his fame and brilliance at Manchester United made him a comparatively wealthy man, he still belonged to a football culture in which the heroes of the terraces had only recently been liberated from indentured servitude. Best's glamour was low-watt and saddening in retrospect, most aptly summed up in the tale of how he would park his Jaguar outside his digs at Mrs Fullaway's house. Soccer paid Best well but nothing like enough to keep him financially solvent after he became disenchanted with the game and ever more in thrall to alcohol.
In 1991, the Manchester critic Paul Morley wrote an essay on Best entitled The Afterlife. Morley spent considerable time with the Irishman as he went about his daily life. One day they were dining in the exclusive San Lorenzo restaurant in London, the next they were in Marylebone Magistrates Court, where Best appeared after a daft pub row led to an unemployed builder taking a private summons. In a surreal episode, the defendant represented himself in court and questioned Best, waving his lamentable autobiography, The Good, The Bad and The Bubbly in front of him, to the football man's understandable bewilderment. The charge was that Best, after organising a sweepstake in a pub, had refused to pay the man his £200 and engaged in a round of pushing and shoving. It was undoubtedly the most depressing moment in a haunting portrayal of a sports god with nothing left to play for.
The weirdness of being George Best - dozens of people shaking his hand to say he was the best they ever saw every single day - was hard to imagine. There was much loneliness behind the laughter and much uncertainty behind the bravado.
Best was as excessive and decadent about his drinking as he was about football. He accepted alcoholism as a disease and fuelled it. "It's wrecked my life and I've managed to come through it, to a point. I drink, and I have to deal with the consequences. If I thought about it any more than that, I'd have to drink ever more to handle it," he said to Morley - as they hammered champagne.
Although he was perhaps too indulgent and too indulged to prevent himself from a chaotic late life, it should be recognised Best was let down by his adoring public as much as by himself. He was let down by English soccer. He was let down by all of us who watched him slobber his way through that Wogan show - a nasty, cold exercise in exploitation. Boozing and the stories were all Best had after the game deserted him. And he was preposterously clever and desperate enough to make a living off the very element that was killing him - alcohol - and nobody shouted stop. At least not with any great conviction.
The trade-off for top-class sports people is that after they fade, they have to learn to become mortal again. The moderately talented and sensible often manage that. Neil Webb, who just missed out on the Premiership days, had the humility and discipline to become a postman when the cheering stopped. But there was nothing moderate about Best. Bright, beautiful and brilliant, he was helpless against life's extravagances being, as he was, its most compelling and exalted embodiment when he wore the red shirt of Manchester.
The difference between today's soccer heroes and Best is not just that he remains peerless as a footballer. Best was - and will remain - loved. Best was loved in a way today's players will never be. Best had the gift of bringing out people's better nature. It is no mean feat to lie on your deathbed with the love and thoughts of thousands of people - as the Beatles sang way back then - across the universe. What a pity, though, that it could make no difference.
