For the first time in two weeks…
BBC NI don’t have a story about some dead alky as their top story. Hurrah!
Belfast’s supposed reaction to the death of George Best hasn’t been that strange - we saw the same thing on a larger scale when yon alky princess died eight years ago, of course. I smell a rat, though - Belfast’s population has shown a muted stoicism through thirty years of terrorism, so surely it’s unlikely that we’d come over all grief-stricken just ‘cos one of many belfast-born professional footballers has finally succeeded in killing himself.
No, instead, surely it’s a bored media establishment stirring up this purported emotional response? Witness the curious language they use - the phrase “Alcoholic Wife-Beater, George Best” is trotted out in every bloddy article, for instance. Now, I won’t take issue with the first word - but… “wife-beater”? What sort of archaic touchy-feely crap is that? Yes, kids, it’s an olde worlde phrase that’s so loaded with misogyny that no-one would dare use it in a serious sense today - unless they were trying to deliberately colour what they said.
“Wife-Beater” easily becomes “Didn’t know his own strength” becomes “Bit of a cheeky monkey” becomes “Perhaps his only crime was loving women too much” - it’s the sort of soft-soap treatment that’ll be used to advertise partworks in the Daily Mail in twenty years’ time. It shouldn’t have any place on the BBC now.
Okay, using more neutral terms, like “rapist”, or descriptive phrases such as “acutal bodily harm” or “greivous bodily harm” may fail to cover up his crimes sufficiently - but why are the serious news media prepared to indulge in such mendacity in the first place? If it were just a well-meaning effort to not speak ill of the dead for a few days, surely they could just not mention his non-soccer-related activities at all?
And what’s all this stuff about him being “The Greatest Footballer - ever!” (which, after the initial hysteria became “maybe not the /greatest/ - but certainly in the top 3”)? Now, I went to university with some football fans, and I remember their interminable discussions about the greatest ever footballer only too well - and I can tell you that Best was never, ever mentioned. Pele, Ronaldo, Ronaldino, Maradonna, and various other south americans featured prominently - as did gordon banks, bobby charlton, bobby moore, various germans -even Danny Blanchflower was talked about more than once. But never George Best.
Now, I’ve no special knowledge of, or connection with Best. I remember my ganddad shouting “Oh! Geordie Best!” at my baby brother as he kicked a football two decades ago, and, of course, I remember the playground sniggering after his “Wogan” interview a few years later. But I hadn’t a clue about who he was, or what he did for a living between drinks.
There was certainly no sense that he was some sort of local hero - if you’d asked about the greatest local footballer, I’d’ve said “Danny Blanchflower” (the only one I’d heard of as I was growing up), or talk about the time that Pat Jennings was at the Strandtown School Fete. The first time I found out that I’d grown up ten minutes’ walk from the Best family was two weeks ago, when reading an article in the Guardian.
I’ve no objection to his friends, family, and fans going to his funeral. Plenty of those who were dedicated english football fans in the 1960s will tell you that he was an exceptionally talented player. But were 32,000 of them really prepared to travel to Northern Ireland on a rainy saturday, just to watch a funeral? The airlines have said that they didn’t need to lay on any additional flights, so I doubt it.
Who were all those other people at Stormont on saturday, then? People who were too young, or too indifferent when he played for Manchester. People who came to know of him only because of our culture’s lionisation of anyone with a hint of “celebrity” - people who wanted to “pay respects” to him because he was famous (and, therefore, important). But he was much more famous for his alcoholism, his bankruptcy, his imprisonment, his disgusting attitudes toward women, and his increasingly-desperate attempts to gain publicity, than he ever was for his soccer skills. Worst of all, I suspect that a significant proportion of the crowd were there solely to gawk at the famous people.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
