Thursday, November 24, 2005 - Sad

When I was a little boy  I was sent to the local primary school in Birmingham, England at aged 5, this would have been in the late 60's. By the time I got to be about 7 years old we started to play football on the playground and by 9 -10 years old I was placed in the school football team, which would have been in the early 1970's.

 To go back just a little my parents are from Belfast, Northern Ireland my father coming to England to look for work in construction, he was never interested in football and was more of a pub/boxing/construction guy, so I never had the input from Dad of being encouraged to support local teams from Birmingham.

 At school we had a  teacher who was originally from Manchester, he was one of the 'cool' teachers, Mr. Hibbert played the latest folk songs on guitar, and also coached gymnastics and the boys football team which I enthusiastically took part in.

I can't quite remember if it was Mr. Hibbert or my Mom that first stimulated my interest in the Manchester United football team, maybe a combination of both? I do remember Mr. Hibbert recounting the Munich air disaster that had taken most of Man Utd's promising players when Mr. Hibbert was probably a young boy in Manchester;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/6/newsid_2535000/2535961.stm

There was also a certain young player on the then present Manchester United team that really caught my( and my Mom's) attention. George Best was from the same Cregagh Estate in Belfast where my Mom was from, my Mom had vivid memories of George as  he  went to the same school, and was in the same class as her younger sister. She told me he was always kicking a ball around, even  back then. Given my Mom and teachers influences, Best's amazing skills, pop star status, constant prescence in the papers and  news and playing in eye-catching ( to an 8 year old) bright red, I was completely captivated.

I wanted to be George Best, in fact I was George Best when we played football on the playground or organized games against local schools. One year I got the Man Utd shirt for Christmas and my Mom sowed a crooked hand made white numbers on the back of my new red shirt, it was crooked and home-made, but it didn't matter I was George Best!!

 Consequently I remember reading the papers when I was about 10, his drunken exploits, rows, not showing up for training, the rows with manager Tommy Docherty  and the rest is history....

This morning my sister called me, since I have been in the States my family have moved back to the same area of Belfast where George grew up, she informed me he was seriously ill and was not expected to make it through the next few hours, he was donating any organs that were of use to offer someone else the chance of life that he had when he received a liver transplant. At the same time she added that the sky had ominously gone completely black over the Cregagh Estate area of East Belfast and it had started to snow.

 George Best will be remembered for a lot of things, many of them negative, however he was a working class kid who left his family at aged 15 to go to England to play professional football for one of the world's biggest teams, how would we have coped with this type of stardom, years before the internet, when going to England from Northern Ireland was a huge step before todays smaller internet influenced world. Sometimes those who start out with the greatest gifts in life are left with the fewest.........

For me I like to keep a place in my heart for him as one of the greatest players ever to touch a football, that inspired a kid to play football many years ago, a fallen idol maybe but still my boyhood hero.