LockerRoom: George Best died as he had lived, with the brightlights and the media mob sucking away his dignity and his privacy.
He was George and we took him and made him Georgie and turned himinto a deity and then into a cautionary parable.
I interviewed him once, in a pub in Ballymun, after an eveningwhich he had spent retailing the tragedies of his life as bawdyyarns for boozers. He sat down afterwards, a man far too intelligentnot to appreciate the pathos of his situation, and he looked at mewith his beautiful ruined eyes as if to apologise for hisimperfections. You could only look back and apologise for all thatwe took from him.
If there was mercy in his parting it was twofold. An end to whathe suffered at the hands of demons and parasites. Plus the chance tosit children down and show them what true genius looked like on afootball field. Those highlights reels of goals will never beproduced again. That streak of dangerous genius would be coached outof any kid in double quick time.
I remember Best telling me that as a kid, he once watched Eusebiowarming up by doing some tricks - the most impressive of which wasto kick a penalty in such a way that the ball took off and when ithit the ground it spun back to Eusebio's feet. George went off andpractised for hours and hours until he could do that. You could seelove in what George Best did on the field. You see pragmatism andcoaching in what almost everyone else has ever done since.
That image of an enthralled kid alone with a ball practising andplaying has always stayed with me. George Best crossed a thresholdnot just by becoming the first superstar of sport but by beginninghis career in an era of innocence and ending it in a time ofcynicism.
He often described the joy of his childhood in the CregaghEstate, running to school dribbling a tennis ball as he went,dashing home at lunch to be first back afterwards for the game inthe yard and long evenings just kicking that same tennis ballagainst a row of garage doors.
Go to the internet and get on your Google and examine how kidslives have changed. All replica jerseys and no sweat. Every surveyshows kids getting fatter and more obese and less likely to takeexercise. They live joyless goldfish bowl existences, cossetted fromall 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 theGovernment's national nutritional plans suggested that 11 per centof boys were overweight and nine per cent of them were obese, while12 per cent of girls were overweight and a further 12 per cent wereobese. More than half take insufficient physical exercise.
Get to the north side of Dublin and it gets worse. Girls takesignificantly less physical exercise and have lower levels ofaerobic 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 disasterwhich is coming down the chute? Here's a thing. The amount of moneygiven to grassroots sports for girls in Ireland is a pittance whenit should be an extreme case of positive discrimination. The dropoff rate of girls from sporting activity in late teens is a disasterwhich only money and imagination will remedy.
Sport needs, as it is in Australia, to be a part not just of thenational curriculum but part of a broad campaign to changelifestyle. Hopefully there will be more on that issue in the weeksto come but just imagine (in this era of burgeoning sports sciencedepartments on campuses) sports as a Leaving Cert subject requiringsome fitness, some participation as well as some theory. Why not?Why is it different from art or music? Why don't we recognise thetremendous pay-off which sports will give us in terms of the mentalwell-being and sheer good health of future generations.
George Best wouldn't be allowed to walk to school today. Hewouldn't play football on his estate until the only light was fromstreetlamps. We've cossetted kids so much that we've taken joy away.The lucky ones get brought to sports clubs, there to experience thethrill of sport a couple of times a week while know-nothings mutterabout burnout and stress. The rest are left to fatten up like geese,their thumbs being the only body part they exercise as theyfrantically manoeuvre the play station joystick.
The Government will, as usual, respond with campaigns. What weneed, though, is an overhaul. A sea change. A structure whichdelivers.
There's a small start we could make. In a few months' time thegusher that is the SSIA schemes will open. Almost literally, thiscountry will be flooded with money. There are 1,170,208 SSIA schemesin operation. The average payout will be [euro]14,000. I got out thecalculator on the mobile phone to work out the total amount of moneywhich will suddenly swish about. The phone hadn't enough space forall the numbers. Let's just say it's an 11-figure sum.
My friend, who understands money, brought me around a couple ofbooks on the subject of SSIA money and what do do with it. And anidea. You can get breaks for investing your dough in just aboutanything from old folks' homes to sports-injury clinics. Honestly,there are great, big, long lists of things that the Government wouldlike you to throw your cash into. They're all up for review comebudget time, which leads us to the idea.
From April onwards when those lucky and prudent 1,170,208citizens of this state start getting lump sums of on average[euro]14,000 each we are in all likelihood going to do with thatmoney what we did with the whole Celtic Tiger bonanza. We're goingto throw it in the direction of the usual bandits. We'll allowourselves be fleeced as we go on the rampage through the vast galaxyof consumer goods we fancy. There'll be cars, kitchens and foreignholliers for everyone in the audience.
The Government will say tsk, tsk, please get the money back to usin orderly fashion. And we will. And when we're done madly splurgingthe lump sum we'll find we each have some money left over in ourmonthly pay cheque. The cash we've been paying into the scheme inthe first place.
So why not invest in sport? Why not an SSIA scheme for sportsclubs? If each of us all nominated somewhere (an audited club) wherewe wanted some of our money to go to, could we not pay this cash inthe form of a once-off payment (out of our lumps) or a standingorder drawn from the income we are free to enjoy again?
Currently you get tax relief on donations to appropriatelyregistered and audited sports clubs but why not up the ante? Expandthe extent of the relief. And once the club keeps passing its auditsfor, let's say, two years, then top up the amount which came in onthe scheme by 25 per cent.
A GAA or soccer club with, say, 100 members, pledging [euro]100of their newly freed-up money (or 200 members paying [euro]50 - Icould go on!) a month for a year or two with a 25 per cent lump ontop of that for the club at the end of it would be in a position tomake 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 Australiaabout developing sport and staying healthy. There is much to belearned, too, from the childhood and adult life of George Best.Local grassroot sports, people taking care of their lives and theirclubs, are where the future is at. It's time for a big idea, a grandgesture.
George lived a life where the innocence of sport ended with thetheft of his dignity. There'll be plenty of flash vulgarity and verylittle dignity about the spending spree we're about to embark on. Alittle investment in innocence, joy and future good health would bean antidote.
