The disease of charm
We needed to be told just how badly Best had treated those who loved him, writes Gwen Halley
SOMETIMES it seems like there are no women working on Joe Duffy’s Liveline. Or at least no women willing to say, “Just a minute, Joe”. Maybe this is why Eamon Dunphy and Rod Liddle were allowed to carry on a laddish love- in last Thursday (disguised as a tribute to the genius of George Best) without even one woman’s voice to tell us how badly he had treated those who loved him, particularly his second wife, Alex Pursey.
If Duffy had invited any other duo (a favourite word of football pundits) than Dunphy and Liddle we might have been reminded that Best spent a lot of his life in bed — not only having sex with women, but being nursed by women.
But of course no such empathy could be expected from either Dunphy orself-confessed love rat Rod Liddle — who famously left his wife for the S p e ctator’s receptionist — during his honeymoon.
As a woman, I’m well aware that my views on Best carry no weight in the weird world of Duffy, Dunphy and Liddle.
In fact, to express my opinion on football causes a fever among the menopausalmales who seem much less interested in women’s legs than in Roy Keane’s legs. A few months ago, when I said Keane was selfish, I got a sackful of creepy letters saying, “Stick to the girly stuff Gwen”.
The trouble is the girly stuff is also the grown-up stuff. It’s the girly stuff that alerts me to the fact that although Best was a great footballer he never grew up, never adapted to adult sexuality, never took real responsibility, as a lover, husband or father. As a footballer, Best was a genius. As a man, Best was a total mess. Like Georgie Porgie, he kissed the girls and made them cry.
As a woman, I want to put in a word for Alex Pursey. She married Best in 1995 when she was a young, beautiful woman in her early20s. From the outside, she seemed to be living the glamorous life of a footballer’s wife. The reality was that Best was broke and was as sick as a dog. She stuck with him, without a washing machine, manually draining the bile from his liver daily. He said thanks by dissing her book on the Late Late Show.
Forgive me for being a bit of a girl about all this. Am I alone in thinking that Alex Pursey deserved a moment or two on Duffy’s Liveline? Actually, I’m not. Last Friday, while I was having coffee in Bianconi’s on Merrion Rd, the sharp Cork waitress remarked that if Best had not been a celebrity he wouldn’t have been seen as a nice person.
Best had a disease deadlier than drink — he had charm. Like most of the commentators who gathered like ghouls around his deathbed, Dunphy and Liddle hitched a free ride on that. A fecklesscharmer’s legacy to charmless feckers.