Best before
Forty years ago, a fading footie god appeared in SA. There was a helluva hullabaloo, writes Luke Alfred
IN the winter of 1974, shortly before the World Cup in West Germany, Abe and Solly Krok managed to tempt George Best to Johannesburg to play for their club, Jewish Guild.
The Kroks’ coup was one of boundless chutzpah. Today it would be like inducing Fernando Torres for a spell at Polokwane United, or getting Frank Lampard to play for Free State Stars.
Doubtless lured south by tales of endless sunshine and la vida loca, Best seemed to interpret the Kroks’ salesmanship a touch literally.
Shortly after arriving, he ventured into the sun for longer than he should have and promptly came down with sunstroke. He missed his first training session and the Guild coaches were not pleased.
When he ventured from his swanky rented pad with the ritzy king-size bed and cane furniture, he was watched at practice by notorious local stripper Yvonne Wintle, who operated under the stage name Ultra Violet.
Ultra was about to appear in court on public indecency charges and her lawyer was on Guild’s board of directors. Despite her impending appearance before the magistrate, she could not resist seeing Best in the flesh. He paraded and she watched.
Some of the more cunning members of the press couldn’t resist putting them together in print. “A beetroot-burnt George Best had Ultra Violet focused on him when he resumed training at Balfour Park yesterday afternoon,” wrote a perky Sy Lerman in the Rand Daily Mail. “No publicity hound could have dreamed of this gimmick. It had to be coincidence. Yet here was Best, on the day after he was prevented from taking part in his first official practice because of sunburn, face to face with the slinky stripper who has burnt a few fellows in her time.”
Best was only 27 when he arrived in SA, but his mind-bending brilliance for Manchester United and Northern Ireland was already a thing of the past. His career wasn’t quite on the skids but it was certainly in quiet (if not sober) decline.
He didn’t even play in Guild’s first game, possibly as punishment for his failure to honour his first practice. He sat on the bench through what we can safely assume was the tedium of a 3-0 drubbing at the hands of Rangers at the Rand Stadium. Scribes put this down to a collective case of “Bestitis”, a condition that intimidated players so severely that they could hardly string a pass together, let alone put the ball in the back of the net.
It was beginning to look slightly ropey for the Kroks. Across at neighbours Highlands Park, smart and sophisticated boss Rex Evans had just flown to London and signed Spurs’s Alan Gilzean on a two-year deal. Evans clearly wanted titles rather than fawning fans and photo opportunities. He wasn’t bothered by local journalists referring to “the nearlybald Gilzean”.
On the up side, Best certainly didn’t lack for hair. It showered onto his shoulders, black jets of it; his eyes were of a piercing, inviting blue. He was nimble and wellmade, an artist, the best in the business. As he once said to Scottish sportswriter Hugh McIllvanney: “If I had been born ugly you would never have heard of Pele.” Things, surely, would turn.
And turn they did. To the Kroks’ relief, Best and Guild began to find each other. Best’s complexion returned to normal and Guild managed to put their nervy performance against Rangers behind them. On the following Friday, they chiselled out a 1-1 draw at home against Hellenic, not the best of results but a start. Guild would normally have played at Balfour Park, a ground they shared with Highlands Park, but it only held 8 000 spectators and half of Johannesburg wanted to see the Irishman. Thirty thousand trooped to Turffontein in search of stardust.
Guild and Best went one better on the Sunday, beating Durban City 2-0. Bennie Booysen, Guild’s striker, banged in two goals after halftime, with Best on hand to make them.
“But it was a different story after the change-over when, like some leprechaun from his native land, Best cast a spell over City’s vulnerable defence. And his magic, even if it only came in short spells, was enough to bring a second goal,” wrote an anonymous Durban-based stringer in the following day’s Rand Daily Mail.
So pleased were the Kroks that they extended Best’s trip from three matches to four. Wintle was in court at much the same time, dealing with her indecency charges in the only way she knew how — by offering to show the magistrate the correct position of her g-string. He respectfully declined, while she denied all the charges but was found guilty nonetheless. She ran from the courtroom and burst into tears.
Best flew home to further fritter away a career that for a precious five- or six-year window was the most talked-about in Britain. The summing-up was left to Terry Lofthouse and Dave Beattie in their Soccer Scene column in The Star. They spoke for many when they wrote: “Certainly there were some among the 30 000 at Rand Stadium, the 22 000 at Green Point Stadium, the 10 000 at New Kingsmead (on a wet day) and 8 000 at Balfour Park, who only went to see the man who had gained such a world-wide reputation for his athletic prowess in other directions.”
Despite the smoky charm, Best was at heart a shy man from a working-class home. His dad, Dickie, was employed as an iron turner by the Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff, builders of the Titanic. Once, on his way to practice, Best accepted a lift from Sir Matt Busby, the Manchester United gaffer. On arriving at United’s training ground, he was given such a ragging that he never accepted such an offer again.
As a result of his early retirement and the fact that as a Northern Irelander he never played in a World Cup, Best remained an essentially British phenomenon. As now, in his day British players tended not to sign to European clubs. As Liverpool’s Ian Rush said of his brief move to Italy: “It’s like playing in another country.”
So once his beloved United started to disintegrate, Best was in quicksand. His spell with Guild was, for many South Africans including Ultra Violet, a thrilling opportunity to see a star.
But by then Best was sinking. Sinking beautifully, strikingly, but sinking all the same.