BEST OF MATES
One shone for City. The other was United’s superstar. Here, Mike Summerbee recalls how he and George Best loved the good life...
FIFTY years ago this autumn, a bored and lonely young footballer walked out of his hotel in central Manchester looking for company. Ten minutes later he walked into a coffee shop and found it.
‘It was a day off and I thought I would have a walk out,’ recalled Mike Summerbee this week.
‘I went into Kardomah, a coffee shop, on St Ann’s Square. There was a girl at one table, a blonde, and a guy on his own at another. The guy was George Best.
‘I had seen him on the TV and in the papers, a Manchester United superstar. But he didn’t know me from Adam. I was a nobody. But it turns out he had just come back from Ireland and was homesick too, alone and missing his family. I was 22 and he was 19. I caught his eye and went over and that was it. That was how it started.’
Ten years ago this autumn, George Best died. He was 59. The world of football lost one of its most captivating stars and Summerbee, the former Manchester City forward, lost his best friend.
‘It seems like yesterday in some ways,’ said Summerbee.
‘I still think of him always and often. How could I not? I pass the places we went and bump into the people we knew.
‘ He l eft such an i mprint on life in Manchester. My wife Tina always said that you could never imagine George being an old man and it turns out she was right.
‘I would love to have seen him play football today. Stone me, on these perfect pitches. Can you imagine? When you think of the conditions George played under; kicking, tackling from behind, heavy pitches, a case ball. George went through all that and gave it all back.
‘In a derby game once we man-marked him and George scored after 60 seconds. I turned to (City manager) Malcolm Allison and said, “Do we have a plan B then?”’ AS t he r ed and blue of Manchester prepare to come together at Old Trafford for the 170th derby tomorrow, an examination of Best and Summerbee’s friendship is like looking through a window into a different world.
The back of Summerbee’s autobiography carries a photograph of the two footballers on holiday together in Majorca in the summer of 1967. Ladies are also present.
‘Neither of us could swim,’ smiled Summerbee.
‘ We j ust used to walk deep enough i nto the water so it looked as though we could.’
Tales of the duo’s nocturnal j ourneys around Manchester are well known.
It i s, however, the small details of the f ri endship that tell of startling normality f oreign to today’s g a me. These details colour the story. Less than a year after they met, for example, Best drove them to Wembley — picking up a speeding ticket on the way — and stood in the crowd at the 1966 World Cup final. Once, when he was suspended, Summerbee took Best’s father Dickie to Anfield to watch United play Liverpool from the Kop.
Every other Friday, meanwhile, t hey would stand on t he terraces together and watch Stockport County play.
‘We would stand behind the goal and l eave 10 minutes before the end,’ Summerbee said. ‘We would sign a couple of autographs but that would be it. No bother.’
Saturdays would be different, of course. A friendship that grew quickly and cared little for the fact they played on opposing sides of Manchester’s football divide had at i ts geographical heart the restaurants, bars and clubs of the city. Even then, though, a night out often wouldn’t commence until Best and Summerbee had popped into Arturo’s, a restaurant where they knew their respective managers — Joe Mercer and Sir Matt Busby — would be dining together with their wives.
‘The two managers lived on the same street and they were close,’ recalled Summerbee. ‘So we would go to where they ate and let them see us there, having a meal and drinking Coke. The perfect professionals!
‘The wives would ask if we were being looked after at our digs and then I would say, “Night boss, night boss” — because I called Sir Matt “boss” too — and as soon as we were out the door we were like “Yes!” and off we’d go into the night.’
Best and Summerbee (left) played against each other on many occasions during a time when United and City briefly stood toe-to-toe at the peak of the English game. Only once did they turn out for the same team.
‘It was a charity match at Oldham,’ said Summerbee. ‘We had been to a wedding reception in town in the morning and had a few drinks.
‘The gate was supposed to be 2,000 and then word spread that George was playing. There were 15,000 there.
‘Anyway, he passed to me once all afternoon. But ours wasn’t a football friendship. It was hardly discussed.
‘Red and blue certainly never came into it, but then football wasn’t l i ke that then. The relationship wasn’t tribal.
‘ The Munich disaster and what happened there had played its part in that. Some people went to both City and United games.
‘For George and I, it only ever came into consideration when, before a derby game, I would just go over and tell him not to take the p*** out of me. I knew that if I went anywhere near him the ball would be straight through my legs.’
Younger supporters of Manchester football will never forget the final day of the 2011-12 season and the thrilling denouement provided by Sergio Aguero’s right foot.
This had, however, happened before, City’s win at Newcastle on the last day of the 1967-68 season clinching the title from United. Summerbee remembers the day fondly.
‘I think this story epitomises George,’ he said. ‘I told him
We were in a bus. If you needed a wee you did it out the door and told the driver to put the wipers on
on the Thursday that whatever happened I would see him at the Cabaret Club at 1am that night.
‘We didn’t fly back from Newcastle as they do now. We were in an old bus. If you needed a wee you did it out of the door and told the driver to put the wipers on.
‘It took ages and you can imagine how George must have felt waiting, having just lost the Championship. Had it been me I would have gone home. But to be there waiting for me was something else.
‘We didn’t talk about it. I said, “bad luck” and he said, “well done” and that was it. After that we were just two young lads out in town.
‘As always we went to the clubs, sat at the bar like wallflowers. George never danced. As for me, there was more life in a glass of Andrews. Deep down George was a very shy man, you have to under- stand that. On the pitch he wasn’t. That was his stage but at night, there it was, that shyness.’
The narrative of this friendship, this story, is one notably free of Best’s troubles with alcohol that were eventually to ruin him. At times it reeks only of innocence.
To this day United European Cup winner Pat Crerand tells how Best and Summerbee offered to babysit his young daughter only to sneak two girls in the back door.
Back then, Best drank vodka and lemonade rather than the white wine that was to become both friend and enemy in later life.
That’s not to say the nights out weren’t long. Both lived in digs when they met but in the late 1960s they bought a flat and then a clothes store together.
The motivation for the first purchase does not require spelling out here. When the clubs chucked out, meanwhile, they would head for Phyllis’s, a not- strictly-legal drinking den in a big Victorian house in Whalley Range, and then, after a few hours of sleep, Sunday afternoons would be spent at a friend’s house in the suburb of Northenden.
‘It would be tea and cakes and there would be a few girls,’ smiled Summerbee.
‘Maybe a few Miss UKs. They were not there to see me.’
If this social Wurlitzer seems as far removed from lives lived today by stars of the Barclays Premier League, that’s because it is. As time passed, for example, social base camp became the Brown Bull, a scruffy pub in Salford.
Best and Summerbee gathered there regularly with other players, both red and blue. United stars Crerand and Alex Stepney were very much part of that scene. Not for nothing did Busby come to call it the hostelry from hell. SUMMERBEE held his stag do in the Brown Bull, with seven United players present, in the September of 1968. George Best was his best man and behaved i mpeccably once the groom had dismissed the suggestion that he jump over the nearest wall and make a run for freedom.
‘He was brilliant that day, so humble and respectful, but I was the only groom whose bride spent most of the day staring at the best man,’ is how Summerbee recalls it now.
To those looking for reasons, or timings, for Best’s ultimate decline into alcohol abuse, however, the loss of his running mate to the conventions of marriage and family life is often cited.
Best himself always blamed United’s fall from grace for his own. Others believe it was a lack of fulfilment on the international stage with Northern Ireland. It should also be noted here, sadly, that Best’s own mother died an alcoholic at the age of 54.
Undoubtedly, though, Best’s life changed once Summerbee and Dave Sadler, another close friend and team-mate, settled down.
‘The time I was with him, he never drank more than me,’ stressed Summerbee.
‘That would have come l ater when he became a world figure, almost a rock star.
‘I was fortunate. I met Tina and that gave me the stability I wanted. Had George done the same thing, it would have been a different story for him. I know that. Deep down he wanted that, too.
‘It was almost impossible for him, though. He was so attractive to people that he would walk into a place and Miss Worlds would faint.
‘ That environment was not conducive to getting a normal life. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to be a person like George Best and a player like George Best and to l ook l i ke George Best. Nobody can, so people shouldn’t try.
‘But people like David Beckham should look to George and his memory and say thank you very much. He was the one who made footballers a commercial product and first took the negative stuff that came with it.’
Best’s career at United was beset by difficulties in the early 1970s and finally ended in January 1974. By this time and during subsequent spells in America, his friendship with Summerbee had taken on a different shape.
‘When you are that close you don’t have to see each other all the time,’ Summerbee said.
Now 72, he finds it hard to talk about his friend’s problems.
On occasions he intervened, once tracking down a missing Best to the bar of London club Tramp — he was alone — and on another occasion shepherding him to a car on finding him worse for wear at a birthday party for Michael Caine at Langan’s.
‘Maybe that was the first time I recognised there was a problem,’ he said.
‘George had been waiting for us and it was obvious he was finding it difficult so we managed to get a group round him and walked him out so nobody could see.
‘It was difficult and painful for us. In our day our friendship had given me such confidence. Just being around George did that. So to see him like that was terrible.
‘I just think he was unhappy in the second part of his life, I really do. I think George liked company, he preferred i t. It’s OK being famous but with George loneliness came with it. It was terrible, that.
‘That day at Tramp, we sat and talked and it was so very sad.
‘You don’t want to see someone who has made such a contribution to people’s lives and given people so much pleasure sitting there all alone in that state. It just didn’t seem fair.’
Summerbee chose not to visit Best as he spent his final days in a London hospital in November 2005. ‘That wouldn’t have been George