legendary George Best

George Best kicked off my love affair with football and Manchester United. As a boy I read every word published about him in the newspapers and, like all kids my age, I lived for Match of the Day when United were on, after which we’d try to recreate George’s goals on our own streets. He scored 137 of them in 361 games for United in his 11 years at Old Trafford, but sadly fewer than 30 are preserved on tape for the wonder of future generations.

Still, we have our memories.

Early days in Belfast

George was honing his mercurial football skills from the moment he took his first steps. Those were at Jocelyn Avenue, a typical Belfast pre-war terrace street, off the tough Woodstock Road area. In 1949, with George aged three, the family moved the few miles to the newly built Cregagh estate, one of the post-war developments springing up all over the city to replace the blitz-damaged wartime housing stock. Here George found the wide-open spaces to express himself: the green opposite his Burren Way home.

George’s was a natural talent, born from a modest sporting lineage: dad Dickie played amateur football until he was 36, while mum Anne was an outstanding hockey player. A typically hard-working Belfast couple of the era, Dickie operated an iron turner’s lathe at the Harland & Wolff shipyard at Queen’s Island, where the Titanic was built; Anne was on the production line at Gallaher’s tobacco factory in north Belfast.

Bob Thomas Sports Photography vi

They granted George’s wish to give up a prized place at a rugby-playing grammar school for his local comprehensive, where football was his academic choice. But this was a Belfast where jobs were hard to come by despite the post-war recovery, leading Dickie to line up an apprenticeship in a printing company for his son as a fallback if his football dreams were to be dashed. However, George’s first and only ‘real’ job would be a stint as a clerk at the Manchester Ship Canal company, where United placed him until he was old enough to sign pro at 16.

Making waves across the Irish Sea

Back in Cregagh, it was obvious to all who watched George that he was special. And yet he was deemed too small and slight to be selected for the Northern Ireland boys international team despite starring in trials; it was the same story at his local club Glentoran.

Then came nine words on a telegram to Old Trafford that changed George’s, and football’s, future forever: "Boss, I think I have found you a genius." So wrote Manchester United’s Belfast scout Bob Bishop to Matt Busby after being alerted to George’s potential by the latter’s Cregagh Boys Club mentor Bud McFarlane.

Initially it wasn’t a smooth crossing from comparatively small-town Belfast to the bright lights of Manchester, as 15-year-old George and another promising pal, Eric McMordie, set sail on the Liverpool boat. They were still in their school uniforms; George, with a prefect’s badge on his lapel, had never been away from home before. McMordie would later tell me: "At that age we felt completely out of our depth and homesick. Neither of us could comprehend the break from home that we’d made, nor could we envisage a life stretching ahead of us in these strange surroundings. Maybe if we’d been a bit older it would have been different.

"That first evening we went for a walk and I said to George, ‘I don’t think I fancy this, do you?’ He replied, ‘I think I feel the same – let’s go.’ I felt bad about it for a long time as we were treated so well. We were just too young." Busby refused, however, to give up on the kid he would later build his 1968 European Cup-winning team around, just ten years after the Munich air disaster destroyed his original Busby Babes. George was eventually persuaded – by his dad and Busby – to return to Manchester.

The entertainer

As a kid I was in awe watching George play for Northern Ireland at Windsor Park. He stirred the earliest sporting emotions I can recall: the anticipation leading up to matchday; the thrill of seeing him play; the buzz around the ground as he swept onto the ball. I was distraught the day he was sent off for chucking mud at the referee against Scotland; disbelieving when his goal against England was disallowed after he nicked the ball in mid-air from Gordon Banks.

I was just as awestruck the first time I met him. It wasn’t as if I was some cub reporter; I was in my twenties and had been around the block a few times. In from the start of Billy Bingham’s glory reign, I’d been with that great Northern Ireland side on their early '80s W