My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography

by Bobby Charlton

  I also felt a wave of emotion. It is not often that you can conjure so clearly and vividly something that has begun to recede into memory. We were both in our late thirties, both contemplating the second half of our lives, but in one precious moment we were back to the pinnacle of our days. What had moved me so much was that the moment had been so spontaneous, springing as it did from our knowledge of each other and our different powers.

  The aspect of Denis that I could never understand, and which I suppose made the sharpest contrast in the way we approached the game, was that he refused to be involved the moment he wasn’t playing in a match. If he was injured and had to leave the field, he would shower and go home immediately, perhaps with the outcome of the match far from decided. It was the same when substitutes were introduced; if Denis was replaced, that was the end of his afternoon. He wasn’t making any statement of anger or resentment. He was just saying that his work and his interest were over. He would rather be back in his house in Chorlton cum Hardy. This lack of involvement if he was not on the pitch was true even for the biggest games – when United played in the European Cup final in 1968, Denis was in hospital having a cartilage operation. He claims to have had a few beers – and fallen asleep.

  If I had to pick a single, dominating aspect of his character, apart from the tremendous commitment which marked his play, and which set him apart as much as his dramatic talent, it would be his sheer Scottishness. I know all Scots aren’t the same, but I do love the way so many of them see a love of their country as something at the heart of their existence, and how it has always been so passionately expressed on the football field. Often there is a show of toughness, and quite a bit of bluster, but you don’t have to be so perceptive to see that at its core is deep pride in their people and a tough view of the world.

  When Nobby and I were helping England win the World Cup, Denis made a point of playing golf. Whenever we played Scotland, Denis made sure to kick us both and call us ‘English bastards’, within the first minute or so of the match. It was as though he had been obliged to make a statement and, having done so, he could then get on with the game.

  I believe that it is part of the Scottish education in life, if not officially in the schoolroom agenda, to compete with most determination against the English. The result in football was that even when some English supporters were making a reputation for strident, riotous behaviour across the world, they had little appetite for visiting Hampden Park. The English fans, like the players, knew that no quarter would ever be given.

  When I played my first game for England in Scotland I remember the bus journey from Troon up to Glasgow. It seemed that there was scarcely a house where someone wasn’t hanging out of a window shouting the Scottish equivalent of, ‘You’ll get nowt today.’ Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t, but there was always one certainty: if there was ever a Scottish deficit, it would never be one of the heart. Down the years I formed the impression that no one embodied this national pride more strongly than Denis, and on my visits to his country there was always at least a hint that he was regarded as the most patriotic Scottish football player of them all. I know that this image for him will always be a matter of the deepest pride.

  Nowadays, I see a certain mellowing in the fierce Scot. He comes down to the club more frequently, and I get the sense that he is pleased to see that his standing remains so huge. He had a battle with prostate cancer a few years ago, and maybe that slightly softened the ferocious edge of the nature that made him such a fantastic player.

  Still, I do not expect all of his mysteries to disappear in the years of his maturity. His humour might become a little less edgy – and scathing – and he might be a little less of the loner, but at his heart, I suspect he will always be the same old Denis: a man who played his football, and lived his life, strictly on his own terms.

  George Best, of course, kept so much of his mystery right up to the end, when Denis and I sorrowfully boarded that train to London on a cold, grey day in November 2005.

  I had met Denis at Stockport station after calling him to discuss George’s situation against the background of reports that he was unlikely to survive his latest health crisis. Denis had already made one visit, and warned me that George was indeed at a low ebb. It was unlikely that he would be able to take much in.

  It was as Denis said it would be. George, surrounded by his family, had slipped into something close to a coma. One of his sisters said he might be able to hear me, and I spoke to him with the greatest sadness. I whispered to him as I had to Duncan Edwards and Matt Busby all those years before in Munich, but I felt that so much of my old team-mate’s life had been, and was still, set apart from my own experience and understanding.

  I wished some things at the core of George’s life had been different. However, the time for judgement had long passed. When he finally left us, meaning so much to so many people, it was enough to shut your eyes and remember all the best of him – and of that there was so much that went beyond any disputes we might have had about the way a professional footballer should operate for the benefit of both himself and his team. Our relationship had grown warmer in later years, and the pain and frustration of the premature ending of the most beautiful and natural talent I had ever seen was tempered by the fact that we had shared moments that would have brought pride and joy to any footballer who had ever played the game.

  To be honest, his first performance for the team, in a league match against West Bromwich at Old Trafford in September 1963, does not linger in my mind. I’m sure he showed some nice touches, but the overall impact was not overwhelming. It was when he returned to the team a few months later, against Burnley at Old Trafford, that you began to see all that he would be. We had been beaten badly at Burnley a few days earlier, and the Old Man was determined to shake up the team. Bringing back the seventeen-year-old George was his boldest stroke and it paid off gloriously. Long before the end, I felt pity for my friend John Angus, the Burnley right back who I had got to know on England duty. John was not so much overwhelmed as tortured. George was like a kid’s dribbling dream that day. The crowd was stunned, then rapturous, and when it was happening I recalled a conversation I had had with one of the coaches at The Cliff training ground a year or so earlier. He had said, ‘We have a lad in the reserves who is bloody good. He’ll be playing alongside you guys soon enough.’ I made the slightly cynical reply, ‘Well, they say that about a lot of young players – let’s wait and see.’ I didn’t watch George play in the reserves, partly because I reckoned that, if he was as good as he was being described, I would be getting a close look at him soon enough. You could see it all in the game against Burnley – the speed, the balance, the nerve, the close control – and the fans loved every second of it. Supporters like nothing better than to see a winger beating a full back to the point of humiliation, and it was a day when they received full value for the price of their tickets.

  Going down to London with Denis, I could not help but recall an earlier train journey – one I made with George from Cardiff after we had played in a Uefa representative match, at the time when his reputation – and, much more than that, his celebrity – had reached a peak. This was at the beginning of the phase when the main topic of conversation at Old Trafford often concerned George’s whereabouts the night before – and at roughly what time that night had ended, and in whose company.

  Sometimes I would get the story from the horse’s mouth. Training then, for all the growing success of the team, was nothing like so intense as it would be today. Around the little red track at Old Trafford, the players would at first mingle together, do a bit of jogging and then, perhaps after half an hour, the trainers would come out and some more formal work would be done. In the meantime, however, you might have found yourself with a team-mate discussing what they had been up to over the previous few days or, in George’s case, invariably, the nights. Once I said to him, ‘Well, what was the programme last night?’ He told me in some detail. He had been to various bars and
clubs, and then finished up in his favourite watering hole, the Brown Bull in Salford. As he related the progress of his night, and I thought of my own life back home in Lymm, I was a little stunned by the comparison and I could not help saying, ‘George, maybe one day they will put you in a bottle in some laboratory at Manchester University.’

  On that train journey from Cardiff I remembered that Norma and the girls were away, and I asked George what he was doing that night, imagining that another spectacular tour of Manchester was about to unfold. When he said, ‘Oh, nothing really, maybe I’ll go somewhere for a drink,’ I asked him if he would like to get off the train in Warrington and come to my house for a bit of supper. Norma had told me there was a bag of frozen scampi in the fridge and I had the idea – it turned out to be a little optimistic – that I could make a decent meal out of it for George and me. To be honest, I was a little shocked when George said yes.

  It was a strange and in some ways poignant evening. George was very taken with our dog, a Chow, and he was full of questions about how it was being married, about having a dog and domestic life in general. For some reason, I formed the idea that he was intrigued by the possibility of getting married himself, that it might just represent another way of life that could offer him something he maybe wasn’t getting in his endless whirl of clubs and pubs and parties; that not least, perhaps, he wanted a little peace.

  From the moment he walked into the house he was full of questions. It was as though he had thought to himself, ‘Well, who knows, I might pick up a few things from old Bobby Charlton.’ He wanted to know about everything, the running of the house, the running of the family, the keeping of the dog, the garden. As the evening wore on, I saw a different George, inquisitive, warm, and maybe a little insecure in himself. It made me think that behind all the glitter and the headlines here was just another young man trying to find his way in life.

  Eventually, I drove him into town. The scampi had not been a towering success but I got the feeling he had enjoyed his visit to another world – and it was interesting that soon afterwards he bought himself a dog. He also had a house built in the Cheshire suburbs – though accompanying newspaper stories said that it was designed by him, and it was radically different from the conventional detached house he had visited in Lymm. Also, amid much publicity, he acquired a Danish girlfriend, Eva Haraldsted.

  It was enough, certainly, to encourage my belief that George might indeed be considering the idea of getting permanently hooked up. Partly, I suppose, I thought this was because his life seemed to me to be stretching out towards a quite predictable futility. Of course he told the famous joke about being in the hotel room with Miss World and champagne and a fistful of cash, and the waiter asking him where it had all gone wrong, but there were days when you had to suspect that he was in search of something he might never find.

  Stories about our differences were often taken as fact, but the truth was they were exaggerated. I didn’t agree with some of the things George did, I didn’t think his lifestyle was compatible with being a professional footballer, but for a while at least I accepted that he was doing extraordinary things on the field. As long as this was so, it was maybe understandable, if not right, that Matt Busby refused to lay down an iron hand of discipline. I couldn’t see that there was much I could do, other than follow the Old Man’s approach. This could be summed up simply enough; take the best that George had to offer – and live with the rest.

  So often, of course, living with George was a glorious existence, and it started with that amazing performance against my Geordie friend John Angus. He sold that excellent full back so many dummies it was staggering to think he was still just seventeen. There were so many passages of play like that, most famously when he destroyed Benfica three years later in the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, and all of them reminded you that apart from anything else George Best had a constitution that was hardly believable.

  This was no doubt the reason that the Old Man mostly – until the very end, when George’s behaviour made the situation untenable if the club was to retain any pretence of discipline – took a lenient view of so many of the transgressions. For me, certainly, an important factor in my decision not to get involved in any of the often heated debates within the club was that at the peak of his success George, when he trained or played, never fell short of what you would expect from one of the world’s outstanding footballers. Of that time I cannot recall a moment when George did something on the field that made me think, ‘Uh-oh, George overdid it last night.’

  When eventually he did become a little ragged in the mornings, when his absences from training were more frequent, and finally you could see that he was beginning to lose some of that brilliant edge, my own overwhelming reaction was one of sadness. Partly, it was because the fans loved him so much, had set him up on a pedestal so high, that when he came down, as he must, the disappointment would be terribly cruel. Down the years when we spoke about this, it was the one thing that he never denied. It was true, he conceded, that his way of life had robbed millions of fans of a pleasure that, when you consider the normal span of a playing career, was much too brief. As his life progressed, when maybe a drink was more important, maybe a girl was more important, it made you think that you don’t get truly great players so very often, and if you do it’s heartbreaking when, as a result of their own actions, they don’t fulfil their potential.

  When he left Old Trafford at the age of only twenty-six, I was seeing a real tragedy, for football and for him. I couldn’t believe that a player of all his gifts was so soon leaving the big stage, where he was loved so much. Maybe in a way my argument is weakened when you recognise that, whatever had happened, the public really could not have adored him any more than they did – and continued to do so in all the years since he stopped playing.

  Today, when I park my car and go to my place at Old Trafford, and see parents taking their children to watch the likes of Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, I am always reminded of the faces of the kids of the sixties. You could see on them the anticipation and excitement when Georgie Best was playing. But then, suddenly, he was no longer there. You had to regret it, as you did the fact that in his prime George never had the chance to perform in a World Cup. You can only speculate on what that exposure would have done for his legend. Yet, here again, you come to the reality that, like Diego Maradona, another ultimate talent whose life has often careered off the rails, George Best could hardly have gone any deeper into the hearts of his admirers. In the eyes of the Argentinian people, Maradona will always be a god – as will Georgie Best for all those who saw him play.

  When I look back on a life that was too brief, too troubled – whatever bright light George attempted to shine on it at times – I share that sense of wonder, sometimes disbelief when I think of how good he was and all those improbable things he achieved under such immense pressure. Rightly the goal he scored against Chelsea – as he ignored scything tackles from some of the toughest, most ruthless ever to play the game – is seen as the embodiment of so much of his ability. It showed courage, resilience and a skill that simply could not be tamed. That was the hard side of him, the one that could see him clouted so hard he wobbled but refused to go down; but then there was also all the delicacy which came out when, say, he chipped the ball over a goalkeeper, exhibiting sublime execution gauged to the very inch.

  He set a standard that people talk about even now, and I suspect this will always be so, as long as there is film of him, because what they see is something that, for all the talented players of today, they do believe is no longer available. They don’t see anyone who is quite like George Best. I spent quite a large part of my life explaining how it was to play with Duncan Edwards, and now it is the same with George. One day, of course, there may be another Duncan, another George, but the bar was raised so high by those players, that when someone like a young Ryan Giggs or Rooney or Ronaldo steps forward, unfavourable comparisons are invariably made, and those who remember George, and the d
windling number who recall Duncan, are quick to defend their idea of what they think of as football perfection.

  I carried all those memories of glory and sadness when I walked into the hospital room with Denis. I thought of my perhaps naive belief that George might have been kindling thoughts of a different, more stable life that night I made a mess of the scampi. I smiled, for a moment, at the time I yelled at him repeatedly to give me the ball when he weaved across the field in a match against Nottingham Forest. I remembered how I called him a ‘selfish little bugger’ as he hogged the ball – and was then obliged to shrug my shoulders and shout, ‘Great goal,’ when he finally stroked it into the net, a grinning, cocky, defiant matador of a footballer, once again delivering a sword stroke that could not be parried. I thought of all the controversy that had surrounded the last years of George’s life, of how some had complained that because of his lifestyle, his repeated failures to stay on the wagon despite the most serious possible warnings from leading doctors, he did not deserve the transplanted liver he was given that might have gone to someone who had not so relentlessly imperilled his own health. But then I thought that life creates extreme cases, and did anyone in football know anybody whose experiences of joy and sadness, and the ability to create such emotions in other people, had been quite so profound?