Simply the Best; or was he?

George Best (left, collecting the 2002 BBC Sports Personality of the Year's Lifetime Achievement award), footballing legend, a pure genius on the pitch and a man even Pele claimed was the best footballer he'd ever seen play, died on the 28th of November. This is hardly news but I'm not really writing about Best, or how great he was, many people have written that.

When Maradonna claims you're his favourite player, when Cruyff respects you, when you play in a team containing World Cup winners like Charlton and Stiles and outshine them, when you're so influential to your club's European Cup success at the tender age of 22 that you're named European Player of the year, you don't really need your praises sung. No, what I'm discussing today is whether the commotion over Best's death is really deserved.

There really is no doubting Best's footballing talent. Even as an Arsenal fan I can recognise the greatness of the man, even if he was a legend for a club that I abhor. Great players transcend clubs and even national allegiances. Pele is an example (how many non-Brazilians revere him?) and whilst we English hate Maradona for the Hand of God, few of us would take away from the genius of his goal later in the same game. It might've been the goal that knocked us out of that particular World Cup but it was easily the greatest goal ever scored. And in the modern game we have players like Ronaldinho and Arsenal's own Thierry Henry. Chelsea and United fans may hate the Frenchman but every last one of them would recognise his quality.

However George Best was by no means the saint he is being painted out to be. Tragic as his death is, it's unsurprising given the abuse he put his own body through. He's wasted two healthy livers, livers that could have gone to more deserving causes. Everyone knew he wouldn't take the lifeline his first liver transplant gave him, everyone knew he'd drink it to destruction again, but because it was George Best noone cared. Tell that to some poor child who was born with a liver defect around that time and missed out on an organ that could have radically improved the quality of their life. I personally, as a former drink-abuser myself, believe alcoholics (and drug addicts too for that matter) shouldn't be allowed liver transplants until essential and more deserving cases (such as natural or genetic defects) are treated first.

However it's not just that. What he does to his own body is, to an extent, his choice, even if it does have consequences for the NHS. Let's face it, most people needing liver transplants are alcoholics or drug addicts; there are few instances of natural or genetic defects, although they do exist and I still feel pity for anyone who needed or currently needs a liver and didn't actually do it to themselves. In an age when footballers are being held up as role-models, even former greats need to stand up for morality to an extent, and this is where my gripe with Best lies.

In fact, perhaps the pressure to be an upstanding citizen is even more pressing on an icon. I bet more people grew up looking up to Best than Beckham, because even today kids are growing up being raised on the Best folklore. Best's up there with Pele and Maradona, and it's quite shocking that two of those three have done some appalling things to their own bodies, but what seperates Best's conduct from Maradona's is what he's done to those around him.

I disagree that footballers that footballers are role-models, generally speaking, but I do agree that they should be held in higher disregard when they break the law because that's when their conduct does push them into the "role model" cateogory. And when Best beat his own wife, he broke the law, and what's worse, he did one of the most appalling things any man can do. No man should ever strike a woman, and the fact he was a great footballer, and a lovely chap in interviews, a charmer and an icon, none of those things eradicate what he did to Alex.

The truth is whilst Best's passing is tragic, whilst it's a shame, whilst we will remember a legendary player who changed football, whilst, given his career ended at 25, he could have been even better, it's ridiculous how much his death is being covered. Much like when Princess Diana died there's a cult of Celebrity surrounding Best's death. Diana was a serial adulteress, for starters, and yet people conveniently forget this when her name is mentioned; she's been sanctified post-mortem. This happens with celebrities a lot, people forget the bad and remember the good, and the same is happening with Best. Why else would there be such a fuss over the death of a washed-up, ex-con, bankrupt, wife-beater?

The irony of it all is that a man like Kurt Cobain, who, albeit a drug taker, was an actual decent man, who did nothing to harm those around him and stopped taking heroin out of pure love and devotion for his daughter, a man who was savagely murdered and then later degraded by being labelled a suicide, a crime that's still yet to be properly, fully and thoroughly investigated, is remembered for the bad and yet not the good.

Sometimes life's just not fair.