Yesterday in the Guardian Nicky Campbell joined the minority of press commentators who have mentioned recently deceased footballer George Best’s tendency to slap women around. He did so with a telling quote from one of Best’s exes:
“I adored George, and do you know what? In almost two and half years together he only hit me twice.”
These words capture two of the most depressing things about domestic violence: that perpetrators get away with it and that victims (and others) let them get away with it. Campbell unfortunately then goes on to argue that kids have no interest in imitating the behaviour of their heroes beyond their respective fields of achievement, which shows that, like too many people, Campbell has no real memory of his schooldays. If Campbell is right then a lot of advertisers have been wasting vast sums of money in sponsorship. They haven’t.
I’ve no problem with people celebrating Best’s brief period of footballing mastery, but the sports page bores can shove their winking “He was a lad, wasn’t he?” nonsense. By his own admission, Best was a shit who brought misery to people close to him; some nifty stuff on the pitch doesn’t excuse his being a bully.
Campbell ends with his own bit of nonsense about how those who “obsess about bad role models” are “judgmental” (God forbid!) and “harbour a desperate need to feel mightily superior”. Personally, I’m all for people being proud of doing the right thing and ashamed of doing the wrong thing. Exercising our judgment about what it and isn’t right and communicating our approval or disapproval of the actions of others are central to our existence as moral beings.
I used to be in a band with a guitarist who hit his wife (and hid his “extra-curricular activity” behind invented rehearsal sessions). One evening, after a reasonably well-paid gig, he got drunk and attacked her in public at the venue we had played. After the incident I told the rest of the band it was him or me*. All lads together, they chose him. I left. It’s one of the few walkouts in my life that I don’t regret. I hope she had the strength and good sense to do the same eventually, but I doubt it. Too many women think love is a noun and it’s something you’re in when you’re with someone who’s bad for you. It’s not. Love is a verb and it’s something you do by being good to someone who’s good to you.
[*I should confess that this decision was made easier by the guitarist in question not being very good. He was, in fact, living proof that there are black people with no natural sense of rhythm.]
Bestie never laid a finger on me, Damien, I’m pleased to say. Mind you, would you hit a 7 feet 6 inch plasterer dressed like Zsa Zsa Gabor, holding a pool queue in a very threatening manner after 18 bottles of Smirnoff with half the Cregah Road egging him on? No, not many would…
Can I ask your readers to help with our Christmas appeal?:
http://rswipe.blogspot.com/2005/12/top-comedy-sites-campaign-update-come.html
They could help us make a real difference for Britain’s 150,000 injured ex-trawlermen this Christmas.
Thank you so much for your time.
Roberta
Hmm. I think Campbell has a point in general. He immediately dissociates himself from Best’s domestic violence, does not defend it, in fact criticises it, then moves on to the broad notion of role models. And there I think he makes some sense. Frankly, as a kid, my idea of the footballing role model was someone who could shoot, pass, dribble and head a ball. What they did beyond that was deeply uninteresting.
And it is usually footballers who are expected to be role models. What happened to pop stars? Is Cliff Richard vaguely the role model type you’d have Best be? Why pick working class footballers and not the ‘classless’ rock and pop chaps and chapesses as bearing the full responsibility for role modelling. A quick gangsta rap anyone?
Fact is Best was loved for whatever reason. Not because he beat up wives (I trust you and Nicky Campbell have the facts on that) but because he was a genius at his brief profession, because he was funny sometimes, did what many want to do but can’t and did those things with few pretensions and because he locked into some myth that is far from dead, a kind of romantic myth about brilliance and early loss.
The tragedy I found was that Best became a means of the tabloids getting an easy story, rather than venerated for his undoubted football skill.
Sure, he was a bad man. I don’t condone anything he did. But if we can’t remember his footballing brilliance in the week after he died, when can we? Does the fact he was an alcoholic and violent mean we shouldn’t appreciate his genuine skill?
– but it wasn’t just his
footballing skill that was remembered – I kept on having to hear what a great and wonderful man he was,
there was something really odd about it all. If the talk had been about his footballing skill alone, it wouldn’t have sickened me so much.
[…] My George Best post says clearly that I have no objection to people celebrating his footballing achievements, but have very strong objections to the way in which, even now, (male) members of the press not only indulge(d) his behaviour off the field because of his performance on it, but wax nostalgic about the days when men were men and women were “birds” and heroes shagged and drank and smoked too much and put their girlfriends in casualty. It’s disgusting and even Best himself became disgusted with it too. […]
Let’s face it Best was a failed human being who for a short time was good at one thing and one thing only. The fact that his career was short, and didn’t match the longevity of many other very good ( the epithet “great” is much over-used and should only apply to a handful of players which to my mind would not include Best) players in football, was self-inflicted. This hypocrisy surrounding his eulogisation is exactly what you would expect from the dead-tree press, other streams of the MSM and sadly the general public at large. At the time of the height of his footballing powers there would have been thousands of fans around the country who didn’t like Moan Utd (ABU) or George Best. Somehow time passing has given them a rose tinted view of this flawed individual.