JULIE BURCHILL ON FOOTBALL DEGENERATION - THE FIFTH BEATLE (Part 1)

Football halfway through the Seventies, when David Beckham was born, was a strange beast. It had lost the manly, love-of-the-game purity that we mope over in those old sepia photographs, but it was still far from being the Met Bar millionaires lark it is today.

In 1961 the same Jimmy Hill – the BHS Beelzebub of British TV Sport – had been a professional player (Brentford and Fulham) and leader of the Professional Footballers’ Union when he achieved the abolition of the players’ maximum wage – around £12 a week at the time of Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews – and it immediately shot up to around £500 for the best players. By the late Sixties and the coming of the Western Cultural revolution to the nation’s urban hotspots (which by the time it got to England had basically boiled down to kipper ties and shagging for all), footballers were young, rich and dumb enough to enjoy all the pleasures that came with breaking-down of deference, repression and tradition, and working class enough not to have the safety net that was always there for middle-class hippies when they’d taken one trip to many.

Footballers, previously Men to boy, became Lads. Increased leisure and affluence among the working class meant that, by the late Sixties – after ROSLA but before AIDS – young men didn’t have to grow up as quickly as their fathers had. There could be a period between leaving school and getting married when, once you’d clocked off, you did little more for five years than drink, dance, pull and go to the football.

The Seventies were when every Lad finally got his leg over, and they were everywhere, in all their feather-cut glory. Turn on the TV and there was Richard O’ Sullivan in Man

About the House, with his bra-and-suspenders plastic apron; every boy bar Dennis and the ‘Mummy’s little soldier’ one in Please Sir! Was at it; then there was Adam Faith’s Budgie, too thick to understand that it wasn’t easy to do a runner in clogs.

There were the great Lad pop stars: Rod Stewart, Ian Hunter, Phil Lynott, David Essex. Laugh-a-minute Lads like Jim Davidson. And even Lad lags: Ronnie Biggs, Johnny Bindon.

And there were sporting Lads: Barry Sheene, James Hunt. Malcolm Allison, who actually left his wife for ‘Bunny Serena’, was an Elderly Statesman of Lad. There were Lads wherever you looked. But Lad-dom, basically being about pissing it all the way, only twice produced anything approaching greatness. And they were Tom Jones and George Best.

Both men, though coming to fame in the Sixties, only came into their own (and everybody else’s) in the Seventies. They did all the things that Junior League Lads dreamed of in their wildest, wettest dreams: fathered boy children, knew that they could lick any girl in the room when they walked into Tramp, wore trousers that were truly an offence against theology and geometry. Above all, these Celtic princes drank for Wales and Ireland respectively. For Jones, this wasn’t such a problem; famous for his gravely voice and somewhat overblown physique, drink only made him growlier and jowlier – though even he languished in lush Las Vegas obscurity for a decade or two before knocking himself back into shape and becoming, at last, an icon of cool.  For Best, as an athlete, it was a tragedy – made even more so, and all the more self-perpetuating, by the fact that his beloved, shy mother also became an alcoholic in the process of his fame, and subsequently died of drink. If Best had no good reason to drink himself into oblivion when he began, he certainly does now.

But back then, on the cusp of the Sixties and

Seventies – that brief shimmering moment when, for the young working class, life did literally seem to be a dream – the Best effect was similar to the way that a generation of literary hopefuls had seen their dreams wash up on the rocks in their dirty glasses at the stained tables of Fitzrovia.

Like young would-be poets who noted that Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas were poets who drank, and who sent on themselves to be drunks who wrote poems, young footballers started to grow their hair long like Best (‘The Fifth Beatle’), date bosomy blondes like Best and worst, drink like Best.