Babysitting George
The Last Days of a Soccer Icon
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
As a young reporter, Celia Walden receives an unusual assignment: track down a global superstar and keep him away from all other journalists. That man is soccer player George Best, who made his debut for Manchester United at age seventeen and was the star of a star team throughout the 1960s. Enormously skilled and ruggedly handsome, idolized by men and women alike, he was referred to as "the fifth Beatle," and still holds a firm place among the world's all-time best players.
But in 2004, George Best is nearing sixty and deteriorating like a much older man. A notorious alcoholic and philanderer, he has just received a liver transplant and has Antabuse tablets sewn into his stomach lining. His wife has left him again. When Celia finds him in a bar in Malta, he isn't exactly delighted to see her. He's been chased by journalists all his life. Yet as Celia's assignment to "babysit" George around the clock stretches out over months, an unlikely sort of friendship develops, and she gets to know George as a funny, volatile, and complex human being, an avid reader and member of MENSA, ravaged by alcohol and gradually withering under the constant glare of the spotlight.
Babysitting George is a tender account of a unique relationship between a young journalist and a dying star. It questions the exploitative nature of tabloid journalism; the terrifying, all-consuming nature of addiction; and the implausible meetings that can change one's life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An inadequate account by a British journalist and novelist (Harm's Way) tracks the legendary ailing Manchester United footballer through bars and hotel rooms one summer two years before he died. In July 2003 Walden, then a rookie reporter at a London tabloid, was sent to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Sliema, Malta, to find the notorious former athlete, womanizer, and now very alcoholic George Best, who had been contracted to write a column for the paper but had gone on a wild bender, alienating his second wife, Alex, and threatening to talk to other newspapers. Walden found the diminished star drinking wine spritzers alone at the English pub behind the hotel, and gradually ingratiated herself into his company, without drinking or sleeping with him. (A concluding photo shows Walden, then a lithe blonde in her early 20s, with Best towering over the elfin footballer.) At this point Best was still reeling from a recent liver transplant, stuffed with prescription pills, including Antabuse, which made him ill after drinking alcohol, and given to maudlin musings on fame and failure while being chased by opportunists and sycophants. Walden, perhaps due to her youth, asked only superficial questions of the sadly aging star, and never grasped a sense of his great climb to godlike heights and cataclysmic fall from grace.
