Book review: The Times, September, 2006
BEST AND EDWARDS, FOOTBALL, FAME AND OBLIVION by Gordon Burn - Faber, £16.99; 255pp
The day after the death of Sir Matt Busby in 1994, camera crews roamed the
concrete prairies surrounding Old Trafford. They found their Everyman and
his Everyson. They were both wearing puffa jackets.
''How do you feel about Sir Matt dying?''
''Devastated.''
''What did he mean to you?''
''He was like a grandfather to my lad,'' he said, pointing at his blank-faced
kid.
''Did you know him then?''
''Not personally, no.''
This is sport's dilemma incarnate: the perpetual seesaw between queasy sentimentality and a joyous but rational siphon of emotion. Gordon Burn has bravely taken on two of football's most iconic and tragic figures in George Best and Duncan Edwards, two players over whom supposedly strong, hard men have wept oceans.
Edwards was the boy-colossus from Dudley who played for Manchester United at 16, England at 18 and died at 21 in the Munich air disaster. George Best was the boy-waif from Belfast who could bamboozle defenders, barmen and blondes. He died twice: the sportsman's death on leaving Manchester United at the age of 27 and the mortal's last year, aged 59.
Scores of books have already been published about them both and Burn's is a spirited resume of them all with idiosyncratic tics of his own thrown in. He has used Edwards and Best as a frame for a far more enigmatic story than the routine 'compare and contrast.' He draws in ancillary characters like Busby and Bobby Charlton, indeed the whole village of Manchester United. Whenever the mood suits (and to hell with narrative) he launches into impromptu essays on celebrity and alcoholism, drizzling names and places randomly over the text: Chelsea to Belfast, Waylon Jennings to The Smiths, Salford to Los Angeles, JG Ballard to Jack London. At times it feels as if he has dashed from a road accident, still dazed and stricken with a kind of intellectual whiplash: all this information, got to get it out. The effect is absorbing if occasionally disconcerting.
The research is thorough. He returns first-hand to Dudley and Manchester, trying to make sense of this broth of nostalgia and sentimentality, what it says about us, our relationship with sportsmen and the past. By far the best section is his account of Best's days slumming it in Salford's Brown Bull pub where, at the height of his fame, he slept in a storeroom among beer crates and ashtrays.
Following on from David Peace's The
Damned Utd, also published by Faber, Burn's is another compelling
book about football. It far transcends the routine one-size-fits-all approach
to genre-led sports writing and is instead a splurge of ideas set free. Presumably
it will not have been a stress-free synopsis when first pitched to publishers
and will have fallen uneasily on the sell-sell-sell burden of the commissioning
editor:
''What's it all about Gordon?''
''This and that, partly sociological, bit of cod psychology, a few literary
references, biographical, novelistic. Prosey in places, that kind of thing.''
''Sounds a bit muddled.''
So it is, much like life itself. And all the better for it.