Babysitting George: The Last Days of a Soccer Icon

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. (Dec.)