I'm in Good Company

Dalrymple more or less agrees with my column on Catholic Exchange yesterday:

Unfortunately, [George Best's soccer] abilities began to decline as he started to live the high life. He was at his peak for perhaps four years. He soon became an alcoholic. Later, rather disarmingly, he said that he had spent a lot of money on drink, women, and gambling–the rest he just frittered away.

His long decline was in fact extremely sordid. He was violent to women, none of whom could tolerate him for long. He frequently appeared dead drunk in public and once went briefly to prison for drunk driving. He never gave up drinking, despite having had a liver transplant at 56.

The outpouring of ersatz grief that followed his death was extraordinary. His death filled the press and the airwaves of Britain and Ireland for days. No reference to him was complete without the word “genius.” No one dared say that soccer, however well played, remains relatively low on the scale of human accomplishments, just as no one dared say, in the days after Diana's death, that her life had not been a model of selflessness.

Journalistic intellectuals fell over themselves to see deep positive significance in Best and his soccer game . . .

He received the biggest public funeral since Princess Diana's: hundreds of thousands turned out for it; mountains of flowers and teddy bears piled up at several locations.

In the immediate aftermath of a man's death, we should doubtless overlook his faults for a time or at least treat them with charity. But it is surely disturbing that a man who possessed for only a few years a major talent at a minor accomplishment, and whose subsequent life became a prolonged descent into squalor, both physical and moral, should have provoked such a public outpouring of emotion over his death. It is a sign of deep shallowness and emotional emptiness.

Link.

Excerpt from intro of my piece:

You ever notice how many saints die of drug overdoses? It's amazing. A newspaper article will recount a man or woman's last days in a way that makes the person sound sweeter than St. Francis, and then, buried in the middle of the article, there'll be a reference to the heroin that killed him.