The last time I met George Best, he turned up two hours late up at his 'office' - the Phene Arms in Chelsea - and nursed a series of spritzers - 'it's not a real drink, is it?' - throughout the mid-morning interview. It was 1995 and he had just split up with his long-suffering partner, Mary Shatila, and shacked up with a 23-year-old flight attendant called Alex Pursey. You could see in his red-rimmed eyes and puffy face that the years of hard drinking were taking their toll, but his adolescent sense of wonder at the opposite sex was undiminished. Alex, he kept announcing unprompted, was 'a cracker' and this time it was 'definitely the real thing'. The old boys arranged along the bar of the Phene Arms nodded their heads indulgently. Like them, I would not have bet on Best's latest ill-starred romance lasting six months.
Seven years later, the house nestling deep in Surrey's stockbroker belt shared by George Best, 56, and Alex Pursey, 30, is a model of domestic tranquillity, the only hint of disruption emanating from the two overactive red setters that roam the expansive lawn like a pair of sly midfielders in search of a stray ball.
Alex, tanned and lithe, greets me at the door, suspiciously at first, then with a warmth that suggests relief. 'We get one or two unannounced visitors just turning up on the doorstep. It can be a bit worrying.' Inside, beneath a vaulting wood-beamed roof, the living room decor is tasteful-going-on-chic, with none of the 'designer' excesses usually associated with superstar footballers and their spouses, past and present. A painting on the far wall depicts the young Best crouched low in a characteristic body swerve, while a dogged defender - possibly Leeds United's Norman Hunter - snaps, equally characteristically, at his ankles. Beneath it, bronzed and clad only in summer shorts, sits Best himself.
He looks older than his years and moves slowly and tentatively, his still burning bright eyes shining out of a face that is no longer puffy, but lean and drawn. Ocasionally, a flashing smile lights up his whole face and, for a moment, you are transported back to a time when his talent was transcendent and its limits possibly endless, when that same look was usually accompanied by a red-sleeved arm raised in triumph as he turned from the goalmouth to greet his team-mates. Most of the time, though, he seems subdued, like a man who, finally, belatedly, has had some time to reflect - and to count his blessings.
His rebellious streak, though, is undiminished. 'We're off to Corfu tomorrow,' he says almost straight away with a sly grin, 'The Cromwell (Hospital) aren't too happy with me, but I have six hours to get back if I get word they suddenly find a donor. I've had nine months of waiting, so I figure I can take a week off.' In March last year, after being told that another drink could cost him his life, Best went on a marathon bender in Northern Ireland. He had returned there to live in the small village of Portavogie after a previous year's binge in London had caused him to collapse and almost die with liver failure. The news from Northern Ireland was not good: friends reported that he had wilfully decided to drink again and that he was resigned to dying rather than having to face a life on the wagon. It seemed that Best's fabled self-destructive streak had taken a late, dark turn, that the alcoholism that had defined him almost as much as his precocious footballing skills had finally defeated him.
'Drink's a strange thing', he says, now, shifting uncomfortably in his armchair, his voice serious and low, 'For a while it was the one thing that mattered in my life. It was the only thing I worried about and, in a way, it carried me through. Then, it took over my life and I made every excuse in the book. That's changed finally. Now, I control it. I mean, it will always be there, but you get older and wiser. Or, you die. That's the choice I was faced with, literally. People say you have to hit rock bottom, and, I can tell you, almost dying is as rock bottom as it gets.'
In his bestselling autobiography, Blessed, published in paperback next month, the opening sentence revisits his brush with mortality. 'I was in such agony that if someone had offered me a pill to end it all, I wouldn't have hesitated to take it. Death would at least have ended the persistent dreadful pain - the worst I've ever known...'
It is a long way from the cavalier opening to his previous autobiography, The Good, The Bad & the Bubbly (1990), which kicked off with the immortal line: 'I punched Michael Caine to the floor in Tramp one night.' A longer way still from 'My Old Irish Home', the opening chapter of his first book, The Best of Both Worlds, published on the back of Manchester United's European Cup Final win in 1968, when he was English and European Footballer of the Year, aged 22. Taken chronologically, the shifts in tone of each book map out the contours of an epic, semi-tragic life: early genius, defiance and decline, a late getting of wisdom.
The last time we talked, he insisted that he had no regrets: about leaving the game he loved at his peak, aged 27; about the drinking, gambling and womanising that lasted a further two decades; about the reckless squandering of money and the attendent disregard for his health that has culminated with his current incapacity. I ask him if that is still the case. 'Oh yeah,' he answers, immediately, 'Apart from the illness, my life's just got better. Alex, the house, the work at Sky [he is a respected and much sought-after sports pundit], the Mail on Sunday column, the success of the book. I mean, life's pretty good at the moment considering I shouldn't really be here at all'.
There is certainly sea-change in his personality; he seems a lot more reflective, content even - not words you would have associated with the Best of old, who always had that impatient, restless, seemingly insatiable energy that appears to underpin addiction of any kind. 'That's definitely true,' he smiles, 'and I think Alex is relieved about that. I think I just snapped out of it. If I hadn't met her, I probably would have just carried on. Now, every extra day is a bonus for me.' This sounds, I say, like Twelve Steps-speak. Has he finally, after years of resistance and denial, taken a leaf out of Paul Merson's book and joined Alcoholics Anonymous? 'Nah,' he says, dismissively, 'at the end of the day, I don't need to sit for three hours and discuss what my problem is. I know what it is. I don't need to talk about it.' Has he even given it a go? 'Back there I did, but it didn't work for me'. What part of it didn't work exactly, I persist? 'The trying-to-be-anonymous bit.'
It is difficult now to imagine the kind of tectonic shift that occurred in the young George Best's life in the mid-to-late Sixties, when he was propelled from the solidly Protestant, working-class streets of the Cregagh estate in Belfast to the epicentre of pop stardom. And, although the football pitch was his arena, Best was essentially a pop star - young, stylish, strikingly beautiful, possessed of a creative confidence that bordered on arrogance, and worshipped by young men and women alike. Like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, he epitomised the first, sudden, dynamic emergence of a postwar youth culture that, for better or worse, would help define the rest of the century. Long before Beckham, he was Britain's first footballer as popular icon, as emblematic of the wild excesses of his time as the clean living, endlessly coiffured one is of today's empty, celebrity obsessed culture. 'Beckham has total control of the planet,' he quips at one point, 'I had an agent who lived in Huddersfield.'
For those of us brought up in Northern Ireland in the early Seventies, Best was akin to a God. He was our only footballing genius, our only style guru, our only pop star (whatever else the young and precociously gifted Van Morrison was, he was not a pop star). Even his ill-advised adverts for Cookstown Sausages - 'It's the Cookstown sizzle' - could not dent his aura of otherworldliness. On the field, his skill was simply breathtaking, the closest the English game has ever come to the notion of football as art. Former Observer sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney described him thus: 'With feet as sensitive as pickpocket's hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic. The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves, sudden stops and demoralising turns, exploited a freakish elasticity of limb and torso, tremendous physical strength and resilience for so slight a figure, and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple.'
By 26, Best had won a European Cup Winner's medal, two League Championship medals, European and British Footballer of the Year awards, and had been Manchester United's top scorer for six consecutive seasons. There was, as he has said before, 'nowhere else to go but down'. This, of course, is not true, another example of the old Best bravura camouflaging a vast well of lost promise. To United fans, and lovers of football in general, his messy and dramatic exit from the club, just as he was approaching his peak, was nothing short of criminal. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, you feel that he knows that too, and that the void left by that reckless decision was filled by the years of excess, denial and guilt.
His nemesis, he maintains, was manager Tommy Docherty, one of Manchester United's short-lived successors to the great Matt Busby. Four years after winning the European Cup, United, their squad in decline, were relegated. 'Not many people could pull that off,' he mutters, 'but Docherty managed it.' Having played alongside Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and Nobby Stiles, Best suddenly found himself propping up a second-rate team. 'I couldn't handle it,' he says now, 'I didn't want to play in the Second Division and I didn't want to go anywhere else. Manchester United was my life.' In January 1974, when Best missed a training session after a late night at Slack Alice, a Manchester club he part-owned, Docherty dropped him from the team. 'I had agreed to do a double session the following day, and I kept my part of the bargain,' Best elaborates, a trace of anger still discernible in his voice, 'Docherty still says to this day that I turned up drunk and with a girl in tow. Total fabrication. I never ever turned up drunk at Old Trafford. I wouldn't have insulted the team nor the fans in that way. Nor have I taken a girl to a training session. He had to find an excuse so he went ahead and made one up. That was it, for me, I didn't even watch the game I was so insulted'.
The rest is history, albeit history George Best style. For all the glorious highs of his playing days, there were lows aplenty in the years that followed. Girls came and went, mostly blonde, mostly driven to depair by his drinking and gambling, then driven to the tabloids in revenge. He claimed to have bedded five - or was it seven? - Miss Worlds, and like his equally wayward contemporaries, Charlie George and Stan Bowles, epitomised the vulgar excesses of lad culture long before the term gained its Nineties' notoriety. He spent Christmas in Pentonville prison in 1984 after failing to appear in court on charges of drink-driving and head-butting a policeman. In 1990, there was the infamous appearance on the Terry Wogan TV show, where, drunk and dishevelled, he was asked what he liked to do with his time, and he replied: 'Screw'. The shy, smiling Belfast boy, who had caused 60,000 people to hold their breath as one every time he set off on a run, seemed suddenly to be a distant memory from a vanished era. 'I was ill,' he says now, 'and everyone could see it but me.'
These days, illness, ironically, seems to have finally saved Best from himself. He is, if not regretful, certainly chastened. He regales me with tales of the dirtiest player he ever came up against - Irish, Leeds United, surname ryhmes with piles - and, surprisingly, bemoans the demise of the 'hard man' who was the backbone of every great Seventies' team - Norman 'Bite Yer Legs' Hunter at Leeds, Tommy 'Iron Man' Smith at Liverpool, Ron 'Chopper' Harris at Chelsea. 'I took it as a compliment that they targeted me,' he says, smiling at the memory and revealing the kind of psychology that helped make him what he was, 'They weren't going to stop you by skill, so they tried doing it the only way they could - by kicking lumps out of you. It never worked.'
I ask him if the capsizing tide of celebrity, though nothing then compared with what it is now, had anything to do with his drinking. 'Nah,' he shrugs, never one to make excuses, 'Nothing whatsoever. I loved it. I always wanted more - more of everything. Girls, drink, success. I suppose my problem was that I couldn't get enough.' Later, though, while we sit on the lawn waiting for my taxi, he asks if I saw Albert Finney as Churchill in the recent TV biopic. 'He's brilliant. I knew Finney for a bit in Manchester back in the old days. He was in one of my favourite films, Charlie Bubbles, about a writer who can't cope with fame and attention. In the end, he goes up in a balloon and cuts the rope. He sails off into the big blue sky. That always stayed in my head, that scene. Pure escape, turning your back on it all, on the world.' He trails off into silence, smiling. For a man who walked away when the world was at his dazzling feet, George Best, despite everything, has not done too badly. Finally, I think, even he realises it.
· Blessed is published in paperback by Ebury Press on 1 August