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Best funeral unites Ireland

The son of the late George Best, Calum, left, his former wife, Angie Best, center, and his agent and friend Phil Hughes, watch the thousands of mourners who came to pay tribute to the soccer player in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Saturday. PHOTO: AFP

In death as in his life, George Best stirred the passions and unified the people of his native Belfast in a triumphant farewell of tears, humor and pride.

More than 100,000 mourners, Protestant and Catholic alike, applauded as the hearse bearing Best's body drove down Belfast streets on Saturday for a state-style funeral inside Stormont Parliamentary Building, Northern Ireland's hilltop center of government overlooking the city.

Northern Ireland has seen more than 3,000 funerals over its past 35 years of sectarian conflict -- but nothing so large in scale, nor as surprisingly cathartic, as this.

Best, 59, was the world's first soccer superstar. He delighted fans with fantastic ball-handling skills and attracted others with his dark good looks. But in recent years he became an increasingly tragic figure, unable to defeat his toughest opponent -- alcoholism -- despite a 2002 liver transplant.

Tears flowed freely in the state-style funeral service, televised live throughout Britain and Ireland, as Best's only child, Calum, read poems that compared his father to a heavenly star called home too quickly by God.

"The golden days, they went so fast. The precious times, why can't they last?" Calum Best said in one of many moments when emotions overflowed at the speaker's podium beside Best's casket.

Outside, mourners who stood for hours in the rain for their moment tossed bouquets and soccer scarves into the path of the slow-passing hearse. Police stood to attention and saluted it all the way to Roselawn Cemetery on the Belfast outskirts, where Best was buried alongside his mother, Ann, in a private ceremony.

But at Stormont, laughter and happy memories cut into the grief. In his coffin-side testimonial, former Manchester United teammate Denis Law reminisced about Best's feckless failure to keep appointments or to show up sober -- a reputation so ingrained that one Belfast bookmaker had offered seven-to-one odds on whether Best would miss his own funeral.

"I can't count the number of times he let me down," Law said.
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