Read Online Always Managing: My Autobiography by Harry Redknapp - Free Book Online Page A

Not devious, but private. He’dask you ten questions before he answered one of yours. You would sit there and suddenly realise that you had done all the talking, and Bobby had barely told you what he thought about any of it. He must have had trouble in his life, and I was as close to him as anybody, but I can never remember Bobby volunteering his problems. Even when he was seriously ill, he kept it to himself. It needed the drink to make him relax but, even then, there were limits. Even as a captain, he was brilliant, but quiet. He led by example, not by shouting and hollering.
    Sadly, the more famous he became, the more difficult it was to even switch off as he used to. There was nowhere he wasn’t known, and he felt he always had to be on his best behaviour. That was why he relished the days playing football and having a party. He was among mates and he could let his hair down. It was the same for George Best, I think.
    I knew George from a distance as a player, a little more when we were together in the States, and I was at Bournemouth as coach when he came to us in the 1982–83 season. We were his last English club. Don Megson was the manager then, and we did a good deal, paying George mostly appearance money – I think Brian Tiler, our managing director, might even have got some of it back by charging our opposition when we played away, because George certainly put a few on the gate. I don’t think it would be legal now – and I’m not even sure if it was then – but the news that George was in town saw us playing in front of crowds of 14,000, and the opposition chairman was always up for that. George was a fantastic fellow, really. His teammates loved him. But by then he had a lot of problems. He was probably at his happiest sitting up at the bar in his favourite pub.
    We were due to play Bradford City and George didn’t turn up. It was Friday and Brian had to go looking for him in London. George was living with Mary Stävin, the former Miss World, and it was Brian’s job to persuade him to leave her for Bradford. When he got there, George was already on the loose, out on a bender. She gave him the names of a couple of his favourite haunts and eventually Brian tracked him down. They sat together and had a lager and a chat. ‘We need you at Bradford, George,’ Brian told him. ‘The team needs you, the boys all want you to play.’ By the end, George had been persuaded. ‘I’m just going for a piss and then we’ll go,’ he told Brian. So Brian waited. And waited. And eventually he smelt a rat and went into the toilet to check everything was all right. George was gone. He had climbed out of the window. He never made it to Bradford, and then bowled in the next week as if nothing had happened.
    Another day he came to see me. ‘Harry, where’s Salisbury from here?’ I told him it was about half an hour away. ‘Why?’ ‘There’s racing on – do you fancy it?’ he asked. I have never needed much persuading where the horses are concerned, so off we went. I drove – George had no car – and he asked if I could drop Mary off at the station on the way. In got Mary, looking like a film star. She really was a lovely girl. Not just beautiful but friendly, charming – any man would have loved to be with her. After she got out, George turned to me. ‘Thank God she’s gone,’ he said.
    ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked.
    ‘We went to the pictures last night,’ he said – I forget what film he wanted to see – ‘and she drove me mad all the way through it. Touching me and kissing me.’
    I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Really, George? Sounds awful.’
    There would have been a queue a million long to go out with Mary, and he was moaning. ‘You don’t understand, Harry,’ he said. ‘I was trying to watch the film.’ But that was George. Deep down, he wasn’t the Jack-the-lad that people thought.
    The Salisbury meeting was very popular that day. A lot of the old Southampton boys were there: Mick