Best - Blessed: The Autobiography

Co-author Roy Collins has been a sports columnist for over 17 years and is a personal friend of George Best. A chief sports writer on Today for ten years, followed by the People, Roy writes for the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph and has co-written the autobiography of Frank Warren.

For the boys of 68, who helped
fulfil one of my dreams
and my beautiful wife Alex,
who continues to fuel those dreams.

I WAS IN such agony that if someone had offered me a pill to end it all, I wouldnt have hesitated to take it.

Death would at least have ended the dreadful, persistent pain the worst Ive ever known which felt as though a knife was being twisted in my stomach. But despite weeks of this pain, weeks of throwing up and coughing up blood, which is the most frightening sign that you are really seriously ill, I refused to accept that I was in need of urgent hospital treatment.

My wife Alex, as you can imagine, had been growing increasingly frantic in her pleas to me to go in, sometimes trying to cajole me and at other times threatening to leave me to suffer alone. Just like you do with a kid. Also, unbeknown to me, she had begun crushing up vitamin pills to put in the little bit of food that I had been managing to eat, though I rarely kept anything down for long. She also began crushing up tablets of milk thistle, which helps to clean out the liver.

Given the amounts of booze Ive put away, it was like trying to dilute a vat of scotch with a thimble full of water but you could understand her doing it. She had also been reading all the medical books she could get her hands on and knew that everything pointed to me having cirrhosis, though without being unkind to her, I think anyone could have worked that out.

I knew it myself but there was always something inside me, that little inner voice, which said that it didnt matter whether my condition was caused by booze or something else. If I was going to die, I told myself and I did think it was a distinct possibility it had to be something, so why blame the booze? Everyone always blamed the booze. Slowly but surely, though, it started to sink in that I could get treatment, could do something about this pain and that it would involve going off the drink. Of course, thats the bit that I didnt want to accept so I kept on pretending.

If I ever had any doubts about my condition, I only had to look in the bathroom mirror to dispel them. I had noticed my skin starting to turn yellow, the first traces of jaundice which comes with cirrhosis. My face was pinched and I had begun to lose so much weight that my clothes looked as though they had been bought for someone two sizes bigger.

Id started to feel ill just after Jimmy Tarbucks 60th birthday bash in February 2000. The invitations read:

Men dinner jackets; women posh frocks; food upmarket fish and chips

And thats what was served up at Tarbys golf club for celebrities like Cilla Black, Ronnie Corbett, Russ Abbott, Robert Powell, Michael Parkinson and Adam Faith. It was a fantastic evening but I had not been on my best form for a while so Id decided to book a week at Forest Mere health club in Hampshire.

For years, this had been my pathetic answer to a lifetime of drinking to excess going to a health club four or five times a year and believing that it balanced out the drink, even though I often knocked back wine when I was in one of those places. Sometimes, I would actually come out in a worse state than when I went in but I still convinced myself that I had been doing myself some good, sorting out my problem. Unfortunately, there is no solution to alcohol.

You cant make it go away.

I also got another sign at Forest Mere that things were seriously wrong. I was about to step in the shower one day when I noticed a little spot on my leg, the sort of thing we all get. Automatically, I scratched it and it started to bleed. And bleed. And bleed. Its something everyone has done at one time or another but it was unbelievable that this little spot was producing so much blood. Before I knew it, the floor was covered in it and I was surrounded by blood-stained toilet paper and tissues which I had used to try to stop it. Eventually, Alex managed to get a plaster on it but for the next couple of days, the blood continued to seep out. It was a sign but not one I cared to take any notice of.

As for the drink, I wasnt really interested in trying to make it go away. Quite the opposite in fact, as true to form, I looked for the solution to my stomach problems not in a bottle of medicine but one of brandy. I was not supposed to drink the stuff in normal circumstances because it wasnt good for my blood pressure, though some of the bar staff at my local pub in Chelsea, the Phene Arms, would always slip me one.

Now, I began to drink more and more of it, sometimes starting soon after I got up, on top of the daily wine lake I was putting away. And, of course, the more I drank, the more the pain eased. So with the logic of an alcoholic, I reckoned that more was better. Naturally it helped, but as the pain was caused by my liver screaming for mercy, it was making my condition even more chronic.

But I wouldnt go into hospital because I knew what the treatment would entail. No more of my own medicine.

Alex and Phil Hughes, my agent and friend, who have both seen me through some pretty bad times, realised long before me that this was something serious. Or, at least, they accepted it long before me. They were now begging me to go to hospital on a daily basis but I continued on the brandy self-help diet and rolled into the Phene every day. It had become as familiar as my own living room.

Then, when I was sitting in my usual seat in the corner one afternoon, something amazing happened. The pub door slowly opened and I looked up to see one of the old regulars who hadnt been in for a while. I didnt recognise him at first because he was so frail and thin and when I realised who it was, I was absolutely shocked. His skin and eyes were completely yellow and his cheeks were almost hollow. Needless to say, he had just been diagnosed with cirrhosis.

Now, my skin had started turning yellow but it was nothing like this guys. He looked ten times worse than me and how he survived, I will never know. I knew from my jaundice that things were not right but here I was looking at the next stage of my condition, I was looking at me in a few days or weeks time, if that long. It terrified me and the timing of this guy coming into the pub also made it seem as though it was meant as a warning to me. It certainly helped me make the final decision to go into hospital.

One thing that had allowed me to keep up the pretence was that I still felt reasonably fit in myself, though I would hardly have described myself as athletic. But all of a sudden, almost overnight, I had no energy whatsoever. I was completely drained and I couldnt do anything. Alex had to dress me, feed me, even take my socks off for me. And all the time, I was suffering this awful stomach pain, literally doubled up with it. My resistance was wearing thin and Alex was stepping up the pressure.

Finally, one day, when I was curled up on the bed like a baby, she told me she was calling an ambulance.

This time, I did not resist.

They took me to the Chelsea and Westminster, which was only round the corner, and they practically had to carry me in. But despite the pain I was in and my dodgy right knee which has never been completely right since my playing days, I wouldnt let them put me in a wheelchair. I wasnt taking the risk of having that picture plastered all over the newspapers the next morning.