Legend has it that the hotel bellboy who took champagne to George Best’s room and found him there with a scantily-dressed Miss World and a stash of money won at the casino, commented, “So, George, where did it all go wrong?”
Where, indeed! The irony was obvious as everything had gone wonderfully well for George Best. He had already been named European Footballer of the Year (in fact, he was later named number five in the greatest player of the twentieth century) at a young age. He had the world at his feet, though perhaps for him it would have been more appropriate to say he had the world at his bed or his bar.
He was a brilliant individual innovative soccer player who reached the heights but effectively gave it all up before he was thirty.
What went wrong for George Best can perhaps be found in the witty comments he has been recorded as making. “I used to go missing a lot,” he said, before adding, “Miss Canada; Miss UK; Miss World”. On another occasion, he joked that “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.” Then, again, he boasted that “In 1969 I gave up alcohol and women — it was the worst twenty minutes of my life”.
We may laugh at the wit in his comments but sadly there are many others in all areas of life who have climbed the ladder of success and fallen badly from it.
Where does it all go wrong, not just for him but for all? Dare we suggest that it starts at school? Schools, and the children’s parents, push youngsters to be successful and delight in their glory.
They insist that their pupils must succeed and will do everything they can to do so. They reward those who succeed, adding further kudos to them.
That all sounds reasonable, does it not? However, there are real dangers inherent in all of that, that are generally ignored and neglected.
The fact is that when we are pushing all our pupils to succeed, to come top of the pile, to beat all others, we are actually pushing more of them to fail; in a race, one person wins and the rest fail, for as long as we say that the winner is the successful one.
Few people, in simple logical terms, do (or more importantly, even can) achieve, yet we push everyone to succeed. So we set people up to fail.
Not only do we set them up to fail as few achieve it but we then set them up to fail by piling on special treatment of those few; we mention them glowingly in Assemblies and social media; we splash out Honours and Colours, often with different colour blazers or ties.
They are put on a pedestal, under the spotlight, and everyone sees their every move and finds an easy target to shoot down; they are given special privileges and attention yet few are mature or able enough to handle it.
We may then consider that we further set our youngsters up for failure because we do not prepare properly those few who do succeed to handle the success and all that comes with it, whether it be financial riches, fanatical adulation, fanciful invitations.
They may well succeed and excel in their specific area of expertise but they may not handle the pressure, enticements, inducements and glory.
They are pulled in every direction and can easily lose focus and perspective. They often become arrogant, conceited, complacent, lazy, comfortable. If we do not prepare for all that can come with success, when we are pushing them to succeed, we are in fact guilty of a massive offence.
We also compound the problem as we do not prepare the youngsters to handle the success that may come to a few but we also rarely equip them to know how to handle failure.
We ignore them; in fact, we often berate them or even deride them (as if they intended to fail or even wanted to fail).
We do not discuss with them what went wrong but dismiss them into the background.
Instead of pushing youngsters to be successful, we should encourage them all to be faithful, to do what they can with what they have, to learn from mistakes; it is progress not success that is required.
More than that, we should encourage and assist them to be fruitful, where they are achieving something for others, not just for themselves.
Of course, it did all go wrong for George Best; he died before he reached the age of sixty, having previously had one liver transplant. And it will go wrong for many more if we do not take more care in what we are saying and doing.
Success is not seen in results; it is found in the character of the youngsters themselves.
They must not be George Best but the best that they can be, otherwise it will indeed all go very wrong.
