Transforming the Beautiful Game: Clyde’s Best Story Review – A Fitting Tribute to Pioneer Sparrow | film

IIt may seem as if every conceivable football story has already been told in the age of live streaming. But clearly that’s not the case: here’s a heartwarming film that has important things to say about racism and empowerment in the game through the life story of Clyde Best, the West Ham striker from the early 1970s. Best’s pioneering status as one of the first black players in elite English football is fairly well known – but of course it is not as well known as it should be, which is what this film attempts to remedy. Plus of course the respect he deserves for his pioneering role for future generations of black footballers in the UK.

This fact no doubt lies behind the impressive line-up of speakers who appear on camera to acknowledge the significance of Best’s career, from West Ham contemporaries including Geoff Hurst and Harry Redknapp to those who have followed Best’s paths, such as Viv Anderson, John Barnes, Les Ferdinand, Shaka Hislop and Garth Crooks. Anyone with hazy memories of the best game on the field since the early 1970s will be interested to hear about his remarkable trip to London from Bermuda as a 17-year-old for a one-off trial session, after which he signed future England manager Ron Greenwood (who, in fact, came out of that film quite well). Best says he was quickly accepted by his West Ham teammates, but elsewhere it was less glamorous; He’s found himself at the sharp end of some virulent post-Empire Enoch Powell racism in the 1970s, and it’s sobering to realize that when Alf Garnett is shouting appalling abuse from the football stands, he might as well shout it back.

Best wasn’t completely alone. West Ham also had Clive Charles and soon after Ade Coker in their team. When all three were selected for a match against Tottenham in April 1972, it was the first time a top-flight side had fielded three black players in the same match – an event that would not be repeated until the advent of West Brom’s ‘three tiers’ in 1978. The film presents a history filled with black players before they were named the best black players in the Premier League, and reveals in a footnote that one of them – Jack Leslie, scored dozens of goals for Plymouth. Argyle in the 1920s and 1930s – he ended up cleaning Best’s boots as a West Ham businessman. (Leslie, who died in 1988, appears to have been denied the chance to be England’s first black international in 1925, with selectors suspected of withdrawing him from the team after his ethnicity was discovered.)

Best ended up leaving West Ham in 1976 to play for Tampa in the original North American Soccer League (NASL), after missing West Ham’s epic 1975 FA Cup win over Fulham. (Best did not make the squad on match day, but given the apparent cruelty of football, this is perhaps a somewhat shakier confirmation of how much of a role race played in his exclusion.) But there is no doubt about the cultural change that greeted him in the United States: no monkey chants or National Front, although Coker recounts a frightening incident when he got lost in South Boston in 1975 and had to hide from a lynch mob that posed a real threat.

Once Best arrives in the United States, the focus of the film begins to shift away from the man in question, shifting to a lightly detailed panegyric of the NASL and its (ultimately futile) attempt to establish itself as a major sport in the United States. This perhaps also speaks to the uncertain purpose of the film itself, which falls between appealing to nostalgia for British football, selling the modern game to an American audience, and making an impassioned discourse on the broader issue of racism in football more generally. (This may explain the initially puzzling presence of TV actor Tony Dee Head as the main presenter, who is, so to speak, somewhat uncertain, wrapping his voice around names like Mike Trebilcock and Brendan Batson).

Whatever the case, Best comes across with great dignity, especially with the final montage of his various special appearances and honorary degrees in the guise of an elder statesman, and someone who has only a modicum of appreciation for the importance of making a way. As the man himself says: “My father taught me: ‘Clyde, when you go out and play, you don’t play for yourself, you play for the people who come after you.’