All the Best, Mueller

It is queer coincidence that in the week of George Best's passing away, when the world is coming to terms with his going away despite knowing that it was to happen someday very soon, a former teammate comes visiting. It doesn't end there.
Gerd Mueller ��� in Kolkata with the visiting Bayern Munich team ��� looks like some good natured professor in recent website photos.Someone whose life could not have seen more ups and downs than probably a minor hiccup at the stock market, nothing more. But it is almost eerie, how the two players and their personalities, so polar to each others, bore such uncanny similarities.
First the footballing connection. Both belonged to arguably the greatest decade in modern soccer -- 1964 to 1974 -- where the biggest tally of greats roamed the fields. Of course, Best was perhaps the greatest never to play a World Cup, and Mueller with his record high of 14 goals, was the epitome of World Cup success. But the two couldn't be more different as players. Best was this wispy angel of a footballer who could fashion anything out of nothing on the field, while Mueller, of stocky build and huge limitations as a player, embodied typical German grit.
But few would remember that when the high-profile North American Soccer League was launched in the 1970s attracting fading football stars like Pele, John Cryuff, Franz Beckenbauer and Teofilo Cubillas, Best and Mueller were actually teammates -- with the Fort Lauderdale Strikers!
According to Jeff Rusnak of the Sun Sentinel, Best supplied Mueller with an assist for a goal in a 6-3 away rout of California Sun. It was to be Best's last game for the Strikers; he didn't return with the team, happy as he was to take charge of Bestie's, the bar he owned in Hermosa Beach.
Bestie's brings up the other connection. The drink. By the time, Best reached the Strikers via LA Aztecs and on the way to San Jose Earthquake, he was 32, out of shape and generally considered over the hill. Even over a decade earlier, he was already the elder statesman of drinking and womanising. Mueller was to follow Best's path soon.
Less than a decade after he stabbed the goal against the imperiously fashionable and snooty Dutch side in the 1974 final, a still-confused Mueller was failing to come to terms with now-absent adulation and fading glory. He checked into rehab to battle alcoholism, and supposedly posed nude for a magazine. While the latter was something, Best was usually happily caught without during his prime, in Mueller's case, it left a bitter taste. The money, it appears, was beginning to run short. Best too, did his celebrated rehab rounds -- all to no success, it appears now.
It is widely believed that until Bayern Munich (at the behest of Franz Beckenbauer, they say) stepped in and rescued him from his plight and penury, Mueller was considered a lost cause. A silent, almost bashful goalscorer, much less a
footballer, would have quietly passed into history. Unnoticed.
Sadly, Best had no such luck.