'You're Not Playing for Yourself': Clyde Best on Being First

Clyde Best during his time at West Ham in 1977. (photo: PA Images via Alamy)

When a filmmaker set out to tell Clyde Best's story, the introduction did not come through an agent or a studio call sheet. It came through a nephew, who had gone to school with the director. That is how "Transforming the Beautiful Game: The Clyde Best Story" got made, and it is also, in a smaller way, how Best has always described his own path through the sport.

"So far, it's been a good ride," Best told Soccer Down Here's Jon Nelson, ahead of the film's two night stop in Atlanta this week. "Up until now, we haven't had one person come and say this is not good enough. Nobody's done anything like that. So it's been pretty successful, and I'm happy with that."

The film screens Monday and Tuesday at the Loudermilk Conference Center in downtown Atlanta, part of the BronzeLens Film Festival. But the story it tells starts more than fifty years earlier, in a place most of English football's history books still skip over.

First Through the Door

Best left Somerset, Bermuda for West Ham United at seventeen, arriving in England the same year the national team had just won a World Cup. He made his first team debut in August of 1969, and by the time he left the club in 1976, he had made 218 appearances and scored 58 goals, a run that made him one of the first Black players to establish himself in England's top flight.

It also made him a target. Best was regularly abused from the terraces during a era when English football had barely begun to reckon with its own crowds. He has credited West Ham teammates Bobby Moore, Harry Redknapp, and Billy Bonds with helping him get through it, and he eventually became a fixture at Upton Park rather than an exception to it.

Best does not describe that period as a burden he carried so much as a job he was sent to do.

"My responsibility from the time I left Bermuda was to go and do a good job and make it possible for people coming after me, that they can get the same opportunity," he said. "And if you look at football today, that's what's happening, especially in England."

Four of the First

Best was not alone at West Ham. In the spring of 1972, he started alongside Clive Charles and Ade Coker, making West Ham the first First Division club to field three Black players in the same starting eleven. Clive's older brother, John Charles, had already broken that ground for the club a decade earlier, becoming the first Black player to appear for West Ham in the First Division and the first Black player capped at any level for England.

Best remembers Clive and John's mother more than he remembers the noise around them.

"She was a little, small, white lady that had married a Black man in the fifties and sixties, so you can imagine what she had to do," Best said. "She brought us up to respect, treat people the way you want to be treated, and be kind. That's the way we were brought up, and that's the way we went about our job. That's why it never really affected us, because we were mentally tough."

Clive Charles would go on to a second football life in the United States, coaching at the University of Portland and with the U.S. women's national team before his death in 2003. Best had his own American chapter first. He crossed over into the North American Soccer League in the mid 1970s, winning Soccer Bowl '75 with the Tampa Bay Rowdies on a late goal against the Portland Timbers, then leading the Rowdies to the NASL indoor title that followed. He later played for the Timbers himself, on the other side of the rivalry that had made him a champion.

Not Playing for Himself

Nelson asked Best how far the sport, and the country, have come on the things Best spent his career absorbing. Best did not offer a victory lap.

"We've all got a lot of work to do," he said. "You look at the world in general today, and that tells me we have big problems. It's up to us as adults to make sure these things are done properly, because in this day and age, it shouldn't be like that."

What he does offer, consistently, is the same instruction he says his father gave him before he ever left Bermuda: that the game was never really about him.

"My dad always told me, when I left home, that you're not playing for yourself. You're playing for those coming after you," Best said. "When I look and see the boys of color playing football in England now, it makes me feel very proud."

To the young players he talks to now, the message is less about football than about what comes after it.

"Education is the key to success," he said. "You can play football all you want, but you still need common sense and education. Football is part of your life. Education is for your whole life."

The Screening

"Transforming the Beautiful Game: The Clyde Best Story" screens Monday, July 13 and Tuesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Loudermilk Conference Center, 40 Courtland St NE, Atlanta. General admission tickets run $24.50 for youth and $28.50 for adults, with a $60 VIP option that includes a meet and greet beginning at 6:15 p.m. The Atlanta stop is presented in partnership with the BronzeLens Film Festival and Soccer on the Streets.

Best is not the only voice in the film. It also carries interviews with Ian Wright, Geoff Hurst, Viv Anderson, Garth Crooks, Rodney Marsh, Howard Gayle, and Harry Redknapp, among others who watched the ground shift from somewhere close to where Best was standing.

But it is Best's own accounting of it that carries the film, and it sounds a lot like the one he gave Nelson.

"You mustn't let things get you down," he said. "You've got a job to do. You just go on and do it to the best of your ability."