Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 21, 1993 TAG: 9305210063
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON SIRAK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: EDITOR'S NOTE LENGTH: Medium
Losing them is like having the Dodgers move from Brooklyn, seeing the designated hitter take the bat out of the pitcher's hand or having your neighborhood bar replaced by one of those places with hanging plants and a dozen TVs.
Sam was a pitcher who lost more than he won, drank more than he should have and never grew up when it came to people of the opposite sex. That sounds like a lot of major leaguers, past and present.
He turned an unspectacular baseball career into a successful business, realized he had a drinking problem, and quit. That put him well ahead of many players.
But always there was that adolescent attitude that he was better than the rest of us, with every hair in place and with every woman a potential conquest. He lived off the hero worship of his loyal customers.
In that he also had much in common with the guys who get paid for playing games.
His bar, Cheers, was the kind of place you want to go to, the kind of place that is going away.
The bartender would actually throw you a free drink occasionally and would take the time to talk. There weren't a zillion different games on a zillion different TVs.
There were the Red Sox or the Bruins or the Celtics.
You cheered for the home team. (Remember the episode when, acting on a tip, Sam and Coach bet against the Celtics and had to keep it a secret?)
The wisecracks flew fast and furious. The gathering of friends was comfortable enough with each other to let down their defenses, laybare their wounds and laugh at their failures.
We all knew people like this, places like this, at some point in our lives. Perhaps we still do.
But people like Sam, places like Cheers are slipping away.
Players are becoming corporations and bars are owned by them.
It's all becoming just a little too impersonal.
What Sam lacked as a pitcher he more than made up for behind the bar. He gave us 11 great seasons in Cheers. In fact, the whole team did, a team hurt by only one free-agent defection and somehow we all know that hurt Diane more than it did us.
Norm and Cliff, Carla and Woody, Frazier and Lillith were all wide of the mark, and in that they were right on. They set their sights too high or too low, they were too angry or too passive, too smart or just barely lacking that key bit of information to really know what they were talking about.
In that they were very human. And that is why we loved them.
We all want to walk into a bar and have familiar voices call out our names. We all want to watch a game with a roomful of friends who feel the joy of victory and the pain of loss the same way we do.
And I suppose we all want to rub elbows with an ex-major leaguer. Those are opportunities few and far between in this era.
True, Sam had about as much control over his life as he did over his fastball, which is to say not much. But he was a ballplayer from a simpler era, running a bar lost in another time, populated by people who cheered for the home team, win or lose. Cheers is gone. Somehow it feels like baseball lost again.
by CNB