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Real life Sam Malone is laid off
Sometimes you may want to go where everybody knows you’re name, where they’re always glad you came, but at the Boston bar, which inspired the ’80s to early 90s television show starring an ensemble cast including Ted Danson, there’s one less bartender around to help make that happen.
Eddie Doyle, a bartender at “Cheers” for 35 years and inspiration for the Sam Malone character on the show, has lost his job after being laid off. The bar’s owner sited a tough economy and sagging business as the cause of Doyle’s layoff along with several other bar staff in an Associated Press article written by Jay Lindsay. Doyle, another casualty of a worldwide travel slump, says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.
Doyle began working at the bar in 1974 when it was called the Bull & Finch Pub.
His last day at Cheers will come with a going-away party later this month on Tuesday, March 24 at the Hampshire House, upstairs from the Bull & Finch. He also confirmed that he’ll be getting a weekly check until the end of the year, but alas, no tips.
The Associated Press story goes on to say:
Doyle, who will give his age only as around 66, described his job in the early years as “ringmaster.” People of all stripes, from college professors to working men, would meet to hash out the day’s events, give one another a hard time and occasionally cause mischief. He recalled a group of regulars who got in trouble racing wheelchairs at a hospital where he was staying with an illness, just before stopping in to surprise him with a party on the night “Cheers” made its debut in 1982.
The clientele changed when the TV show took off, and Doyle has had plenty of brushes with famous people. Kevin Costner stopped by once, and Doyle shook hands with Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The TV show’s entire cast has been in and out of the bar, though probably not for inspiration.
Doyle was nothing like his TV counterpart, the womanizing barkeep Sam Malone. He’s married to the same woman he met at the bar when he was a regular there in the early 1970s …
The article ends saying: He’ll be leaving a place best known for the fiction it inspired but was actually a lot like it, despite the sometimes goofy plots, Doyle said. The interactions between characters remind him of what the real Cheers was: “a bunch of eccentrics that could get together and become friends,” Doyle said.
Read the full article here or visit the Cheers bar Web site here.
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