25 Facts About Sam Malone

Sam Malone is a recovering alcoholic and a notorious womanizer.

Sam Malone has an on-again, off-again relationship with the bar waitress Diane Chambers for the series' first five seasons until her departure from the series.

Sam Malone appears in "The Show Where Sam Malone Shows Up", a crossover episode of the spin-off Frasier.

At the time the series debuted in 1982, Sam Malone has been the bartender and owner of Cheers for five years.

Chronologically within the series, Sam Malone, who is Irish Catholic, dropped out of high school in his senior year to play professional baseball.

Sam Malone began his career in the minor leagues, where he met Coach Ernie Pantusso.

Sam Malone eventually became a relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, wearing number 16.

Sam Malone's major league career lasted approximately five years; he specifically mentions having pitched in 1973, and was a member of the 1975 AL champion Red Sox team.

However, in "Sam Malone Turns the Other Cheek", Sam Malone reveals that he avoids "married, underage, and comatose" women, so he does have some ethical standards.

In "Teacher's Pet", Sam Malone earns his high school diploma despite an overall bad grade from the high school geography teacher, with whom he had a brief affair while he was her student.

The episode "Sam Malone's Women" reveals that Sam Malone was married to his somewhat more sophisticated ex-wife, Debra.

Diane finds this out from Coach, and involves her new love interest Frasier Crane in helping Sam Malone slowly regain his sobriety in the following episode, "Rebound, Part Two".

In "Cry Harder", Sam Malone is able to buy back the bar from the Lillian Corporation after Sam Malone has saved the corporation from financial victimization by Robin Colcord, Rebecca's lover.

However, in the following episode "Love Is a Really, Really, Perfectly Okay Thing", Sam Malone devastatingly tells Rebecca that he has no feelings for her.

In "The Days of Wine and Neuroses", Sam Malone rejects Rebecca's advances one night while she is drunk over her doubts when now-impoverished Robin proposed to her.

Unbeknownst to Sam Malone, she slept with Frasier, which she does not reveal to Sam Malone.

In "Mickey's 60th Birthday", Sam Malone forgets Rebecca's birthday and begs Mickey Mouse to sing "Happy Birthday to You" as her birthday present.

Sam Malone's baldness was revealed at the 42nd Primetime Emmy Awards.

Steve Craig from the University of North Texas wrote in his 1993 journal that Sam Malone is a parody of "traditional male values" and of a negative stereotype of masculinity.

Glen Charles, a creator of Cheers, considered Sam Malone "a spokesman for a large group of people who thought that [the women's movement] was a bunch of bull and look with disdain upon people who don't think it was".

Sam Malone further wrote that Sam never suffers from consequences of his promiscuity and has been happily single and childless, while it portrays Carla Tortelli as a "nymphomaniac" who regrets her own promiscuities, which lead to out-of-wedlock pregnancies.

Sam Malone has been compared with some of Ted Danson's later roles.

Television critic Phil Rosenthal from Los Angeles Daily News said Danson's performance as Sam Malone was irreplaceable and that no other actor could capture Sam Malone's "sexiness, vulnerability, and goofiness".

Rosenthal credited Sam Malone for helping the series survive by becoming the show's central character.

The role of Sam Malone earned Ted Danson two Emmy Awards as the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series: one in 1990 and another in 1993.