Coach Ernie Pantusso - Character

Character

Ernie "Coach" Pantusso is a slow, forgetful bartender with a gravel voice, caring personality, shred of intelligence, and warm heart. According to actor Colasanto, Coach loves to serve drinks for customers as a bartender, regardless of wage, and has no other ambitions in his life. Moreover, he listens to people and their problems very well. He is still nicknamed "Coach" by everyone, although he has been retired from coaching for years.

Before the show premiered in 1982, Ernie has been nicknamed "Coach" because he was Sam Malone's baseball coach of the Boston Red Sox. As a young man, Ernie dropped out of high school and joined the Navy. He then played both minor league baseball and with the Browns. He later ended up with Boston's farm team, the Pawtucket Red Sox as a coach and also managed in the minors. As discovered in "The Tortelli Tort" (1982), as a coach of the St. Louis Browns, he led the American League in hits by pitches for two consecutive seasons. He moved back to the Majors as Boston's third base coach when Sam Malone was pitching. When Sam succumbed to alcoholism, leading to the end of his baseball career, Sam bought the bar Cheers and hired Coach as a co-bartender.

Coach is a widower of his wife Angela, who died before the show debuted. They have a daughter, Lisa (Allyce Beasley), whom he encourages to end an engagement to a fiancé he disliked in "Coach's Daughter" (1982).

In the first season episode "Pick a Con... Any Con", Coach loses a bar asset of $8,000 in gin rummy games to his competitor George Wheeler (Reid Shelton), making Sam anxious. Sam and Coach bail Harry the Hat (Harry Anderson) out of prison to help them retrieve the money back. They learn from Harry that George is a con artist, who uses different names in other locations. At overnight, Harry ends up losing to George in poker many times, but Sam and Coach realize that Harry's hand would have beaten George's. Harry and George finally admit their betrayal, so they decide to have George win again in the final game for real, but this time, if George wins, George would give back the money. Then Coach decides to play tricks in 'favor' of George, but that cost George the game. Harry leaves with cash, and George chides Coach for making him lose. However, it turns out that poker events were ideas and executions of Harry and Coach to cleverly retrieve money.

In the two-part third season premiere "Rebound", after Sam and Diane broke their on-and-off relationship, Sam relapsed into alcoholism and committed excessive womanizing. Therefore, Coach goes to Diane Chambers's (Shelley Long) apartment to inform her about Sam's relapse, so she brings in her love interest, Frasier Crane, who is a psychiatrist, to help Sam cope with his alcoholism. Coach convinces Diane to be a waitress again, so Sam does not relapse again. Then he convinces Sam to re-hire her as a waitress again, so Diane does not lose her mind again. Then he convinces Frasier to be still Diane's fiancé by making her a waitress again, so Sam and Diane do not start another relationship.

Later, in two-part episode "Coach in Love", Coach is engaged to a widow Irene Blanchard, but she breaks off the engagement after she wins the lottery and is engaged to another man who is a millionaire. He later earns the highest grade in his geography class in "Teacher's Pet" (1985) after deciding to return to school with Sam to earn his degree.