This year’s Big Slick charity event in Kansas City, Missouri, is missing one high-profile guest, following the death of George Wendt. But Wendt’s nephew Jason Sudeikis paid tribute to the late Cheers star during a kickoff press conference at the Children’s Mercy Hospital on Friday, May 30.
“He was an amazing guy,” Sudeikis said, shortly before his microphone cut off, as seen in the KSHB video below. “That’s him. That’s him messing with the soundboard. Like, ‘Don’t talk about me.’ Just good Midwestern humility and sound know-how.”
And Cheers fans will be glad to know Wendt was just as toast-worthy as his character, Norm. “With regard to my uncle George, I mean, there’s that old saying of like, ‘Don’t meet your heroes’ — usually ‘[because] they let you down,’ I assume, is the back half of that statement — but he’s not one of those people,” Sudeikis said. “He’s as fun and kind and as warm as any character he played on television or in films.”
The Ted Lasso star also spoke about his uncle’s “incredible influence.” Wendt showed him, for example, that acting is “a career you could actually have, if you really care about it” and “also a career where you could meet the love of your life, like his wife, a.k.a. permanent girlfriend, Bernadette.” (Wendt wed Bernadette Birkett in 1978, and she voiced Norm’s offscreen wife, Vera, on Cheers.)
Sudeikis went on: “He also always kept connected to his family, to his roots, both in Chicago, of course, where he’s from, but then also the time he spent here, going to Rockhurst College and to a bar called Mike’s a whole bunch, where I think he logged, maybe, 18 credit hours. But it was all in preparation of a job that we all know him for, on Cheers. All time well spent. But yeah, we miss him greatly, and yeah, I love him dearly.”
Wendt, who died in his sleep on May 20 at age 76, was one of the stars who returned to Kansas City in 2010 for the very first Big Slick, an annual event that raises money for Children’s Mercy with the goal of eradicating pediatric cancer.
“George was always willing to participate,” Rob Riggle said at the press conference on Friday. “He was always an active participant in Big Slick, whether he was umpiring the game, on stage, whatever it was. He was easy with a laugh and always fun to be around.”
Paul Rudd said, “It’s going to be felt, his absence this year, even though he’s so a part of it just as much as any of us. He is a really, really sweet guy. I mean, I love him.”
And Eric Stonestreet recalled hanging out with Wendt at a hotel at a time that Wendt got a craving for cheeseburgers from the Kansas City chain Winstead’s. “He’s like, ‘We should send somebody to order us a bunch of them.’ And miraculously, a hundred cheeseburgers showed up,” Stonestreet said. “And we sat there and toasted each other with cheeseburgers. It was perfect.”