By now, every Aussie is aware of David Boon (allegedly) drinking 52 cans on a flight to the UK for the Ashes in 1989, but American baseball legend Wade Boggs’s (also alleged) plane drinking exploits are even wilder.
And we say even wilder, we’re talking over DOUBLE Boony’s count of 52 beers — into triple figures.
Aussies are probably most likely to know Boggs from his hilarious Simpsons cameo, as one of the ring ins on Mr Burns’s company softball who suffer an unfortunate fate.
Boggs is seen at Moe’s in a drunken argument with Barney over who the greatest British prime minister — “Lord Palmerston!” “Pitt the Elder!” — and ends up knocked out on the bar room floor.
But in real life he was a legendary drinker, and he once (again, allegedly) drank 107 beers on a day’s flying cross-country in America in the 90s.
The story of a baseball legend’s plane drinking exploits
According to VinePair, Boggs — a 12 time All-Star and Hall of Famer — started drinking immediately in the Boston Red Sox locker room before the team set off for a flight to the West Coast.
He kept drinking at the airport, on the first leg of the flight, during the layover, on the second leg, and then went out with the rest of the team that night.
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Understandably, details surrounding the amount of beers Boggs drank have always been murky — until the man himself confirmed the extraordinary number to Charlie Day on the set of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.
Boggs guest starred in an episode where the characters try to break his record, initially believing it to be 50 beers before upping their estimate to 70.
But Boggs cleared things up with the crew, telling actor Charlie Day the insane number.
“He pulled me aside,” Day said on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, “and said ‘Charlie, really it was 107.’”
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There are more corroborating stories about Boggs’s love for the amber fluid, with former teammate Brian Rose dropping this story once:
“I was sitting next to him on a plane and a flight attendant came by and gave him a case of beer,” he told Baconsportsbeer.
“He slid it under the seat, and I was like, ‘What’s up with that? We only have an hour flight.’
“He said, ‘That’s mine.’
Rose said that Boggs claimed to be unaffected by the drinking.
“Beer doesn’t affect me,” Rose remembers Boggs saying in the same interview.
“I don’t get drunk unless I’ve had at least a case and a half.”
107 is a bit more than a case and a half though, so you’d imagine he felt that!
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