If you’ve seen this week’s episode of ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’, then you’ll be aware of the legend of baseballer Wade Boggs.

A Hall of Fame third baseman, Boggs played the majority of his 18 year career (he debuted in 1982) for the Boston Red Sox, also having stints with the New York Yankees (a bit of a sore point for Boston fans) and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He was a 12 time All Star and a World Series champion who won 5 batting titles and amassed 3010 career hits – one of only 28 men in history to pass the 3k mark.

He was also in that episode of The Simpsons in which Mr Burns rigged the Power Plant softball team’s final by stacking them with Major Leaguers, where he was knocked out at Moe’s Tavern by Barney Gumble in an argument over whether Lord Palmerston or Pitt the Elder was England’s greatest ever Prime Minister.

But perhaps most notoriously of all, as explored on Always Sunny this week, he drank beer. A lot of it. So much beer that you’ll feel drunk just thinking about it. He poured beer on his breakfast cereal. He bathed in beer. He once beat his entire Red Sox team (including coaches) at beer pong on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles (becoming the first known ‘Mile High Beer Pong Champion’). And, as the legend has it, he once drank 64 beers on a similar cross-country flight to L.A. SIXTY-FOUR! (And he has allegedly claimed that the number doesn’t included the beers in the lounge before the flight, the stopover beers or the beers on the town when they arrived – he told Charlie Day he actually hit triple figures for the day’s drinking!)

As amazing as that urban legend may be, it doesn’t sound very realistic, right? Like, wouldn’t that amount of imbibing leave any mortal man with anything short of a steel liver in a body bag? Let’s investigate.

Most folk tales like this have an air of exaggeration about them. The 107 number is a new one and we can basically discount it because he was probably just joking or maybe Charlie Day was joking and also it was over a longer stretch of time anyway. The 64 on the flight is the iconic figure, a figure that has fluctuated between 50 and 70 depending on who you asked before seemingly settling on 64, which was made famous in a college football sign.

A flight from Boston (or New York) to LA takes about 5 hours. There’s no way he drank 13 beers an hour for 5 hours, let’s rule that out – it’d mean a beer every 4 minutes and 40 seconds. So we’ll assume he started counting from the time he got to the airport. Maybe he even knocked a few back with breakfast that day. Plus a stop in there to refuel on the plane. That makes it anywhere up to 10 hours. So now we’re at a reasonable time frame – but how does a guy, even a pro baseballer built like a horse, handle that much alcohol?

A can of beer holds 330mL. Multiplied by 64 and you have over 21 litres (we’ll assume there’s some spillage too). The average human bladder holds around 3 beers worth of liquid. Let’s say Boggs is superhuman in that regard, he’s still getting up to piss at least a dozen times. That’s do-able. He might be a little dizzy and wobbly by the last trip but that’s not a disputable possibility.

The other factor working in his favour is that Wade Boggs was a known advocate for Miller Lite. That particular beverage has an alcohol content of 4.2%, which is far from heavy. It’s about the same (in kiwi terms) as a Tui or Export Gold. Student beers that taste sweet and watery. For a mature and practiced drinker such as Boggs, he wasn’t gonna have any issue with the taste going sour after that third dozen or anything.

His blood-alcohol content? Yeah, that’s dicey. 700 grams of ethanol digested over a 10 hour period averages out to a fatal dose. As in, statistically he should be dead from that. What restores this legend’s credibility a little is that Boggs was no lightweight. According to teammates who played with him in this era, that feat was no one-off. Boggs always had a beer in hand.

Here’s pitcher Jeff Nelson on Bogg’s mythical in-flight exploits:

“Now, at the time, we were flying out of New Jersey, so it was somewhat of a drive from Yankee stadium to the airport in New Jersey. Wade would drink another couple of beers on the bus to the airport. At the time, we were flying this older airplane, it couldn’t make it across the country without refueling, and it wasn’t the fastest airplane in the sky. So we would stop in North Dakota or something. Wade would drink about a half rack between New Jersey and North Dakota, and it would take about a half-hour to an hour to refuel once we got there, so he’d have a few more beers while we were grounded in North Dakota.

Once we got back up in the air, Wade would drink another 10, 11, 12 beers on the way out to the west coast. The whole flight from coast to coast usually took us well over 7 hours. We’d touch down at Sea-Tac, hop on the bus headed to the Kingdome, and Wade would have another beer or two on the bus. Then, all of us would get to the Kingdome and unpack our bags and sit around and BS with each other, and Wade would have a beer in his hand the entire time. He was always one of the last people to leave the club house too. So I’d say that all in all, he drank over 50 beers on the trip, and this wasn’t just an isolated incident, he did that almost every time.”

Wade Boggs was on ‘Pardon The Interruption’ when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, and they actually asked him about this famous flight. He denied the 64, refusing to give a number at all, but basically implied that he didn’t tend to hold back on the beersies. As he said:

“You know you get bored on a cross-country flight from Boston to LA so you gotta spend the time doing something”

So it’s doubtful that he managed 64 – and impossible that he drank them all on the plane – but he definitely did slam plenty back. Perhaps the most remarkable part of the story is that he reportedly went out the next day and grabbed a couple hits and a walk or something close.

Boggs’ efforts are historic, however most Australasian readers were probably thinking from the very mention of ‘sportsman drinking on plane’ that it all sounded eerily familiar. What about Boony!?

That’s true, there also happens to be an iconic beer-swiller of the South Pacific too: former Australian test cricket opener David Boon. The man slammed back 52 beers on a flight from Aussie to England and still walked off the plane! He even made it to a XXXX sponsors event that evening.

Wicketkeeper Rod Marsh had allegedly hit the half century mark previously in 1983 with 51 (or maybe it was 44, there’s debate), though he had to be carried mumbling and drooling onto British soil as a result. Boon set out to beat that in 1989. The story goes that with the descent into Heathrow fast approaching, Boon was stuck on 49 and so the pilot made a couple of loops just to make sure he brought up his most famous half-century. Coach Bob Simpson was so furious that he almost put David Boon straight onto a plane back to Australia – except that he was too worried he’d just keep on drinking.

It was a decent series for Boon too, as although he didn’t manage a century, he did hit three (more) fifties, including a 94, and averaged 55.25 for his 442 runs.

His mark of 52 beers was a 12-pack short of Boggs’ but it’s also a little more reliable, if only because the flight takes more than twice as long as Boggs’ 10 hour venture and the lesser quantity, although still statistically fatal, is easier to comprehend. Plus even though Boon has never admitted to the feat (calling it a fairy tale), he did have a number of very specific witnesses to the triumph of mind over liver. Geoff Lawson, not a drinker, kept score on a sick bag which unfortunately was never recovered as the plane landed.

There’s also the certainty that each of these burly men were outliers in their bodies’ ability to process alcohol. Probably through years of intense training. Just as there are Buddhist monks in the Himalayas that have mastered the art of levitation through a lifelong dedication to the art, there are moustachioed sportsmen from the 1980s whose livers can withstand a volume of alcohol that would kill a horse twice-over.

Also, there’s no way of measuring the litres and litres of beer that never quite made it from the can to the mouth, left soaking instead on the hirsute upper lips of these two great sporting heroes.