I am not going to pretend to know the rules of Cricket. What I do know is that it is very similar to baseball and when not playing, ball players from each sport love to drink. Americans are very familiar with Boston Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs and his drinking exploits of a billion beers (107) while traveling between games.

But aren’t too familiar with David Boon, an Australian Cricketer, that once downed 52 cans of Victoria Bitter beer aboard a flight to England celebrating the Ashes series. I did some nerd calculations and discovered a direct flight from Sydney to London is around 23 hours. This means they had to stop somewhere. I can imagine the horror on the faces of innocent bystanders when the rumbustious Cricket team led by their mustached hero dubbed “The Keg on Legs” burst through the gate in Singapore headed for the nearest bar. Or perhaps they waited on the plane chugging more ice-cold brewskis, the tale is misconstrued.

While in Singapore, Bonnie and company finished their 22nd. In the aftermath, Boonie became a brand ambassador to VB and later said to Weekend Australian Magazine, “We played our cricket in an era where blokes learned never to let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

When a reporter asked Merv “The Magnificent” Hughes, the famed Cricketer and/or Bash Bro with David “The Keg on Legs” Boon, whether the story of chugging 52 beers on a flight from Sydney to London was true, he had a differing opinion. “That’s an abolsute fabrication of the truth,” he exclaimed, and paused just before the silence became awkward. “It was 53 cans.”

Back in his playing days in the 80s, Cricket didn’t entertain “the flop” gesture prevalent in sports today. “You could do everything you enjoyed about Test cricket: you could still bag the umpires, you could still sledge the opposition, probably as captain I sledged my blokes more than I sledged the opposition. I was having an absolute ball, I got to sledge everyone.”

The ill-willed trash talk stayed on the field, off it the opposition enjoyed beers and laughs at events held by their team sponsor, which most of the time was a brewery. Sadly, the game doesn’t appreciate this behavior, though I’d argue the fans would love a character half as entertaining as Hughes.

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Both mini-stories were featured on @LateNightHistory, a sister micro-blog on Instagram. I felt it was necessary to update this blog which I haven’t in ONE YEAR, so a Human Hall OF Fame induction was appropriate.