Boggs on Boyd: 'Delusional drug addict'

Former Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs, in an interview with the Dennis & Callahan show, expressed outrage over the accusations by former pitcher Oil Can Boyd that he was a bigot who used racial epithets in the clubhouse on a daily basis while the two were teammates.

"Absolutely, positively, 100 million percent, I am not a racist, I am not a bigot," Boggs said. "You have a delusional drug addict who let not only his family down, but his team, the city of Boston, Red Sox Nation when it counted most. Now he wants the good people of Boston to go out and spend money on this garbage to support his habit. I find that extremely amusing."

Boyd, in his interview on the D&C show last week [1], said that Boggs had learned the racial epithets from his father. Boggs -- who said that he got along with Boyd "extremely well" when the two were teammates -- rebutted the claim.

"What upsets me the most is that my father, who at the age of 16, did more for this country on Guadalcanal than Boyd will ever do in his lifetime, you’re sitting there and calling me something that in today’s society is so hurtful to so many people, and you have to sell your garbage to people with things like that in it, and call me, ruin my reputation and character, through something like that?" Boggs asked. "I have never, ever in my history of being alive on this planet, 53 years, never, ever said that in the clubhouse. You can take Jim Rice and Don Baylor and Steve Henderson and everybody, ask them and ask anybody on that team if I ever did. Absolutely not. It infuriates me to have this alleged nonsense brought up, and to be put in print, to ruin my character. It hurts me to the core. ... For someone to be labeled one of those words is extreme character assassination."

Boggs' wife, Debbie, also joined the call and also objected to Boyd's characterization of both her husband and his father.

"I have never heard either one of them use the word that starts with an ‘n’ in public or even in private. They never used that word," Debbie Boggs said. We have relatives that are African-American in our immediate family. They are so hurt. They know that we would never … he’s not a racist.

"Obviously there is something very, very wrong with [Boyd]. I guarantee you, if we saw him now, him and [Boyd's wife] Karen, he would say, ‘I didn’t know I said it,’ or, ‘I don’t remember saying it,’ or anything like that. That’s what he does," he continued. "We just assumed people would consider the source and we didn’t want to comment about it. But you can’t just let something like that go."

To listen to the Boggs interview, click here [2].