Red Sox Slap Fan with Lifetime Ban from Fenway Park over Racial Slur

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The Red Sox have levied a lifetime ban from Fenway Park on a fan who used a racial slur at Tuesday night’s game against the Baltimore Orioles.

Calvin Hennick, a white man and a former Globe freelancer, took his biracial, six-year-old son to Fenway with his black father-in-law. As a young Kenyan woman finished singing the National Anthem, Hennick says the middle-aged white man next to him leaned over and said, “It was too long, and she n—ed it up.”

When Hennick asked the man if he heard him correctly, the man replied, “That’s right. And I stand by it.”

https://twitter.com/CalvinHennick/status/859592965769109505

“Yes, it was a racial comment,” Red Sox president Sam Kennedy said Wednesday. “It was a racial comment used to describe the national anthem that was taking place, the performance of the national anthem. It was sickening to hear.”

Hennick notified Fenway security, who ejected the man and later issued the lifetime ban. Both Kennedy and the Boston Police Department’s civil rights division reportedly contacted Hennick following the episode.

“This man is the perfect embodiment of the sort of racist dipshit that has come out of the woodwork in recent months: loud and brash and proud of their bigotry, until it might cost them something as small as being kicked out of a baseball game,” Hennick said on Twitter. “And then they turn into the meek cowards they’ve always been.”

Orioles outfielder Adam Jones sparked an intense conversation on race relations in Boston earlier in the series, when he said he was taunted with racial slurs and pelted with a bag of peanuts at Fenway Park earlier this week. At the behest of Mookie Betts and others, Sox fans gave Jones a standing ovation during his first at-bat Tuesday night—not long after Hennick’s incident.