Payton Bites, Hawks Blow

February 21, 2004

This Week in the NBA: Payton Bites, Hawks Blow

In the third quarter of Wednesday night's Lakers-Warriors game, a fight broke out between Lakers' point guard Gary Payton and Warriors' pg Speedy Claxton. Ho hum. Sure I like watching brawls just like every savage male does, but they're actually pretty common and really not that newsworthy. Unless...

I didn't realize it at the time, but the brawl I was watching between Payton and Claxton actually had quite a bit of significance. As the close-up camera angles revealed later on, that fight represented the first time since that unforgettable night in the summer of 1997 that a professional athlete had been caught resorting to the most bush league of tactics -- biting his foe. That's right sportsfans, it's right there on tape, and if you haven't seen the footage of it by now, you owe it to yourself to check it out: Gary Payton tried to go Mike Tyson on the side of Speedy Claxton's face.

Now, my first question about this incident is, what compels someone to do this? I know in the case of Tyson trying to bite Holyfield, it was a matter of Iron Mike not having taken his medicine. While we don't encourage psychotic behavior, we do on some level understand it. Mike Tyson is nuts. But Gary Payton, to my knowledge, is not. Yet there he was on Wednesday night trying to gnaw a hole in Claxton's grill. And don't get me wrong -- I would never say that I'm anything close to a clean fighter. If you and I start brawling, you can bet that within five seconds I'll have tried to punch you in the balls. Cheap? Yes. Fighting like a man? Absolutely not. But no matter how you size it up, biting is in a whole other league.

Probably the best thing about this is that despite the act being caught on TV and mercilessly replayed in slow-mo on every highlight show, Payton denied ever trying to bite Claxton. I guess the philosophy is, if you're going to act nuts, you might as well go all the way and plead insanity.

In other news, I'm pretty certain that my hometown Atlanta Hawks are now the sorriest franchise in all of sports. That includes college teams, semi-professional cricket clubs, even my recreational league basketball team. The fascinating thing about the Hawks is that, over the past three seasons, they managed to put together an incredibly talented roster that not only underacheived, but was simply horrendous to watch. The combo of Jason Terry, Glenn Robinson (gone before this season), Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Theo Ratliff may have been the most infuriating foursome in NBA history -- four alleged studs who played a sloppy brand of basketball and refused to co-exist on the court.

Now, the Hawks have blown it up, and bravo to them for doing it. The problem is, in the stead of all the talent they spent years accumulating (not to mention that they gave up promising young players like Memphis' Pau Gasol in the process), they now have a total vacuum. A few weeks ago, they traded Abdur-Rahim and Ratliff to Portland for Rasheed Wallace and then traded Wallace to Detroit for virtually nothing -- players they will lose at the end of the season plus a draft pick. The idea, in theory, is to clear out enough space on their roster to throw their money at a big-time free agent like Kobe Bryant this summer. I can guarantee you two things about this plan: 1) it will not work (say what you want about Kobe's decision-making ability, but he knows better than to join the Hawks), and 2) if for some reason the Hawks were able to pull off the miracle and sign Kobe, they would do so without the knowledge that he had just been sentenced to six years in prison.

I guess the one positive we can take away from this is that at least the Hawks finally have a roster to reflect how truly awful they are. Unlike Gary Payton, my philosophy is, if you're going to bite, it's better to come by it honestly.

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