17. Tree Rollins
“Tree Bites Man.” Yep, that was an actual headline in the Boston Herald the day after the Celtics and Hawks met in a first-round playoff game in 1983. In that game, Ainge went low and tried tackle Tree Rollins. It was typical for the feisty Ainge to go after someone with an eight-inch and 60-pound weight advantage. In this case, Rollins’ bite was far worse than his bark. Ainge shrieked in pain from the ensuing tangled pile of bodies.
“We got into a little scuffle out on the court by the foul line and he almost bit my finger off,” Ainge said, according to Sports Illustrated’s Ian Thomsen in a 2008 article. “He bit it all the way through. I had to get two stitches.” He raised his right hand to reveal the scar on his middle finger. “Usually, you don’t put stitches on a human bite,” he said. “But just to keep everything in there together, they had to put a couple of stitches in there.” Did he realize that someone was biting him? “Oh, yeah, I knew it was happening,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”
Next: No. 16 -- Melo