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Glen "Big Baby" Davis and The $500,000 Diet

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

Sports contracts include all sorts of bonuses in order to incentivize behavior, but this one caught my attention:

The Boston Celtics are bringing back Glen "Big Baby" Davis, who agreed to a two-year deal that could pay $6 million . . . Davis will receive $5 million in base salary and can earn an additional 500,000 per season for meeting certain weight clauses, a source told ESPN.com's Chad Ford.

Davis, of course, has a history of weight problems, which may partly explain why he fell out of the first round in the 2007 NBA Draft and also why he struggled to attract much interest as a free agent this off-season (another reason is his height relative to position -- 6'6 power forwards usually aren't coveted).

The incentives in his contract suggest that Davis believes his weight woes are his own fault, or at least primarily his fault, rather than the fault of unusual metabolism or something else that would be beyond his control. After-all, if he thought his weight problems were beyond his control, then he presumably wouldn't ascribe much value to the incentive.

With obesity rates soaring in the U.S., it will be interesting to see if more athletes encounter weight woes and if, correspondingly, teams turn to $$ as a way of discouraging players from putting on the pounds.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on August 17, 2009 (boomark / email).