Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 7

Max Williams had always felt a strong kinship with the great open stretches of unspoiled land that bore few footprints and even fewer traces of civilization. That was an integral part of his West Texas birthright.

He had grown to manhood in the Humble Oil Camp of Avoca, Texas, his face blistered by the sand that dust devils, whirling dervishes, and windstorms raked across the empty, troubled wastelands far below the Caprock. It had been a great time for the oil business, and hard-working families attached their hopes and daily livelihood to a company town that was destined to survive only as long as the pump jacks continued to pull great amounts of crude out of the ground. For a time the Williams family lived in Guthrie where the high school occupied one room, and Max’s sister single-handedly formed the entire fifth grade. No restrooms. No running water. No cafeteria. No gym. Williams always said that if his family had remained in Guthrie, he would probably have been a roper. Two years later, the family moved back to Avoca, a town too small even to field a six-man football team.

Williams would never forget the small community where drifters were treated as neighbors and neighbors like family. Avoca was nestled back amidst a rough-hewn, hard-rock, and mesquite-thorn landscape of scarred beauty and enduring serenity. It was, he said, a place where common decency and honesty prevailed, where neighbors stuck together whether times were tough or prosperous, where a man’s full worth was judged by his character, not by how much money he had or didn’t have in the bank.

Max Williams had something of an idyllic childhood. Hard work. Few problems. Didn’t have a lot of money, but neither did any other family in the camp or the town. When you don’t know anybody who’s rich, you don’t have any idea who might be poor. During his thirteenth year, however, the carefree world as he had known it suddenly crumbled around him. His father Claude died after a struggle with cancer, and the pleasantries of childhood scattered with the winds across the prairie. His father had been the family anchor, a good man who never bowed nor bent under the weight of hard work, and now he was gone.

The boy, who would become a man long before his allotted time, stood alone in the backyard of his home wearing a T-shirt, faded jeans, and the best $12.95 cowboy boots that money could buy. There was a scarred, leather basketball in his hand, an old hoop hanging ten feet above him, and, even though his heart was breaking, he refused to shed a tear because he had never seen his father cry. As a melancholy sun dropped below the treetops, with a hot wind stinging his face, his jaws clenched and his eyes unflinching, Max Williams shot basket after basket, soft one-handed jump shots, hour after hour, until darkness tumbled down around his shoulders and night brought an uneasy chill but no relief and little comfort. It was a dark and apprehensive time for the Williams family.

His mother Willie Mae, proud, stubborn, and undaunted, took the life insurance money and completed her education, becoming a teacher. His older sister Theresa had always been his best friend, his confidante, and she became his rock when he needed one. She, probably more than anyone, understood the grief boiling down inside him, the grief he kept to himself when his only outlet was hard work, either on a basketball court or in the oilfield. By age fifteen, Williams was working for farmers during the summer break, and three years later, while waiting on college, he took a job for Humble Oil and Refining Company to help ease the financial burdens shouldered by his mother.

Basketball, however, always basketball, became his salvation and his road out of a lonely town. Randy Galloway wrote in his Dallas Morning News column: Back in the mid-fifties, there was this great basketball player named Max who lived so far out in the West Texas bush that he thought Sweetwater was Dallas. Avoca, forty miles north of Abilene as the tumbleweed blows, was his home court. The town’s population was, and is, 150. But for some strange reason, Avoca was once a breeding ground for hoop heads. With the smallest enrollment of any UIL school in the state (only twelve in Max’s senior class, including nine boys), this dot on the map was known throughout West Texas as a giant killer. The Mustangs took on the big boys in San Angelo, Abilene, and Fort Worth Poly and drummed them. And this Max, he was something. The son of a widowed schoolteacher, he handled the ball like a transfer student from a New York playground. It was Showtime when Max hit the floor – passes came from behind his back and over the bus. He appeared to prefer dribbling between his legs, and he had that weird one-handed jump shot in an era when the two-handed set was still the only way to put it up.

Max Williams was the first Texas high-school player to ever be chosen All-State for three consecutive years. He ended his high school career as the all-time leading scorer in Texas schoolboy history, racking up 3,360 points. He led the Avoca Mustangs to a state championship, was voted the Most Valuable Player in the 1956 High School All-Star Game, and became the only Texan to make high school All-American his senior year. There were several occasions when he scored as many as fifty or sixty points in a game, and sometime the long-range bomber personally outscored the other team. Just Max, the ball, and nothing but net.

The Avoca post office had difficulty handling the mail that came pouring in with college scholarship offers from one end of the country to the other. He was, in the eyes of America’s great basketball coaches, a wanted man. Max Williams, however, was a good Methodist. That good Methodist University in Dallas, SMU, was coached by Doc Hayes, and Hayes had a well-deserved reputation for building a national basketball power in a conference better known for its football teams. Williams politely told the rest of the coaches, including Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, “Thanks, I’m honored that you wrote me, but no thanks.” He had been a Mustang in high school, so he might as well go ahead and play his college ball for the Mustangs as well. Doc Hayes finally made it official by heading down the long, straight-shot road to Avoca and buying Williams a steak dinner. The deal was sealed, medium rare.

On a basketball court, he was a sleight-of-hand magician Here you see the ball. Now you don’t. Moves as unpredictable as a whirling dervish dancing across the prairie lands around his home. He became the biggest gate draw in the Southwest Conference, the point guard, the deadly assassin, who every coach feared. Couldn’t guard him. Could not stop him. If SMU beat you, it was Max Williams coming down the lane with dagger in his hand. He brought a little razzle and a lot of dazzle to a game that had traditionally relied more on hard-nosed, eyeball-to-eyeball, elbow-in-the-gut defense.

Doc Hayes, his own coach simply said, “If he were six foot, ten, he’d hit the rafters every time he jumped. He is the most unusual player I ever saw. He has more native ability, he has the quickest reactions, he jumps the highest, he is the cleverest dribbler, and he has more ways of passing the ball than Bob Cousy. I saw Cousy as a senior at Holy Cross, and he couldn’t do what Max can do with a basketball. You couldn’t change a natural talent like Williams. You just lived with it.”

Williams led SMU to a stunning victory over Kentucky and Adolph Rupp when the Wildcats were ranked number one in the nation and destined to win the NCAA championship, then spearheaded wins over Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt, both rated among the country’s top ten teams. It was little different from days at Avoca. The bigger they were, the more he enjoyed cutting them down.

He was called a high- flying Houdini with a basketball, a player who could build two points in mid-air and out of thin air. He was the driving force that helped engineer a Southwest Conference championship. Williams, however, did have one major obstacle confronting him. Size. Or, at least, lack of it. The proud NBA, even then, frowned on ball players who stood less than six feet tall, no matter how high they could jump. Williams quietly put his basketball aside, buckled down, earned a business degree at SMU while taking a class in geology simply because he needed a course in science. Growing up in an oilfield camp, he had more than a passing interest in the ancient earth around him. After graduation, he took a job selling insurance, but detested every minute of it. There must be a better way, he thought, and if there were, Max Williams was determined to find it.

Max Williams had no avowed intention of going into business for himself until George Smith met with him one afternoon and offered him a chance to potentially earn a small fortune by importing mercury from the badlands of Mexico. “I’ll handle the deal with the miners on the other side of the Rio Grande,” Smith said casually, “and you can make arrangements for the sale of the mercury on the United States side of the border.”

“Is it legal?” Williams asked.

Smith grinned wryly. “By the time it gets to U.S. customs, it will be,” he said.

“It sounds a little like smuggling.”

“Don’t worry,” Smith assured him. “If it wasn’t on the up and up, I wouldn’t be involved. It’s just business. That’s all. The United States needs all of the mercury it can get its hands on. Mexico has the mercury to sell. You and I are just the middle men.”

George Smith’s role was to acquire the mercury. He knew his way around the cinnabar mines of Chihuahua and Sonora. Williams would be responsible for finding the money necessary to pay for the mercury when it reached U.S. customs. There would be as many as three hundred flasks for mercury, and it would all be sold to Associated Metals. Smith and Williams would split the profits. It was a clean and simple deal, and it might go on forever.

But as the months passed, Williams, on a lonely stretch of highway south of San Antonio, decided he was giving up a lot more than he was earning. He was giving up his time away from Dallas, time he would never be able to recover during those long days and weeks away from his wife Carolyn, daughter Laura, and son Wayne, who had just entered the first grade. He thought, why have a family if you become a stranger in the house? It was, he knew, the right time to leave. He was driving across those endless miles for the final time. It was just as well. During the Christmas holidays, the cinnabar mines shut down. No more flasks. No more trips to Laredo. He had imported his last flask of mercury. Might as well stay around Dallas and home, which, in retrospect, became a wise decision.

In the midst of the holidays, Max Williams received an unexpected phone call from Jim Hammond, who had played basketball with him at SMU. Hammond was working with the All Sports Association of Dallas, and, he said, the organization had a serious interest in pursuing a franchise with the newly created American Basketball Association. Would Max like to investigate the possibility of making such a project a reality? Williams grinned. Might as well, he thought. He knew a lot more about basketball than mercury.

Williams telephoned Roland Spaeth, whose brother had originated the ABA and who was on the road, desperately seeking to secure new franchises. Yes, he said, Dallas was definitely on the list of potential cities. Yes, he would be happy to fly to Dallas and outline the league’s strategy for moving forward.

All Dallas needed to do, Spaeth said at a clandestine meeting in the Chaparral Club, was come up with an investment of three hundred thousand dollars, which, if the league’s figures were correct, would certainly be enough money to run a basketball team for a year. Last a season and build for the future. That was the formula, and it did not seem to be a complicated venture. Dallas would need to submit a formal application for a franchise to the league, but, with three hundred thousand dollars in ready cash, how could the ABA turn Dallas down?

Williams immediately made arrangements to meet with Bob Folsom, a good friend and a successful real estate developer, the last four-sport letterman to graduate from SMU. He outlined the plan for obtaining professional basketball. All Dallas had to do was raise three hundred thousand dollars.

Folsom nodded. “We’ve tried to land a franchise in the past,” he said, “and this might be as good a chance as we’ll get. Here’s what you need to do to get your money. Find thirty guys who’ll give you ten thousand dollars apiece.” Folsom had raised money before. He continued, “I’ll draw up a list of potential investors. You just call them and tell them that I asked you to call. Then tell them what you want and why you want it. These are good men. They’ll do anything they can to support Dallas.”

Within two weeks, Max Williams had his three hundred thousand dollars, and Dallas had its franchise. If Bob Folsom wanted a deal done, to no one’s surprise, it was done. There was, however, one stipulation from those who had handed Williams their ten thousand dollar checks. Bob Folsom would take over as president of the franchise. No vote. No need to vote. No opposition. Bob Folsom would look after their money.

From day one, it was a struggle. The league didn’t have the history, the notoriety, or the fan base of the NBA. It had difficulty signing the nation’s top players if any team in the NBA wanted them, and, for the most part, league owners didn’t even know who the nation’s top players were. Williams spent days on the phone with college coaches scattered across the country, scanning basketball magazines, searching out seniors who might have the potential to play. He compiled an unofficial list and sent their names – posted from A to Z – to Roland Spaeth, who erroneously thought Max Williams had assembled a scientific draft order with the best player written in first and the worst player penciled in at the bottom. The Dallas Chaparrals thus drafted names as they appeared in alphabetical order. Matthew Aitch from Michigan was the first name called and Charlie Beasley the second.

The Chaparrals were a week away from their opening game and still didn’t have a radio contract. No one had thought about going out and finding one. The general manager and advertising director for KRLD Radio showed up at Williams’ office and asked about the possibility of his 50,000-watt, clear channel station broadcasting the games. For Max Williams, it was an under-the-wire godsend. KRLD, however, expected the Chaparrals to provide their own play-by-play announcer.

Williams turned to Terry Stembridge, who had just signed on to work with him in the business office. In the back of his mind, Williams remembered that the young man had previously broadcast Kilgore High School and Kilgore College basketball games. Was pretty good at it, too. He had heard the tapes. Williams leaned back in the chair behind his desk and told Stembridge, “You’re it.”

“I’m what?”

“Our radio voice.”

Terry Stembridge did not merely broadcast games. He was a master storyteller. He painted word pictures, and it sometimes seemed that the ninety-feet of action, from basket to basket, was more of a theatrical stage than a sporting contest. With Stembridge behind the microphone, Chaparral fans did not hear the game on radio. They watched the game on radio as surely as if they had been seated in the stands.

The Chaparrals, frankly, were not viewed as the city’s number one attraction.. Interest lagged. Attendance was poor and, on some nights, virtually non-existent even though the Chaparrals finished second and reached the 1968 Western Division finals before losing to the New Orleans Bucs. The club ran out of money four times, and four times Williams managed to scrape together just enough cash, pledges, or IOUs to keep the franchise from falling apart. He served as general manager and even coached for a season. He endured four hard, grueling, and disappointing years.

The bleeding had not stopped, and the Chaparrals were bled dry. In desperation, the owners sold the franchise to a group in New Jersey, but the league refused to approve the deal. The money was right. But, alas, the potential new owners, according to rumors, had ties to the Mafia. Good for New Jersey, maybe. Bad for the ABA. Terry Stembridge was even told, in a quiet and private conversation, “When you pack up your microphone and head to New Jersey, you’d be a lot better off carrying a machine gun than a suitcase.” As a last resort, owners leased the Chaparrals to San Antonio for a dollar as long as San Antonio guaranteed operating expenses. The team’s name was changed to the Spurs, and they became the hottest draw in town. Terry Stembridge packed up his microphone and became the only member of the front office to move south with the team. The tamales sounded a lot more enticing than a New Jersey machine gun, and he broadcast Spurs games for the next six years.

Four years at the helm of the Chaparrals had been taxing for Max Williams, and he began toying with the idea of branching out into the petroleum business. His wife’s uncle, Glenn Cooper, owned a small oil company in the West Texas town of Seymour, and Williams already had experience working in the oil patch during his summers with Humble. Bob Folsom thought otherwise. “This isn’t the right time,” he told Williams. “Companies are only allowed to produce thirteen or fourteen days a month. The price is low, and a few dry holes will drive you out of the oil patch. There’s just not a whole lot you can do with oil these days. If you want to go where the money is these days, go into real estate with a good broker like Claude McClennahan.”

Williams recognized sound advice when he heard it. If nothing else, Bob Folsom knew real estate. He had made several fortunes developing raw land. Max Williams went knocking on Claude McClennahan’s door and again, entered a high-powered, pressure-cooker world of business. His job, on the surface, was simple enough. Max Williams tracked down pieces and parcels of raw land and negotiated deals for real estate developers who were building shopping centers, office buildings, industrial parks, warehouses, retail stores and homes, creating a new suburbia on empty farmlands, primarily north of Dallas. Property selling for ten thousand dollars an acre was suddenly worth as much as eighty thousand dollars an acre.

Money was flowing like fine wine, and the intensity behind a man’s assignment to find new land and new deals was suffocating. At the time, Williams began working with Randy Stewart, fresh out of law school and working as a commercial real estate closer. For several years, Williams would handle the intricacies of placing a buyer together with the seller, the right land with its user. He took responsibility for financing the real estate packages, then stepped aside and turned the deals over to Stewart to hammer out the fine print and handle the legal work of each transaction. Williams liked satisfied clients and big commission checks. Stewart made sure that the deals were tightly tied together and would go through the legal process without a hitch. Max Williams admired the young man’s grit and energy. Stewart was smart, and he had no problems with working long hours on short notice. Wherever he went and regardless of what he might do to earn a living, Williams knew, there would always be a place for Randy Stewart.

It was during the halcyon days of the early 1970s, and Dallas was known as Big D for a reason. The city possessed a great deal of money, and Dallas had a lot of daring, high-rolling men and women who possessed a great deal of money. Dallas, the myth and the reality, was being nailed together with a handful of promises and an armload of good, honest, make-you or break-you entrepreneurial greed.

The right real estate wizard with the right vision on the right side of town could make greed both fashionable and socially acceptable. For many, deals were consummated in saloons, in taverns, in coffee shops, in back rooms, in board rooms, in hotels – illicit, illegal, immoral, or otherwise – on golf courses, at cocktail parties, over dinner, over phones, overnight, and with a handshake. Max Williams had become part of a business where a man’s money kept score of his wins and losses

Within a year, Claude McClennahan’s company had sold more commercial real estate than any other business in Dallas County. Max Williams did not have a magician’s touch, nor did he ever intimate that he did. He made his fortune the old fashion way, which reflected his West Texas upbringing. He worked hard. He worked long hours. He had no idea what the word quit meant. Max Williams tracked down the land, and money had an uncanny way of finding him. No razzle. No dazzle. No wild speculative ventures. His was a sound, reasonable voice in an easy-come, easy-go, run-away world of real estate.