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