Irv Deal may have appeared to be fragile to some, but he was a tough-minded, left-handed competitor, especially on the tennis courts. He and Max Williams played tennis together, and, for years, between sets at the club, they had talked about prospective business ventures, always wondering if they might some day partner up on a project at the far end of the rainbow. Williams had sold Deal land in the past, and Deal had turned the land into a valuable commodity.
Now, as Max Williams talked, Irv Deal was gazing down at a worn-out land map, ragged, torn, and threatening to fall apart. He was staring at a myriad of possible drilling locations carefully marked in ink, and learning about a chance to strike it rich, or at least parlay a fistful of dollars into a handful of cash, somewhere out West in the Fort Worth Basin, which was nowhere near Fort Worth but in the middle of some ranch in the god-forsaken wasteland of Palo Pinto County.
The map meant absolutely nothing to him, Deal said. Oil and its terminology were a foreign and unfamiliar territory where he had never before traveled. And when it came to the technology of drilling a well, Deal, by his own admission, was clueless and trapped in the dark.
One thing was for certain. There might or might not be oil in the ground. Irv Deal had been given no guarantees. But Max Williams was a hell of a salesman.
One man, Irv Deal believed, might be able to enlighten him. He sat down with Frank West, a good friend, a respected petroleum engineer, who worked with Santa Fe Minerals and was the genius behind the Hanover Drilling Funds.
If anybody understood the good, the bad, and the ugly of the oil business, Frank West did. Deal was sure of it. He did not want an education. It was not important for him to understand the geological and geophysical nuances associated with drilling for oil or finding it. He could hire trained people to do the field work. Irv Deal was simply on the outside, looking on the inside, and searching for direction.
West patiently listened while Deal outlined the basic skeleton of the proposal that Williams had given him. West did not hesitate. “Go for it,” he said. “It has controls.”
Deal frowned. He was still in the dark. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“Do you want the technical definition?”
“No.”
“Simply put, it means you can drill it.”
Irv Deal nodded. He called Max Williams. “Let’s go for it,” he said.
Irv Deal was suddenly in the oil business, and he had never before changed the oil in his own automobile. He was, however, aware of the fact that oil, as often as not, had big sums of money with a lot of zeros attached to it. The business he thought wasn’t that much different from his years in real estate. It dealt with raw land. He had put apartments on top of it. He could dig holes beneath it. He had employed good contractors to build. He would hire good oilmen to drill. He had operated a big business before. And oil was definitely a big business. The only thing that would change was his business card.
He smiled. Pat Holloway had once told him that the oil business would eat him alive. Well, Pat Holloway did not know Irv Deal, not as well as he probably thought he did. Oil was a gamble. He would never argue that point. Any business deal with six or more zeroes attached was a big gamble. Irv Deal had played the game and faced the odds before. They did not frighten or concern him.
For most of his life, Irv Deal had been strongly attracted to money. What it could buy was inconsequential to him. But the ability to make it and a lot of it proved a man’s worth in the hierarchy of a frantic Dallas business climate where too much, no matter how large it might be, was never quite enough.
Max Williams had brought him a proposal. He went back to Williams with another. Deal said, “I’ve got a little money to play with, and I’ve got some friends who still have a little money to play with. I’m not for sure what it will take for us to get started in the basin, but I doubt that raising the money will be much of a problem for either one of us. Who knows? If there’s any oil to be found down there, we’ve got as good a chance of finding it as anyone.”
“What kind of arrangement are you thinking about?” Williams wanted to know.
“Let’s put our two companies together,” Deal said. “You raise half the money, and I’ll raise the rest of it. Then when we hit something, we’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.” The arrangement was nice clean, and simple.
Max Williams went back to his office and thought it over. He would lose half of the profits if the wells happened to be good enough to earn any profits. Deal, on the other hand, would be shouldering half of the financial burden and fifty percent of the risk. It was definitely give and take, and Williams wondered if he were giving more in the long run than he would be able to take. He finally took a deep breath, called Irv Deal back, and told him, “All right, we’ll join up our two companies and do it.”
The two men could have developed a new and single company. Irv Deal, however, didn’t like the idea. He would say, “I anticipated from the beginning that there would one day be animosity rising up between two entrepreneurs who were strong-willed, stubborn, and used to doing business there own way. We could probably work together for little while. But I knew it wouldn’t last. One of us would make a decision or a deal, and the other one wouldn’t like it. That was simply the bitter end of human nature. I thought that Max and I would both be better off with our own companies. In reality, I was preparing to get divorced before we got married.”
Irv Deal established Windsor Energy with less than a half million dollars of his own money. He named it after the street where he lived. Max Williams founded U.S. Operating and sold a third of the company to collect the revenue he would need to make his own set of footprints in the oil patch.
Both men were wheeler-dealers. It’s just that they wheeled and dealed in different ways. They drilled jointly. They would argue separately. They fumed inwardly. Neither was the kind of man who took orders. They gave orders. Each liked to be in charge. They marched to their own drumbeat. Neither owned the same drummer.
But, at the moment, with the wake never ending for real estate and a new day dawning in the oil business, they needed each other – two novices embarking in the turmoil and turbulence of a brave new world. Irv Deal and Max Williams squared their shoulders and readied themselves to confront the sprawling and empty ranchlands that would hold the shallow wells of Palo Pinto County. A few barrels of oil could salve a lot of wounds, even before they were carved into a man’s flesh or his soul.
In real estate, men like Max Williams and Irv Deal had gone from riches to ruin between the rise and fall of a single day. Both were innocent strangers to the whims and wicked ways of the oil business. But it was tattooed with dollar marks. It couldn’t be all bad. They realized that there was no future in looking back or wallowing in regret, so they picked up the dice and rolled them again. Williams promptly placed a call to Randy Stewart, who no longer had any real estate deals to close.
“I’d like to talk to you about a job,” Williams said.
Stewart paused on the other end of the phone. He was out of work. There was no money coming in from anywhere. He was contemplating moving to Colorado to see if he could find a position teaching. Tomorrow had never looked so bleak.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m interested.” He tried not to sound desperate.
“How much money would you need to come work for us?” Williams asked.
“Who is us?”
“Irv Deal and myself.”
Stewart knew that Williams and Deal, whatever the job might be, were starting from scratch, and their cash flow was non-existent. He tried to be fair. In his head, he figured out his house payment, car payment, and living expenses. He gave Williams a number. It was just enough dollars to cover his basic costs.
He heard a long pause on the phone before Williams spoke softly. “That’s more money than I make,” he said. “At the moment, I can’t even afford to buy us lunch.”
He and Randy Stewart