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