So, as you may have found out last night, Marcus Smart was the first Celtics reserve to record a triple double since Hambone Williams did it in 1971.
In addition to possessing what is unquestionably the best nickname in the history of professional basketball (non-Harlem Globetrotters division), Hambone Williams’ path to the NBA was pretty remarkable, even by the standards of the era in which he played.
Art Williams’ family moved from Bonham, Texas, to San Diego in 1953 when he was thirteen years old. He picked up his nickname a short time later at Memorial Junior High, “Some guys were going to play football before home room. I had just gotten here and didn’t know anybody. They were choosing up sides and some guy hollered out, ‘Hambone!’ They wanted me to play but didn’t know my name. For some reason, I responded to it.”
The nickname stuck.
Williams didn’t play varsity basketball until he was in 11th grade, and then only after the basketball coach told him to try out when he saw how well Williams played in gym class.
After graduating, Hambone went to Cal Poly-Pomona where he averaged sixteen points a game in his only season. After that first year, his wife got pregnant and he quit the team and left the university to earn a living.
Williams worked a succession of factory jobs in his twenties, but he never gave up on his dream of playing basketball. He found time to play pickup games against guys like Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard. To hear him tell it, he kept pestering Hazzard to get him into the NBA but nothing ever came of it.
When he was 27 years old and working in the shipping department at Convair the NBA awarded a franchise to San Diego, and the team held open tryouts. Williams showed up, tried out, and impressed the Jack McMahon, the Rockets’ coach, with his ability to pass the ball. Hambone made the team, and spent three years with the Rockets.
He averaged better than 21 minutes a game his rookie year, but that was playing for a truly awful team, as the Rockets won only 15 games in 1967, the first year that the NBA played an 82 game season.
In the summer of 1970, the San Diego Rockets traded Williams to the Boston Celtics for a fifth round pick and Larry Siegfried, who had started for the Celtics during their earlier championship run, but who was also nearing the end of his career.
Hambone played with the Celtics through the 1974 season, being part of the first Celtics team to win a title after Bill Russell retired. His style of play fit in perfectly with Tom Heinsohn’s up-tempo game. “I could outrun John Havlicek, and he was fast. I was the fastest guy on the team.” Williams also responded positively to the way the Celtics organization operated, “There was great respect for every player on the Celtics. The difference between the Celtics and Rockets at the time was night and day.” In a 2012 interview with the Miami Herald, Williams said this about his time with the Celtics, “They gave me a role to play, and I played it. We were like a family.”
Williams was 34 years old when the Celtics won that title and his professional basketball career was all but over; the Celtics released him and he returned to San Diego where he signed on with the ABA Conquistadors but only appeared in seven games before they let him go.
Life for Williams wasn’t easy after basketball–it’s a subject that he doesn’t like talking about in detail, “I’ve had some hard times since then, some tough personal problems I’d rather not get into.” On another occasion he described life after retirement this way, “I felt like going somewhere and falling into a hole.”
However, he stuck it out, crediting his upbringing, “My momma taught me right.” And while the Miami Herald said that he had fallen on “hard times,” Hambone doesn’t see it that way at all. “I’ve had a good life. Not many people can work seven years and be retired at 35.*”
Williams is still living in the San Diego area, and he still considers himself a Celtic. “I can remember Red coming up to me after a game and saying, ‘Hambone, you won that game.'” “We had some great guys. We didn’t fight among ourselves. There was a lot of pride. I still have it. I think I will die with it”
(sources: San Diego Union Tribune 1 | San Diego Union Tribune 2 | Miami Herald | Basketball Reference)
*The Tribune article that is the source of this quote reads “retired 25”, but that is almost certainly a typo
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