In fact, he sat out the 1983 season when Tampa Bay wouldn’t budge. Williams went home to his hometown of Zachary, Louisiana. “I hope the Bucs go 0-16 but all my friends make the Pro Bowl,” he said that fall.
The comment hurt McKay, but Williams was hurting much worse. It wasn’t just the turmoil of the contract dispute weighing on him. That year, his wife Janice had died suddenly of brain cancer. They had a 7-week-old daughter, Ashley. It was the darkest period of Williams’ life. He said he could have turned to drugs or alcohol or just given up if he hadn’t had to care for Ashley.
When the Oklahoma Outlaws of the United States Football League, a rival to the NFL, met his asking price in a multiyear deal, Williams took it.
“He simply wanted out,” Bill Tatham Jr., the Outlaws’ CEO said, according to The New York Times. “It only took about an hour to work out a deal.”
“I went for the money,” Williams would tell the New York Amsterdam News in 1986, but said he wished things worked out differently. He would return to the Bucs to work in their front office from 2004 to 2010.
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