His wife put him in the right direction.
Tim Cone was living a quiet life on a ranch in Quezon eons ago. Every morning he got up, picked up his pen and wrote, then helped his dad out right after.
He dreamt about becoming a novelist.
But not for long. After meeting his would-be wife, Cristina, Cone just wanted to live in Manila and date her.
“That totally screwed everything up,” Cone told Jared Dillinger, Sol Mercado, and Gabe Norwood in the Let It Fly Podcast with a hearty laugh. “My girlfriend was here in Manila and I was in the province. I didn’t wanna be in the province anymore.”
Little did he know, he was already being nudged to his supposed path career-wise. For it was when he decided to live in Manila when he met Fred Uytengsu, who just inherited the task of running the Alaska Aces team in the PBA, in a Bingo Night hosted at the US ambassador's house.
"We (wife and I) went there and we ran into Fred and his wife, Kerry. I knew Fred from high school, and he knew me as a basketball player in high school," he said. "He had no desire about basketball but his dad just purchased Alaska. He had kinda given the team to Fred, who just came back from college."
For weeks, Utengsu would ask Cone to come to the games and ask his opinion about everything basketball. Then, he went out of his way to ask then league coveror Vintage to include Cone in the panel for a season.
He got his break as far as being a member of the Aces after things between then coach Bogs Adornado and guys like Yoyoy Villamin turned sour. Then, as Alaska tried out one interim coach after another, the young American was hired as a consultant of sorts to help out the coaching carousel. Cone said Uytengsu was reluctant to hire an American as coach back then.
“He could have hired me, but he was hesitant because first of all, the PBA is an advertising tool. If they hired an American, it might (cause a) backlash on the advertising that they did. So, that was important in his eyes,” he explained.
Uytengsu, a world-class swimmer turned Iron Man, eventually decided to convince his father to give Cone a shot. The rest, as the saying goes, was history. From 1989 to 2011, Cone steered Alaska to multiple championships, including a rare Grand Slam in 1996. In all, he has won 25 championships in the PBA, and it doesn't look like he has plans of stopping anytime soon.
If it weren’t for his wife “screwing it up,” Philippine basketball wouldn’t have been fortunate to have the coaching GOAT.
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(MDB)