Ron Jacobs, the American regarded as the man who changed the way basketball is being played in the country today, passed away on Thursday, three days before he would have turned 73.
The former Loyola Marymount coach has been bedridden since 2002 and finally succumbed after a gallant fight from a massive stroke that kept him unconscious for close to the last 14 years.
Jacobs was the man at the helm when then-basketball godfather Eduardo ‘Danding’ Cojuangco put up the Northern Consolidated squad that won the Jones Cup in 1995 over a United States squad that boasted of several future NBA stars.
It was also Jacobs who coached a Philippine Team led by Hector Calma to an upset of mighty China in the Asian Basketball Confederation, the forerunner of the Fiba Asia, Youth gold medal at Rizal Memorial Coliseum.
That squad was supposed to start bringing the Philippines back to Asian supremacy—with the Jones Cup being just a tournament on the way to there—only for People Power to come and topple the Marcos dictatorship that led to Cojuangco going on exile and scrapping the program altogether.
Jacobs returned to the Philippines in 1994, took up the coaching job for San Miguel Beer later also on the request of Cojuangco, and changed the way the game is played in the league with his stint with the Beermen.
The drillmaster ordered a pace of play that was so slow that scoring dropped several notches and put premium on team defense.
Jong Uichico, now the TNT coach, has so far won nine titles in the PBA and is the closest thing to a Jacobs clone in the PBA.
“Coach Ron was like a father to me,” Uichico said.
Though he failed to lead the Beermen to a conference title, he went on to steer a rag-tag SMB crew to two straight title series appearances in 1998, the year after the PBA Press Corps awarded him the Coach of the Year citation.
He was named as Philippine Team coach in 2002 for the Asian Games by then PBA commissioner Jun Bernardino.
Jacobs was in the midst of preparing that team for the Asiad when the massive stroke happened.