Reusse: Basketball coach Jay Pivec puts his memories, his yarns, his time in the game into words

Jay Pivec’s tenure as the men’s basketball coach at the Northern branch of Montana State University in Havre, Mont., had ended in March 1990. Jay and Mary Louise put their then three kids in the Oldsmobile station wagon and headed back to the Twin Cities.

Target Center was being finished. Pivec landed a job at what was the Northwest Health Club on the lower level.

“I opened the club the first day,” Pivec said. “I had the 5 a.m. shift.”

Pivec was leaving work and walking on Hennepin Avenue to a bus stop. He was near Minneapolis Community and Technical College and decided to say hello to Ralph Powell, an acquaintance and then the athletic director at MCTC.

Powell said if Pivec wanted to resume coaching, this could be his lucky day.

Following an 0-22 season, the MCTC coach had resigned that very morning. Powell took Pivec down to the office of school President Earl Bowman, and about an hour later MCTC had a new men’s basketball coach.

“I went home and told Mary Louise, ‘I have a new job,’ ” Pivec said. “She asked, ‘What does it pay?’ I had to tell her: ‘Seven thousand.’ ”

Mary Louise wasn’t impressed. Fortunately, MCTC came up with a financial kicker for Pivec: teaching extension courses at the state prison in Oak Park Heights.

Ron Gates had been at Anoka-Ramsey Community College as a basketball assistant. He was interested in doing the same at MCTC. “I told Piv that I had a line on a couple of Milwaukee kids who were players,” Gates said. “He said, ‘You’re hired.’ ”

Twenty years and Pivec and Gates were a tandem with tremendous success at MCTC. The men’s and women’s programs were dropped in 2010. The Student Senate wanted to put the funds for basketball elsewhere and school President Phil Davis was the willing executioner for the programs.

Pivec started a basketball program at Dakota County Tech, spent five years as an assistant to John Tauer at St. Thomas and left official coaching in 2018.

He has now written a memoir, “The Book of Piv,” 173 pages and self-published. There are sure to be many wonderful tales, but this quirky fact — happened upon Friday when trying to contact Gates — was a prizewinner in my opinion:

In the early ‘90s, a sales person for these new gizmos called cellphones walked into the gym. Pivec and Gates each bought one. They were given consecutive numbers … and neither has changed. Piv ends in 6, Ron in 7, that’s it.

“Let me tell you this,” Gates said. “I grew up in New York, playing basketball on a playground with one court in Queens. I was coached by Marvin Kessler, a legend of New York basketball. He was famous for his lectures at the Five-Star Basketball Camp, which really started it all for the summer camp world.

“So, I know outstanding coaching. And Piv, for all the irreverence — he was very good. He took a school with a minimum of resources, and a lot of players overcoming obstacles and trying to find their way. And we competed for national championships."

One young man facing greater obstacles than most was Josh Bausal. He had done a stretch in Joliet prison in Illinois. He had tattoos all over, including covering his face, when he arrived in Minneapolis for a chance to attend MCTC and play basketball.

Twenty years later, he answers his cell here in the Twin Cities, there’s an introduction and you mention the topic — Jay Pivec — and there’s an enthusiastic burst of words.

“Jay Pivec is the father I never had,” Bausal said. “I give him all the credit for the life I’ve been able to lead. He took the mask off me, physically and emotionally.”

Pivec found someone to remove the facial tattoos and others with messages Bausal no longer wanted to send.

“He accepted me as a man; treated me the same as everyone else,” Bausal said. “And Ron Gates, too. Those are my guys. I played two years at MCTC, went to Upper Iowa, played basketball and got a four-year degree.

“This is home. Been driving a forklift at Target Field for 15 years. I have a business as a mover and fixing up homes. And I’ve never been back to Illinois.

“It was a sad day for all of us who came through MCTC with Piv and Ron, and for women’s players, too, when they dropped basketball at the school — dropped that connection for people right there in the middle of city."

You will be able to read all about it, a mix of success stories and quirky yarns, in “The Book of Piv.”

“I was told hundreds of times, ‘Piv, you should write a book,’” Pivec said. “Now, some of those same people are saying $17 is too much for 173 pages.”