Here's a story for you Hanke-

For those of you who know me, I loooove playin up the boards...and if there is a shot outside of first arrow I'm all over that like white on rice in a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snow storm...Some people will ask me where I learned to play up the 3 board...well...I tell them "funny you should ask...turns out there's a great story there..."

I remember one night at practice Halwe was walkin around and I just looked at him and said "Hey Halwe, come show me somethin'." He gave me that look...the one where he would kind of tilt his head one way and you just knew that he'd be thinkin' "alright, whatever...sure" He called me over to lane 8 (i think that's the one on the left side of the house with the brick pillars)

Halwe said..."Panek, I'm going to teach you how to puck 3." I looked at him and said..."what the hell are you talking about?" He said..."go get a ball that has a little surface that will get into a good roll." I went and picked up my x factor reloaded (some of you know it as grandma's wafflehouse...thats another story but not for now).

Halwe said "here's what you're going to do. You're going to stand on 5 and throw up 3." Needless to say I looked at him like he was crazy...he would later tell me that he was. heh heh heh SO anyway, there i was on lane 8...and Halwe was telling me to stand on 5 and throw up 3...which is amazingly close to those stupid brick pillars. He told me to just fluff it up the 3 board to get it into a good roll and the ball would do the rest. My first attempt, I tugged into about 6...

Halwe then said, "wait...I'll show you." He picked up a ball...stood 5...hit 3...and there were 10 in the pit. He turned around and with a grin on his face...and my jaw on the ground...told me to give it another shot. This next time i hit 5 and it didn't work out so well for me. Halwe decided to show me again...He stood up...stood 5, hit 3, and flushed the rack. This time, he did that strut that you would sometimes see him do...you know...the one where he stands up real straight, both hands behind his back, big grin on his face...if you guys ever learned from him...you know exactly what i'm talking about. If he was a pea****, his feathers would have been fanned out so wide they'd have reached from STL to my home in Jersey.

SO this time i got up and this time pitched out to the one board and it didnt' come back all the way. Halwe then got back on the approach without saying anything...flushed another shot the same way...did the strut while coming back...he saw me with a huge grin on my face...he looked me straight in the face and said, "did you see that?" i said "yeah..." and he said " good because i'm not doing it again...3 times is pushing my luck."

And that's the story about how I learned how to play the ditch...against some brick pillars, with the greatest coarch i've ever had...just having a good time on a thursday night after the major city league. Since then, I've gotten much better at "pucking 3"...since then the ditch has been so much fun to play...almost as much fun as it was to learn in the first place.










There was another instance...don't have the same details but halwe told me about 2 months ago that this is one that stood out in his head....I think it was at St. Claire Bowl where Halwe got me and princess (Jay Collins for those of you who don't know) to play a little left of 4th arrow...for those of you who know me, thats very uncharacteristic of me....not only did he get us to do it..but he bascially taught us how to do it during the tournament. the first attempt was a little off...but it ended up working well for both of us.

what some people may not get is that Halwe had a way of saying things that would reframe what was going on in your mind to make you be nothing but positive. He'd have you believing that you were going to win a tournament when you were back 200+ pins. I remeber at the brickyard one year he gathered me and the rest of the team around and told us that he was going to hypnotize us. Being on the B team, and having a rough start, we didn't have a shot in hell..but halwe had us believing we did.

And that's the thing about Halwe. Halwe, although rather excentric at times (his chosen attire for league and states) and although seemed just "out there" at other times (mooning stone 9 pins...occasionally humping a ball return...and doing shots of pepperming or whatever the "gayest shot" available was that night)...he was a guy that when he talked, people listened, and people believed what he had to say because he wasn't bull****ting when the lights were on. He never wanted to stear anyone in the wrong direction, and he was always out to help someone in need of help to the best of his ability. So long as the individual wanted help, Halwe was able to give it to them.







He always told me that "helping you guys has been the highlight of my career, and now that you have learned,...now its YOUR turn."

Not only did Halwe want us to learn, but he also made sure that we knew that we should pass it on to someone else that is willing to learn.

Here's some direct quotes from some e-mails that Halwe had sent me back in November:

"We've got some more good freshmen this year; kids that
want to learn (like you did).  I haven't been to a
tournament yet...I'm not really ready to travel...but
I've been expounding during practice time, and some of
the kids ask me to come up and help, so I keep my hand
in."

"I get more of a kick watching you guys succeed
than anything I've ever done in my career. It's worse
than crack...but I keep getting my fix. Every year
there are new kids coming in that haven't heard my
brand of bull**** yet (Just got a call from one, infact,
so I shall hie up to the local scoring emporium
shortly)...and they WANT to learn is the cool thing."



-- Edited by Panic Attack at 17:04, 2008-01-06

My favorite Halwe story took place during my fresh or sophomore year, so 2001 or so.  The team practiced on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3-5 that year.  It was Tuesday afternoon, and people start straggling in for practice.  We are looking for Mike, who is normally hanging out in the shop, and Don Helling is in there and tells us that no one has heard from Mike since the weekend (we had just bowled ACUI's at K State).  Mike isn't answering his phone, hasn't called in sick, nothing.  So Adam Duke, Doug Lakey, and myself all head over to Halwe's house to check on him.  After about 20 minutes of knocking on doors and windows, and hearing no sound except dogs barking, Adam calls the St. Charles County police.  An ambulance and a couple cop cars show up.  The cops knock a few times, and after getting no response, grab a crowbar and start trying to break into the house through the garage entrance.  After a couple loud thumps of the crowbar, the door FLIES open... in the doorway is a pink bathrobe-clad Mike Halwe, with a pistol in his hand! 

When asked why he didn't answer the door or phone before?  "I was sleeping on my good ear".


Another great story is Halwe's explanation of why he always smelled his cigarettes before lighting them.  I'm sure most of you have noticed how he would pull out a cigarette and then run it under his nose in one fluid motion.  Well, he explained to us that the reason for that is that in his younger, wilder days, he would keep both his cigarettes and his "other cigarettes" in his front breast pocket, and when he was driving late at night, he couldn't see what he was about to smoke when he pulled it out, so he had to smell for it.

Speaking of cigarettes, Halwe told us on a few occasions that when he died, he didn't want to be buried... he wanted to be cremated so we could roll him up and smoke him. LOL

I finally remembered my password...

Amongst many many times that I sat in the proshop for five hours discussing Rocky Horror, The Psychology of the male gender, Tivoli theater, college, dogs pretty much everything but bowling.

I have two stories that are my favorites 

We were having LU practice at the low end of the house. I believe it was Phil don't remember cause of course it was a thursday.. I'm sure haha. Everybody was supposed to line up down the lanes on the gutter caps and do anything they could to distract us. Of course me being an instigator and all told Halwe to go moon somebody because how many times did he do that to people... Well sure enough my turn to throw runs down and shows his bare ass to me lol.. That's Halwe for ya.

Another one kind of sad but a good one...
2005 Thanksgiving I offered to cook for the team Thanskgiving dinner at the bowling alley. The turkey was deep fried and supplied by Randy. I stuffed it heated it up and made all the sides. In walks Halwe asking if I needed any help. I made a crack about being old and told him to carve the turkey.. He grabbed up the knife and all ready to dive in when he stopped and looked at me. I said what's wrong Halwe? He said I don't know how to carve a turkey. I said what are you talking about. He said I never had a Thanksgiving dinner of my own to carve my own turkey.. 


It's so sad... but I hope he's in a good place...
 

sluggs wrote:

---

I remember sophomore year (the year the guys won nationals) we were about to head out to Rockford and I was just hanging out at the bowling alley, so I walked into the pro shop. Halwe said, here I have something for you. I didn't know what it could be. He went to the back and came back with a brand new Messenger LG ball drilled up just for me. I was like what is this for? He said Rockford has Guardian and I just thought this might be good for you to use. Just out of no where I have a brand new bowling ball just because he thought it would work for me?? That is just shows you the kind of guy he was and the commitment he had to the team. Always so giving.

---

that is how i got my Diesel and Vapor Zone

"when the day comes when you pick up a bowling ball and it feels like u have never touched a bowling ball in your life...and i promise that day will come. Think of elephants..." -Mike Halwe


Now i wish that was a DIRECT quote but i could be a little off...but i am pretty sure i got the basic idea. The man had some crazy philosophies but they all made sense...he is a great guy and will be missed for a long time to come.

town

Cat thanks for posting that. good to hear you are doing well!

OH, and for those of you that know and those of you that don't, here is a link to purchase Mike's book that was released in late November / early December:

http://www.lulu.com/content/1321821

Great chuck, now i am almost crying again and school is about to start!!!!

This is prolly the 12th time in what, near 3 weeks now I've sat here & tried to post something, and its just not working right, and this prolly won't either....oh well...
I don't have the great story of Big Cat, yes Halwe helped me more and regarding many different things than anyone else I've ever known. I hated school and wouldn't have gone had he not told me one day they would pay me to bowl for them. I now see just how great that time was and regret so much that I pissed a large part of it away being a stubborn self centered ass. I guess theres still time, but I've made zero use of any of the benefits school could have given me. He no doubt saved me too, I'm just a bigger mess than even he could work the total magic on.
I can't say he ever taught me any one specific thing but there was surely enough to tansform me, a talentless wannabe hack, into the guy who was able to make a 15 board jump with 5 frames left in a pba tournament, and get it to work, to take cash out of a national champions pocket.
He got me to (sometimes) ease up, be it by telling at 50 decibles, and 5 times over, to the entire tournament squad, that he had to clean explosive dog diarreah out of the van and that was why he was late, or singing ICP in league, or the Rob Clark imitative approach, the old pba stories I had heard 15 times each, the purple chested flailing THERE's to panic stricken rookies at various college tournaments, consuming roughly 14 gallons of mountain dew driving to Omaha, having a mini stroke and refusing to let me drive him home and then going back to work the shop later that night,

Hell I don't know where I went with all that. But just think of one other thing, that some of us mentioned last night....think of how many engaged or already married couples would likely never have even met each other had it not been for him(starting the LU program). Theres at least 7 right now and will prolly be more.






I cannot describe how lost I'm going to be without you now.