ZestVlog

Every morning, Beau Bear stood in the backyard and shouted toward the pasture, the toddler’s giddy shriek echoing throughout the Mills family’s 70-acre ranch.

Hiiii, bullssss.

He proceeded from stall to stall with his dad, Beau, waddling behind like a duckling on what his mom, Alicia, describes as “the wonkiest feet.” He greeted each member of the herd, from Yellow Jacket Jr. to Screwball to Mister Twister. He emerged from the feed bin coated head to toe in grains.

Advertisement

One evening, as the family tended to Lacey, a cow who had lost her calf during the birthing process, Alicia sought a picture with her son in their matching olive green sherpa jackets. She scooped him up and planted a kiss on his chubby cheek while posing for the camera. But Beau Bear wouldn’t divert his attention from Lacey. Instead, the 1-year-old with piercing blue eyes presented a facial expression that shouted: There’s work to do out here, Mom. Now’s not the time.

When Beau Bear was four weeks old, the Mills family relocated from central California to Granbury, Texas, to a property that hosts 70 cows and 100 bulls, with an arena and a grandstand and two homes, one for their family and the other for Beau Bear’s grandparents. Brad Mills, his grandfather, devoted nearly 40 years of his life to professional baseball, most recently in a role as bench coach in Cleveland for manager Terry Francona, his close friend since they sported hair, shared a room on roadtrips and starred at the University of Arizona in the late 1970s. Beau Mills, Beau Bear’s father, was Cleveland’s first-round pick in 2007.

The youngest of four, Beau Bear wasn’t captivated by “Paw Patrol” or Disney movies. He didn’t need an iPad or a playpen to keep him entertained. He preferred the outdoors, where he mingled with the bulls, marveled at his siblings’ Wiffle ball games and chased the family’s black Lab, Tess. He wanted to be at the center of the action, in a diaper and, on a good day, a pair of pants. He was usually barefoot.

“He was super bow-legged and flat-footed,” Alicia says, laughing. “We could never find shoes. Nothing fit his feet.”

Between the back door of the Mills’ home and a backyard garden rests a gray, stone bench, a gift the Millses received from five couples known as the “Buckin’ Fun Group.” They own a few bulls through the Mills’ Red Laces Cattle Co.

Advertisement

Etched into the bench, in script lettering, are four words.

Brave as a Bear

The bench faces the pasture where the cows roam, where Beau Bear would direct his morning salutes. Alicia considers it the most peaceful spot on the ranch, where she can read a book or monitor her ever-active children.

“You’ll see them playing basketball and you’re picturing Beau Bear with them. There’s just always …” Beau’s voice trailed off.

“…  something missing,” Alicia finished.

In 2012, Beau Mills stopped studying pitcher scouting reports and started learning about corn and wheat and cows on his father-in-law’s dairy farm. One day that fall, Brad suggested Beau pick him up and drive him to the farm for a crash course on his new career field. Beau was behind the wheel of his silver Ford F-150 Platinum, cruising past a cotton field in Visalia, Calif., when Brad revealed an ulterior motive for arranging the get-together.

Brad was joining Francona’s new coaching outfit in Cleveland.

“You have to be freaking kidding me,” Beau said.

Beau always dreamed of playing for Francona, the patriarch of his second family, the man he knew as “T,” his father’s nickname for the Cooperstown-bound manager. The Mills kids and Francona’s children were like cousins, performing talent shows for their parents during spring training.

“They weren’t very talented,” Francona said, laughing.

Of course, Beau would have given anything to play for his father. Brad coached with Francona in Philadelphia and Boston before landing the Astros’ managerial gig in 2010. Beau and Brad never crossed paths on the diamond, though. Brad always seemed to stick on the East Coast along his baseball journey, grounding him in Florida for spring training. Beau spent his springs in Arizona.

Cleveland drafted Beau with the 13th overall pick in 2007, a power-hitting first baseman who cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects list the ensuing winter. In 2008, he produced an .880 OPS with 21 home runs in High A.

Advertisement

Four years later, however, Beau was toiling away in Triple A. Alicia was pregnant with the couple’s second child. Beau contemplated the regular season grind and the mental and physical dedication and offseason commitment required to improve at his craft and reach the big leagues. He thought about his dad, about how Brad spent nine or 10 months of the year on the road, every year, every exhausting year. He thought about the milestones they were forced to celebrate from a distance, toasting to walk-off homers and promotions over the phone instead of in each other’s company.

Beau feared repeating history and missing out on those moments with his own children.

“It just hit me,” he says.

And so, at 26, he retired from the only career path he had ever traveled, from the only industry he had ever known, from the sport that courses through the Mills boys’ blood.

For the next year, Beau and Alicia avoided baseball. The last club he wanted to follow was Cleveland, with a roster full of his former teammates, his closest friends and a coaching staff that included his dad. Eventually, he caved, as his old franchise enjoyed a renaissance on the field under its new regime.

Alicia had only ever known Beau as a baseball player. That was everyone’s perspective of Beau, really. He initially intended to study law at Fresno State, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. With his pedigree and his hitting prowess, he was bound for a professional batter’s box, not a courtroom. He settled on a less demanding subject: kinesiology.

Alicia and Beau were both home for winter break during their sophomore years of college. Beau attended a family gathering hosted by his cousin, who lived in Alicia’s neighborhood. Beau noticed the Vannette family Christmas card on the refrigerator and inquired about the oldest of the four blonde daughters, who seemed to be about his age. His cousin invited him to a holiday party the following day with high school friends, figuring Alicia might attend. She did.

Advertisement

“And he charmed his way into my life,” she says.

Beau and Brad were sitting on the couch one winter day in 2009, watching the Professional Bull Riders World Finals. They caught a commercial that suggested they could own a 2,000-pound bucking bull, even without a ranch, a trailer or any experience in the field. Brad’s father raised cattle (and managed orange groves). Beau had no knowledge of the bucking bull universe.

“I thought everybody who had a bull was a cowboy,” he says.

He quickly learned someone could live in midtown Manhattan and own a bull in Texas that competes in tournaments, as long as they pay a trainer to work with the bull and haul him to events. So, father and son purchased a couple bulls. And then a couple more. And a couple more.

“‘Obsession’ would be the word,” Alicia says.

Once Beau retired from baseball, he converted the hobby into a career, first in California. While coaching, Brad would prattle on about the bulls and their competitions before batting practice. During the offseason, he would rise at 5 a.m., grab a cup of coffee and then assist Beau with the cattle.

In 2018, shortly before relocating to Granbury, with some backing from Cleveland pitchers Cody Allen and Bryan Shaw, Beau conceived the Red Laces Cattle Co. Their bulls participate in competitions throughout the year, with the finals taking place in early November in Las Vegas. The Millses host about six contests at their ranch each year. They can squeeze in a couple hundred bulls and 400-600 spectators at their arena.

The bulls’ names stem from a variety of sources. Sometimes, it’s a random observation. There’s one named Ranchwater and another named Huckleberry. No Tag, you guessed it, was once missing his tag. Sometimes, the name reflects the bull’s appearance or bucking style. Mister Twister spins rapidly, like an F5 tornado. There’s a copper-colored bull named Blood & Honey after a similarly hued ale at nearby Revolver Brewing. Shaw’s bull, Oreo, has excelled recently on the PBR circuit. Sometimes, the name honors the bull’s sire and dam. Showdini had parents dubbed Showtime and Houdini. Allen and Shaw named one Amato, after the team’s longtime home clubhouse manager.

Advertisement

During the national anthem, before a game in Houston one year, Francona, Brad and Beau, who was sitting behind the visitors dugout, completed the transaction for Francona’s purchase of a bull he branded Big Tito.

“Big Tito ate better than” – Francona pointed to himself – “Big Tito.”

Francona owned the bull for a couple years, but Big Tito never prospered in the arena. He appreciated the Mills’ passion for the profession, though.

“Beau Bear, I believe, was going to be our ranch boy,” Beau said.

He could barely walk, but Beau Bear would study his dad as he filled feed buckets. Beau Bear grasped which bucket to fill, where to place the bucket and how to lift the handle so grain would fall into the bucket. He even learned to spit — the result of mimicking his dad’s old baseball habit — but he didn’t quite understand the concept, so saliva would tumble down his face and onto his shirt (and onto Beau’s shirt when he held him).

Beau describes his children as Labrador retrievers in that they’ll find any ball on the property and kick it, swing at it or throw it against a wall and field the carom. James and Hudson, the two boys, have the baseball bug. Beau Bear would hold a bat with one hand, dragging it on the ground like a trusty blanket as he stepped up to the tee.

He really cherished the ranch, though. If Beau rode out to the stalls without him, Beau Bear would bang on the back kitchen window and yell for his dad. That was his playground. The bulls and cows were his companions. No time was more coveted than when Beau and his namesake trekked across the ranch in a golf cart or tractor, mooing together en route to another round of feeding.

Hiiii, bullssss.

One evening in February 2020, the Millses hosted a crawfish boil, with friends and neighbors and members of their church in attendance.

Advertisement

Beau remembers holding Beau Bear while watching a cow give birth and waiting to learn if it was a heifer or a bull. And then, about 30 minutes later, Beau Bear fell into the pool. And life was … changed forever … Beau Bear, in the pool, one minute … being transported via helicopter, the next … mind spinning … en route to a Fort Worth hospital … surely, he’ll be OK … the doctors are hopeful … his blood pressure has stabilized … and yet, we feel so helpless … we were just watching a new calf arrive … how did this all happen … how did Brad get here so quickly from spring training in Arizona … who are all these people offering support in the ICU … everything is numb … they say he’s not going to make it … there’s no manual for this … this is all a nightmare, right … right?

“You’re living in a foggy daze,” Beau says. “There’s no way this is real.”

It’s a quiet late-summer morning on the ranch and the Mills families have convened for breakfast in Brad and Ronda’s home. They cherish these moments, brief respites from the unrelenting demands of ranch life or the kids’ extracurriculars. And the food. Oh, the food.

Ronda, Brad’s wife of 44 years, has a recipe book, passed down for several generations, stocked with all of the family institutions, such as chicken enchiladas. She has served her taco salad, a summertime staple with big chunks of cheese and ground beef and Thousand Island dressing mixed with salsa, since Brad and Francona were teammates on the Triple-A Denver Bears in 1981. She’ll select a meal and text the family: Hey, I’m making chicken teriyaki tonight. It’s always an open invitation. Sundays are popular gathering days, so long as they can navigate shuttling the kids to and from practices or games.

Beau occasionally sneaks in a mid-morning coffee with his parents – always black, no cream or sugar – or a half-hour visit between ranch responsibilities in the afternoon. He surmises it’s a 25-second walk from front door to front door, with only a driveway and a patch of grass separating the two residences.

Brad remained in Granbury after the accident, and then the pandemic arrived. He returned to Cleveland that July to assist Francona at the start of the re-launched spring training. Francona is the manager who woke up the morning of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series with his TV remote wedged in his ribcage and peanut butter smothered across his glasses. Mills has been his orderly counterpart, a list-maker and organizer who each spring mapped out a progression plan for every hitter and pitcher in camp. When baseball resumed in 2020, Mills helped the club elevate off the runway. And then he returned home after a few days, ending his four-decade stint in professional baseball.

He still catches games during dinner, tuning in to see the collection of discarded Dubble Bubble wrappers at his best friend’s feet in the dugout. But, he says, “I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Advertisement

Beau needed to speak at his son’s funeral. That was his sidekick, his bull buddy, his partner in the bathtub and on the tractor and in the pen. He wanted to share some of those memories. He felt he owed it to Beau Bear to detail the joyful spirit his son shared each day.

Beau took the stage at StoneWater Church, microphone in hand, somehow composed, and locked eyes with familiar faces in the audience. Childhood friends. Siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles. Members of the church. Then he spotted Francona and members of his coaching staff. He paused his pacing across the stage. There were former teammates, guys with whom he shared 12-hour bus rides to ballparks in the outskirts of the outskirts of small towns. There was Chris Antonetti, Cleveland’s president of baseball operations, seated beside GM Mike Chernoff. Beau’s eyes welled up.

“It meant the world,” he says of their support.

The organization gifted the family a framed, white No. 1 jersey with “Beau Bear” in red letters on the back. It hangs in Beau’s office.

“You’ve never experienced emotion like this, or grief or hurt like this,” Beau says, “deep, like, deep in your soul.”

“How the heck do you process something like that?” Alicia adds.

Sleep became elusive, tears constant. But for as lost and empty as they felt, they were never alone. Church members raced to Fort Worth to offer support at the hospital. Friends chipped in for funeral costs. Neighbors, clients and mere acquaintances supplied meals, toilet paper and paper towels. They hired a house cleaner, anything to lift any possible burden from the grieving family.

“You feel like you’re just being dragged around from place to place,” Beau said. “It’s really, really hopeless.”

Alicia couldn’t bear to cycle through old photos, so relatives scoured the library on her phone to identify the perfect shots for the slideshow and the funeral pamphlet. They chose the music, too. Alicia still receives texts from anyone who hears “Way Maker,” by Leeland.

Advertisement

Now, she scrolls through her photos and a cocktail of emotions follows — there’s smiling, crying, laughing — as she arrives at a photo of Beau Bear on the ranch, in a golf cart, wearing a onesie covered in ships and anchors and treasure chests and palm trees. Or, a video of Beau Bear placing his hands on a door to meet the paws of two kittens on the other side of the glass.

“It’s hard not to think of him,” Alicia says. “You think of doing life. ‘Man, what would it be like if Beau Bear was here?’”

A couple months after the accident, the Buckin’ Fun Group purchased a new bull through Red Laces. The bull was a bit small, personable and gentle-mannered, except for when he was in the bucking chute.

“He knew his job,” says Dave Knaub, a member of the group.

Knaub suggested a name for the bull, but his fellow members were hesitant. Knaub ran the idea by Beau, who approved: The bull would be named Beau Bear. And, Knaub said, he would go on to win the group “quite a bit of money.”

The morning of April 7, Francona sent Brad a text from Kansas City, hours before the first pitch of a new season.

Days like today, I miss you more.

“We’ve been through everything together,” Francona said.

Brad is still the early riser who composes a detailed blueprint for how to attack each day. Those days look a lot different now.

The Mills family sold the ranch — the two houses, the arena, every head of cattle, every square inch of the 70-acre property — earlier this month. The painful reminders of his absent ranch hand, that once-constant, bubbly, pint-sized sidekick, proved unrelenting as Beau continued his daily feeding and care-taking regimens after the accident.

“We tried,” Beau says. “We pushed through. It was just always there, tugging at you.”

Brad and Ronda relocated to a new home that sits near the 10th tee box of a golf course in Granbury. Beau and Alicia planned to build a house elsewhere, until a home in that same neighborhood entered the market. They now live near the 12th tee box. It’s no longer a 25-second commute from one house to the other, but “it’s pretty darn close,” Beau says.

Advertisement

Beau won’t commit to leaving the bucking bull world forever. He still has a passion for the animals, the processes and the competition. But he and Alicia both accepted roles at StoneWater Church, Alicia as a groups coordinator and auditorium manager and Beau as a director of men’s ministry.

When they aren’t working their new jobs or shuttling kids to practices, they’re tackling a project Beau initially suggested in the weeks after his son’s passing. The idea of starting a foundation once terrified Alicia. She needed time for the wound to scab over and then morph into a scar. But she will never forget the network of people who sprung into action when the Millses felt mentally and emotionally paralyzed, and she couldn’t imagine how others endure such anguish on their own.

“A lot of people don’t have the resources or the support to make it to the other side in one piece,” she says.

First, they created a website. They applied for a 501(c)3 designation. They pondered their mission statement. And, over time, Alicia felt empowered to extend a lifeline to those who have suffered the loss of a child. Less than two years after an accident rattled the Mills ranch, in an effort to convert their grief into support, the Beau Bear Foundation was born.

On the foundation’s website sit four words from the Bible passage, Galatians 6:2.

“Bear one another’s burdens”

Alicia receives recommendations from friends or relatives of reeling families, and they connect to determine the best way to lend support. The foundation partnered with a church to cover the funeral costs for one family who lost their son. They contributed to the coverage of medical expenses for another. They provided a three-night getaway to an Ozark Mountains resort for a grieving couple who lived in a house full of extended family members. Alicia encourages the families to maintain contact, to use them as a sounding board for weeks or months or years. She understands there’s no magic formula, no timeline, no simple path forward.

Advertisement

“This was not for nothing,” she says. “Through our pain, there was purpose.”

Two years after his passing, Beau Bear surfaces in daily conversation in the Mills household. Alicia will peer at Beau across the kitchen table and say, “I just miss him today.” As the kids devour donuts or leap from one piece of furniture to another, a sibling will say, “Beau Bear would have loved this.”

Each Christmas, Beau and Alicia solicit a separate gift list from each of the three children. Depending on the year and the kid, the process might be a furious, 30-minute scribbling session or a deliberate, five-day period of critical thinking. Last December, Beau collected the three lists and found a quiet room to skim through the requests. He circled items that seemed attainable. He crossed out entries he deemed outrageous.

As he shifted from one list to the next, he noticed a theme: All three, unknowingly, had asked for a stuffed animal — a bear.

“They each got a bear,” Beau said.

(Top image: John Bradford/ The Athletic; photos courtesy of the Mills family)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kmppbG5ha3xzfJFrZmlsX2eFcK7EmqxmmpWWv26vy56tnqSRo7Fus9SaqZ2hkaPAcA%3D%3D