FORMER MCINTOSH PLAYER SHELBY
DURDEN GETS A FACE FULL OF BIRTHDAY CAKE, COURTESY OF LINDSEY AND MICKEY BEARD, AFTER THE FIRST “MILES FOR MICKEY” 5K AND FUN RUN IN SEPTEMBER 2012.
BEARD DOES NOT YET
KNOW IF HE’LL BE ABLE TO COACH THE CHIEFS NEXT SPRING.
Beard finds it harder to project his voice and breathe. At the beginning of this summer, he exchanged his biphasic positive airway pressure machine for a non-evasive ventilator. The new machine breathes for him when he wears the mask. Beard has become skinnier. His doctor has told him he may require a feeding tube. A local friend and her husband have been cooking at least four nights a week for Beard for the past two-and-a-half years. It comes in handy because Beard’s wife, Cheryl, works nights at a hospital as a nursing administrator. Reilly O’Brien also helps out at night. The 18-year- old caretaker arrives at 6 o’clock for Beard’s dinner, and leaves around midnight after getting Beard comfortably in bed. “It used to be, we’d go a full month before we’d notice that he’s more tired,” Reilly O’Brien says. “But now it’s like, if he does anything the day before, then the next day you can’t really do anything. He’s just super tired.”
The disease doesn’t exhaust Beard just physically, but also emotionally. He gets lonely when he’s left to himself in his chair during the day. With no definitive timetable, sometimes he wonders why his death from ALS is dragging out so long. “Some days,” he says, “I don’t even want get out of bed.” That’s when he cries and lets others, like his family and the lacrosse team, do the fighting for him. Beard also likes to escape by listening to blues music. He says blues artists sing more from the heart and that he’ll listen to it when he can’t find anything good on TV. Vintage Trouble is one of his favorite groups. He especially likes “Nobody Told Me,” a song about persevering in times of weakness.
52 LACROSSE MAGAZINE » october 2014
“That’s exactly how I feel,” he says. “Every day is harder and harder or heavier and heavier. It’s not going to get any better, but you just have to keep pushing through.”
Another outlet for Beard are his cars. He got his first car after graduating from high school. He used the $500 his parents gave him as a gift and some money he saved to buy a 1970 Chevy Vega. It was banana yellow with black interior. “This is where my passion started,” Beard says. Wanting to give the car a meaner look, he painted
the grill insert black. He also bought a foam-padded small steering wheel, skinny tires for the front, wide tires for the rear and chrome mud flaps. Beard never left alone a car he’s owned. That includes restoring the 1966 Ford Mustang Fastback and building the 1941 Willys Rat Rod essentially from scratch. Beard went through “truck withdrawal” at the beginning of his disability leave. So he enlisted friends to help him build a Rat Rod that hauls around his scooter. A four-by-four scrap metal truck bed sits on top of two-by-six lumber flooring. Blue paint gives way to a white pinstripe and black paint underneath. “You can’t have a bad day when you’re in a car like that,” Beard says.
The current project in Beard’s “Back Alley Customs” garage is Reilly O’Brien’s Ford Ranchero.
***
“What is wrong with these girls?” Beard asked. The Chiefs came into their April 1 game at Blessed
A Publication of US Lacrosse
COURTESY OF MICKEY BEARD
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