'The Story'

After the Scottie Scheffler incident, a friend goes public with his own unlikely run-in with law enforcement

CORVALLIS—Last week, the revelation came just after I had finished breakfast with a friend I’ve known since we were 12. We were at a restaurant downtown called Tommy’s, which features hundreds of photos of mostly guys who’ve successfully eaten the Beaver Buster Breakfast, a 7-pound concoction consisting of an omelet, hash browns, home fries, pancakes, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham, gravy and toast. (Time limit: four hours.)

“I need to tell you something, Bobby,” said John Mills, who’d ordered a single pancake.

It sounded ominous; we’re both 70 and health-related issues are beginning to be a thing with folks of our age, the early Pleistocene.

“You saw the Scottie Scheffler story, right?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said about the No. 1 golfer in the world having been recently led off in handcuffs and photographed in an orange jumpsuit by police after a traffic incident. En route to the second round of the PGA Championship in Louisville, Scheffler—anxious to make his tee time—had apparently ignored a police officer’s command to stop at the scene of a fatal accident that had occurred shortly before Scheffler had arrived.

“You heard the name of the guy who died, right?” asked Mills.

“Yeah. John Mills.”

“Pretty sobering to see my name like that.”

Pro golfer Scottie Scheffler, as photographed by police after the incident

Wait, was this a prelude to news about Mills’ own mortality?

No, it turned out, nothing so serious.

“Bobby, given all this, I’m finally giving you permission to tell The Story.”

“Really?” I said, then laughed.

I remembered back to 2010 when I was taking a lunch-time walk with Mills, at the time a senior financial analyst for Levi Strauss across from The Register-Guard, where I was a columnist. When he’d told me The Story, I’d laughed so hard I literally fell to my knees on the sidewalk. (Because you, dear readers, don’t know the nuances of my friend, you may not appreciate it at the deep level I did; still, The Story must be told.)

On the day it happened, at Oregon State’s Reser Stadium, Mills was perhaps the least likely of the 45,379 fans to have been singled out by law enforcement.  

“Fourteen years ago, when you told me The Story, you swore me to secrecy,” I said. “Why the change of heart?”

“The Scheffler incident brought it all back,” said Mills. “And you know how parts of the Warren Commission files about JFK’s death have been de-classified? Well, my intuition tells me it’s time to de-classify The Story—and you’re the only writer I know who can tell it.”

For context, you need to know three things about John Mills:

First, there’s no place the Corvallis man would rather spend a Saturday afternoon in the fall than rooting for his beloved Oregon State football team at Reser Stadium.

Second, he is a straight-arrow, church-going guy with great respect for authority.

Finally, he is a teetotaler. “Never touched a drop,” he said.

“Johnny, I’m honored to tell the story,” I said. “But it’s been more than a decade so I need to go over the details. Start from the beginning.”

Me with Mills last year, more than a decade after his “Scheffler moment.”

ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2010, with the Beavers football team playing Louisville early in the third quarter, John was sipping a can of Pepsi from his midfield position in Reser’s new East Grandstands when he felt raindrops. Fifty-eight at the time, he was sitting with his wife Vicki, their 27-year-old son Jonny and Jonny’s wife, Serena, just adjacent to the “clubhouse” seats. In the premiere clubhouse section, those who shelled out the extra bucks enjoyed the privilege of drinking alcohol—in the days before alcohol was allowed stadium-wide—while protected from the rain.

As the rain fell harder, Mills couldn’t help but notice all the empty seats in the club-seats area, separated from the regular seats by only a waist-high concrete barrier.

Why not?