When news sprinkled out—phone call by phone call, text by text—of 18-year-old Ace Ashford’s death while cowboying this August, the team roping world stopped in its tracks.
Ropers posted win pictures of themselves smiling with the young superstar in the Texas and Arizona sunshine. Friends remembered Ace’s endless humility and kindness. ProRodeo cowboys jumped on planes from the Northwest to be with family on the day we said goodbye to Ace, little brother to NFR heeler Ross, in the high school gym in Lott, Texas.
And Hill Rodeo Cattle’s Bobby Joe Hill—a longtime friend of the Ashford family—flipped through his notebook, looking for a steer’s number—a number that will come to mean a whole lot more by the end of this story.
Hill had remembered seeing Ace at the Gatesville, Texas, UPRA rodeo a week earlier, where Hill had brought the cattle.
“We did a hand-pulled barrier, with an 18-foot score,” Hill explained. “I didn’t have enough walking-fresh steers for the setup. So I had to dip into my NFR pen to get enough to have one for everybody.”
Ace had drawn one of those NFR steers that day, Hill discovered—Steer 27. They made a good run, and that was the last rodeo steer Ace roped. Hill made his mind up that the steer should go to the Ashfords in Lott.
“Bobby Joe called me and he’s like, ‘Hey, I got something I want to tell you,'” Ace’s dad, Troy, remembered. “But he never could get it out. He was very emotional. A month or so later, he called and said, ‘I told you first that Tara and I always said, if our son could grow up to be like any kid, we’d love him to be like Ace.’
“Then Bobby Joe said that he found the draw from Gatesville, and he wanted to give us that last steer Ace ran after the steer got back from the NFR,” Ashford continued. “The conversation was unbelievable, and we were both really emotional.”
But that’s just the beginning of the story, really.
The steer got a deep cut on his back leg, and that cut got an infection. Hill pulled him out of the NFR herd and spent “more than he ever had” doctoring a steer to get him on the mend.
While Hill and his vet were spending their days giving Steer 27 antibiotics, the Ashfords were getting back to a new “normal” and trying to live in Ace’s honor.
Then one day this October, the clouds finally parted with some rain, and Ashford needed to buy horse feed in town. They hadn’t moved Ace’s pickup and his Hughes pipe trailer since the accident, but the trailer seemed like the best place to haul feed and keep it dry. So Ashford mustered up the nerve to deal with the thought of getting in his son’s truck without him, unhooking his trailer, and hooking his own truck up to the trailer to go to town.
“So I swung by after work in Belton, and I had them stack the feed in the trailer,” Ashford explained. “I got home, and it’s dark, and I pull up next to where I unload the feed. I’m unloading a bag at a time. And as I’m unloading them, I realize that Ace had hung his high school football banner in the nose of that trailer. After the first couple bags, I see Ace’s head, I see his shoulder pads, I get down and I’m like, oh my gosh—here’s number 27. His jersey was number 27.”
Ashford picked up the phone and called Hill right there.
“Troy called and asked, ‘What did you say that steer’s number was?'” Hill recalled. “When I told him, and he told me what he’d just found, it made cold chills run down my back. I couldn’t talk for two minutes probably.”
“After that, if people think there’s not a God, first off, I don’t know how you would function because with what we’ve lived through, if you didn’t have faith, we wouldn’t be here,” Ashford said. “And that’s the truth, because faith is the only thing that’s got us even to this point, to get up and move and see signs of Ace. I truly know, there’s a God, and I know Ace is in Heaven. And you think about that story right there. You can’t make that up.”
The steer is sitting at home in Mexia while Hill and his pen of 60 M-branded steers are in Las Vegas for the NFR. But when the Finals are over, Hill plans to make the hour-long drive to Lott to deliver Steer 27 to the Ashfords.
“Bobby Joe knows how our place is laid out, and how that steer is going to be in the pasture straight behind our house, and how much it will mean to (Ace’s mom) Jamie,” Ashford said. “It just gives us hope and reaffirms our faith that we do know where Ace is. Ace is in Heaven and he is in a better place than we are. And God does give us signs that truly that is the truth. And that steer will always be a symbol of Ace and what he loved about the sport of rodeo, about the sport of roping. It all aligns.”
Hill said there will never be another Steer 27 in his herd. But, there is another Steer 27 at Hill’s house. That Steer 27 just happens to be the very first Corriente steer Hill ever bought back in 2005, and he’s gotten to live out his life at Hill Rodeo Cattle, just like the Ashford’s Steer 27 will live out his days in the pasture behind their home.
