Backstory: Ohio’s Real-Life Cowboys

This is a story that ran in our May 1982 issue. Small updates to align with AP style and to correct errors in the original story have been made to this version of the article.

A foot-tall cowboy stands on the hood of the dark green Malavite family van. Two weathered horseshoes welded together shape his body, the lower one his bowed legs, the upper one his shoulders and torso. A thick industrial nut surmounted by a high-crowned steel cowboy hat forms his head. A wire lasso extends upward from one of his horseshoe hands, roping air. The East Sparta Gang is on the road again.

The cowboy on the hood is about as far as Gust Malavite, Jr., can see as he and his rodeo mentor, Dick Zaleski, drive all night through thick fog, guiding the van and the horse trailer behind it at a risky 50 miles an hour from Rockford, Illinois, where they and their fellow travelers rodeoed on Friday evening, to Dayton’s Hara Arena, where they are entered in the early Saturday morning “slack time” calf roping.

Gust Malavite, Sr., his nephew Tim and Barbara Zaleski, Dick’s daughter, who is one of the country’s top barrel racers, sleep on the mattress that dominates the van’s carpeted interior while the Malanites’ horses, Rattler and Slick, and Barbara’s barrel horse, Quick Win, catch their equine shut-eye in the trailer. Dick and Gust Junior spell each other at the wheel, assuring the green-and-white Skoal spittoon on the dashboard of an active life.

The East Sparta Gang arrives at daybreak, shakes off the night’s hard traveling, and immediately begins warming up the horses. Slack time is bleary-eyed, bare-bones rodeo, the pro circuit’s way of accommodating the overflow of contestants after the slots for the public matinee and evening performances are filled. It is run in almost perfect silence, stripped of the announcer’s cornball humor, the clowns with names like Taco Billy and Señor Whoopee, the costumes, the trick riding acts, the band music and the crowd noise that punctuate public performances. The cowboys couldn’t care less. The times they post in slack time count toward the prize money and toward their regional and national standings. No cowboy, Gust Junior observes dryly, ever won points for crowd noise.

He’s up first in the calf roping, at which he finished third in the world in 1980, but his timing is a split second off, causing him to miss the calf completely. Covered with a mixture of Friday night’s arena dirt and sweat, from his big, black cowboy hat to his well-worn boots, he climbs up into the midsection of the deserted stands, settles down to watch Gust Senior, cousin Tim and Dick Zaleski rope, and reflects on the ups and downs of his other event, steer wrestling, at which he finished seventh in the world in 1981.

“Last year,” he says quietly, keeping his eyes focused on the action below, “I won two rodeos wrestlin’ the number nine steer. Won me a thousand dollars. And then the next weekend, in Illinois, I drew him again. I got a real good start, got ahold of him in about the two-second hole, and he just stopped dead, threw his head up and knocked my teeth out.

Cost me a thousand bucks to get ’em fixed.”

Gust Junior’s face breaks into an ear-to-ear grin. Like most cowboys, he’s got a well-developed sense of irony.

“Well, that was in the afternoon, and we had another rodeo about a hundred miles away that night. I had been knocked silly and I was takin’ this pain stuff and I just couldn’t drive. So, Dick did all the drivin’. That’s why it’s always good to have someone with you. I can’t remember where the town was where I lost my teeth. I remember the arena, though. And I’ll never forget that steer.

“Another time last year, I got a horn through my right hand, my ridin’ hand. I was bulldoggin’ down in Oklahoma, and I jumped on a steer that had a lot of Brahma in him, and he just crumbled on me. My hand went out and hit the ground, and he stuck his horn right through it. It was just a freak deal, but a lot of freak deals happen. The hole in my hand was full of dirt, and it was hurtin’ pretty bad, so I went to the hospital to get it cleaned out and the doctor gave me these pills with codeine in ’em. Timmy drove all the way home from Oklahoma and we hit three rodeos on the way.

“By the time we got to Arkansas, my hand was gettin’ real bad, turnin’ colors and everythin’, so we went to a doctor, and he took the stitches out and just let it drain. That’s the last doctor I went to and the last of the stitches, too. When I got home, shoot, my hand was that blown up and every one of them fingers was that big around.” He indicates the sizes of a softball and five two-dollar cigars, respectively. “It was purple and yellow and green, and I was afraid of losin’ the son-of-a-gun.

“So, I just treated it like I do my horses. Whenever a horse swells its leg up, you put on this liniment called Furacin and wrap plastic around it and sweat it out. So, I figured I might as well try it on my hand, and the son-of-a-gun went right down. Took all the swellin’ out of it and then it was just a matter of time. Took about a month before I could steer wrestle again and about two months before I could win anythin’ ropin’ calves.”

Gust Junior does his roping off of Rattler and wrestles steers off of Slick, a former racehorse that bursts out of the box so quickly that he wears blue rubber wraps on his front legs to absorb shock his hooves hitting them. Steer wrestling, Gust’s brother Kevin often says, is like standing on the running board of an old pickup truck going down the road at 40 miles an hour, then jumping on the first mailbox you come to, except the mailbox is moving. But he does not exaggerate. Slick is traveling at about that speed when Gust jumps off the horse, grabs the charging steer’s horns, slides to a stop and wrestles the 600-pound animal to the ground. The slide is critical in halting both the steer’s and the cowboy’s momentum, and the problem is that all rodeo ground is not created equal.

“I was in Claremont, Indiana, about three years ago,” Gust Junior remembers, “at an outdoor rodeo. It had rained real hard and the ground got muddy, and then it had stopped raining and the ground had dried out enough to where it was just chunky. There were ridges in it and you couldn’t slide through ’em. If it had been a weaker steer, as much as I had on him, he might’ve come around in the air and I’d’ve wrecked him. But he was a stout steer, the kind of steer you had to slide about 15 feet with, then bring down. Trouble was, we didn’t have 15 feet to slide in.

“When I jumped on that steer, it felt like jumpin’ off a 10-story buildin’ and landin’ on my feet. That steer just buckled me right over and I got stove up bad. My ankles, my knees, shoot, I walked off there and I thought I was 6 inches shorter, I thought I had lost 6 inches of leg.” He laughs at the memory. “But it wasn’t nothin’ bad. It didn’t stop me from rodeoin’ or nothin’ like that.”

Gust Junior credits Harry Houska, his wrestling coach at Ohio University, with developing the tolerance for extreme pain that has sustained him during his cowboy years. He remembers going out for the team as a freshman, having former national champion Houska, who outweighed him by some 60 pounds, squeeze the consciousness out of him day after day for two months, and wondering if maybe Coach Houska didn’t like him or something.

“It took me a while to catch on. He’d hurt me, I’d feel pain, but it was important to feel that pain because you’re going to feel that pain in a match. So, it’s important in practice to learn how to handle it. He just wanted to increase my limits. After a while, I understood that.”

Gust Junior was one of two wrestlers out of the fifty freshmen who tried out for the team to get the message. He won the Mid-American Conference championships as a junior and again as a senior in the 150-pound class.

“I’d wrestle guys and just barely tie ’em in an eight-minute match and then go into overtime with ’em and deck ’em,” he says, smiling. “ ’Cause they cracked. The pain broke ’em, the same kind of pain that Harry put on me in practice. I could handle it and they couldn’t.”

Gust Senior, Tim Malavite and Dick Zaleski finish roping, all of them a couple of seconds too slow to win money, and join Gust Junior and Barbara Zaleski for the drive to the motel room, where they will rest until it’s time for Barb to barrel race and Gust Junior to wrestle a steer at the evening performance. When they enter Room 440 at the Imperial House North, they find its purple and turquoise floral ambiance severely compromised by the presence of 12 cowboys stretched out in various states of hibernation from one end of the room to the other, oblivious to the plight of the cartoon puppy on the color television screen who is being chased by scowling men toting high-powered rifles for no apparent reason.

Barb decides to kill the afternoon shopping. Gust Junior fetches his Ovation guitar and his mandolin from the van, hands the guitar to Benny Craig, a steer-wrestling friend from Checotah, Oklahoma, and tells him to play something. The hunters on the television screen fire away but fail to hit the elusive puppy. Benny says he wrote this tune for a friend of his who was hung out to dry by a hard-hearted woman. The name of it, he says, is “The Sacrifice You Made.” He gets a slow, plaintive strum going on the Ovation, then starts singing in a high, plaintive voice as sad as the cartoon puppy’s eyes watching the bullets fly past:

I finally found the letter that you wrote me,
With tremblin’ hands and tearful eyes I read,
You met somebody new since you left me, S
igned, ‘Good luck, darlin’, please don’t feel so sad.’
So with a broken heart I drove down to a tavern,
It’s somethin’ I ain’t done in 15 years,
For all that time I tried to be a perfect husband,
Now I’m washin’ away the pain with Budweiser beer ...

Benny steps up a key as he launches into the chorus:

Well, I think I forgot you when I drank that second beer,
And there’s a pretty blonde here tryin’ to help me,
Well, it took time to adjust,
But I just want you to know,
If I’d known things’d be this nice I’d kicked your butt out long ago ...

Benny stops abruptly and says he thinks that’s enough of that one. Loud cries of protest fill the room. Gust Junior stops laughing long enough to shout, “Go on, go on, I love it.”

“Okay, boys,” Benny says, grinning. “Remember, you asked for this, now.”

By the time the second verse ends, the Budweiser-filled cowboy has a new house in the country, a speedboat on the lake and all the groupies he can handle, while the woman who ran off and left him is reduced to living on welfare in a bus outside of town with six children and a seventh one “about to hit the ground.” The cowboys are all awake now, stirred by Benny’s ode to frontier justice. He follows it up with a Mexican-flavored ballad about an outlaw on the run (“thoughts of tequila and pretty señoritas”), then finishes up with another one of his evil woman songs.

Gust Junior takes over on guitar, handing Benny the mandolin. Benny tries to hand the mandolin back to Gust Junior.

“I can’t play that thing,” Gust Junior protests. “I just fake it.”

“I can’t play it, either,” Benny says.

“Yeah,” Gust Junior says, “but you can fake it better’n I can.”

“The only thing I can really play,” Benny pleads, “is a fiddle.”

“Aw quit your cryin’,” Gust tells him with mock disgust. “Stick that mandolin under your neck and make believe it’s a fiddle if that’ll make you feel better. Shoot.”

Benny accepts his burden with equanimity and starts plucking away fervently while Gust Junior, Tim, Gust Senior and Dick Zaleski lead the boys in the makeshift bunkhouse through spirited renditions of “Long, Lonesome Highway,“ “The Tennessee Stud,” “On The Road Again,” “Ghost Riders In The Sky,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Cigarettes And Whiskey” and “Wild, Wild Women, They’ll Drive You Crazy, They’ll Drive You Insane” and their favorite romantic ballad, “Out Behind the Barn”:

I met a pretty girl one day,
Out behind the barn,
She wanted me to stay and play,
Out behind the barn,
She wanted me to stay and play,
Out behind the barn,
She taught me how to kiss and pet,
And other games I can’t forget,
For we still play the same games yet,
Out behind the barn …
Got my education out behind the barn
I aint’ a-foolin nosiree,
Passed each examination out behind the barn,
But it almost made a wreck out of me …

Gust senior feels so good after singing this song that he launches into an a cappella yodel that lasts a full minute and is still probably reverberating down the otherwise placid halls of Imperial House North. By the time the East Sparta Gang has completed its four-part harmony on “Cool Water” and “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” the cowboys just have time enough to catch the second half of “Oklahoma Crude” on the television before heading down to Hara Arena for the evening program.

Red Doffin, a big, carrot-topped, world champion steer wrestler from Ada, Oklahoma, dearly loves “Oklahoma Crude” and instructs Gust Junior to watch closely for the scene in which George C. Scott engages the evil-tempered Faye Dunaway in a night of cowboy passion. Unfortunately, Red has not given proper consideration to the whims of network censors. The much-anticipated night of passions is pre-empted by a decidedly sexless beer commercial, causing Red to groan in disappointment.

“Hey Red,” Gust Junior says, “you ever been crude in Oklahoma.”

This reminds Gust Junior of a story. Red was welding a hinge one time, he says, in a rodeo arena, when a bull got out of a chute and snuck up behind him. A friend tried to warn him, whispering, “Red … , Red … ,” but Red Was bending over his work, concentrating hard. The friend kept whispering, “Red …, Red …,” and finally Red stopped welding and turned around to scream, “What!? Whaddya want!? He had just gotten past the first “What!?” when he saw the bull.

“That bull was so close,” Gust Junior says, laughing so hard he is having trouble with the words, “he just about had his nose on Red’s neck. Oh, it was terrible, man, just terrible.”

“Somebitch hooked me for five minutes,” Red says, while Gust Junior rolls around on the carpet, holding his stomach against the uncontrollable laughter. “Run his horn through my belt and my damn coat. Skinned my knees, my belly, my back and finally the sumbitch hooked me plumb up over the damn fence.”

Tears are streaming down Gust Junior’s cheeks. When he finally recovers, he looks up at Red and says, “Now tell us about the time you were shoein’ your horse and he dumped right on your head.”

A couple of hours later, Gust Junior and Slick catch up to their steer in the two-second hold, but he leaves his horse a split second too soon and stumbles when he hits the ground. The steer has just enough time to go “rubber-necked” on him and it takes Gust Junior a full six seconds to bring him down. A similar thing happens to Red. Benny, the singing cowboy, wrestles his steer in 3.5 seconds and goes home with a pocketful of prize money.

The next night, at a rodeo in Charleston, West Virginia, Gust Junior wrestles his steer in 3.9 seconds and wins fourth-place cash. The East Sparta Gang loads up the horses, piles into the van and heads for home.

Gust Malavite Sr., has always had a fondness for crickets. Never could bring himself to kill one, even in the house. Loves to hear ’em harmonizing with the frogs on the banks of his fishing pond. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, he wouldn’t mind coming back to earth as a cricket.

“Jump around in the grass all day, make love and fiddle all night,” he says. “That’s the life for me.” So, when it came time to name his 1,000-acre farm in the rolling hills of East Sparta, just 6 miles south of the Canton city limits, he named it Cricket Valley.

He is 53 years old now, with salt-and-pepper eyebrows, moustache and long Western-style sideburns and a deep, gentle voice, the kind of a voice that horses respond to.

Until he turned 35, he was a cattle and grain farmer, following in his father’s footsteps, wanting a horse but never being able to afford one until his fledgling excavating business began to pay off. “Seventeen years ago,” he remembers, “when I got my first horse, I didn’t know nothin’ about ridin’ or anythin’ else. His name was Rip, a three-year-old pleasure horse that was supposed to be green broke. I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy who sold him to me had tried to break Rip, got on him one time, got throwed and broke his leg and gave up. Green broke, ha! He sold me a wild animal.

“I saw Rip, I liked him and I bought him for $185. Brought him home and decided I was gonna break him myself. Didn’t know what I was doin’, but that’s the way I am. Trial and error, trial and error, been that way all my life. So, I bought a cheap saddle and took Rip out behind the barn and got up on his back and he turned and went through the barn door, which was about as high as he was, and just about killed me. That’s how I got started with horses.”

He and Rip taught each other a few things over the next three years and then began entering and winning 50-mile endurance races in the hills that permeate Cricket Valley and the surrounding countryside.

Gust Senior found that he had the talent and the incredible patience it takes to train horses. He started buying and breeding quarter horses, developing his own bloodlines, training his horses for cutting and reining shows. He built an outdoor corral and, in 1970, an indoor arena. Cricket Valley was looking less like a farm and more like a ranch every day.

Dick Zaleski, who was a full-time horseshoer and rodeo cowboy then, came to Cricket Valley to shoe the Malavite horses and quickly became a friend. He rented a piece of Cricket Valley land and spent long hours in his barn roping a calf dummy over and over again, honing his cowboy skills. Gust Senior noticed his pal’s passion for roping and thought, Hell, that looks easy. “I figured,” he says, smiling, “I’d walk into the barn and show Dick how to do it. I threw the rope a hundred times before I caught that calf dummy once. That did it. I was hooked.”

He made his own calf dummy and roped for hours on end, night after night, until he could catch the dummy a hundred times out of a hundred.

“Trial and error, trial and error,” he chants. “I’m kinda stubborn that way.”

In 1975, his indoor arena caught on fire one afternoon and burned to the ground. Gust Senior lost 36 cattle and 19 horses, including his two best quarter horse studs and his endurance horses. He was heartsick.

“I was gonna give it all up,” he remembers. “I lost my taste for endurance ridin’. For weeks, I tried to stop thinkin’ about horses completely.”

It didn’t work. Within two months, he was rebuilding the arena and this time it was strictly for rodeo.

Completed in 1976, the Malavites’ 120-by-200-foot indoor arena, complete with bucking chutes and facilities for calf roping and steer wrestling, soon made the East Sparta area into the cowboy capital of Ohio, which is what area natives call it today. Gust Senior began roping on the International Rodeo Association circuit at the tender age of 46 and raised all three of his sons — Gust Junior, Mark and Kevin — to be cowboys.

“I just plain fell in love with it,” he says simply, referring to the rodeo madness that has transformed his northeastern Ohio farmland into a little piece of Texas. “Every day you go out there and you don’t know if you’re gonna get hurt or what’s goin’ to happen to you. There’s no way to get on top of it, no way to ever get as good as you want to be. And there’s just no end to it. I know guys who are still team ropin’ and they’re in their 60s, 70s, 80s even. And they’re still good. I never want to give it up. I hope to go on ’til I can’t move no more. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll become a cricket.”

It is early evening and he is sitting in the lounge area of his indoor arena, laughing at the image that suddenly springs to mind of his future life as a rodeo cricket. He is surrounded by his three cowboy sons, who are laughing with him. They have just staged one of their bi-monthly Cricket Valley rodeos, and they are tired, dusty and thirsting for a beer at the nearby Red Dog Saloon. They have shared the whole Wild Wild Midwest experience together, from the beginning, and they have the scars to prove it.

A steer he was wrestling dragged Mark under a horse’s hooves last year, crushing his knee and ending his bulldogging days forever. Mark continues to rope calves at Cricket Valley rodeos. Two years ago, Kevin was wrestling a steer at a huge rodeo in St. Tite, Canada, when a strange thing happened. He had jumped off his horse and grabbed the steer’s horns when he realized that his left foot had gone right through the stirrup and gotten hung up. As the horse galloped past the steer, it jerked Kevin straight up into the air. He flew over the horse’s back, came down past its left side and landed right under its hooves. The horse stopped him and dragged him toward the arena wall. His foot came free of the stirrup, and his left leg took the full impact of the crash into the wall. Gust Junior, not fully realizing what had happened, was the first to reach him. The two brothers laugh now about the ensuing conversation.

“I’m lyin’ there moanin’,” Kevin says, “and Gussie comes runnin’ over and says, ‘Kevin, get up and walk out of here.’ I try to get up and I can’t move.”

“I said, ‘Get your butt up,’” Gust Junior remembers, grinning. “I said, ‘There’s two more days of rodeo. We got other steers to run. There’s a lot of people here watchin’ this.’ He started gettin’ up again and fell back down and said, ‘Gussie, I can’t.’ So, then I figured somethin’ was bad wrong with him and I carried him over to the hospital.”

The local doctors took one look at Kevin’s left knee and immediately advised sending him to Montreal, 100 miles away.

“What it looked like,” Gust Senior says, “was a hundred pounds of hamburger.”

“The only thing holdin’ my leg on,” Kevin says, “was skin. All the ligaments were ripped in half, the cartilage was all torn up, there wasn’t nothin’ in there workin’.”

“We drove him to Montreal,” Gust Junior continues, “and the doctor said, in broken English, ‘Vell, tomorrow, we cut you.’ Kevin looks at me and says, ‘Gussie, don’t leave me here. They can’t hardly speak English.’ We flew him back home. They gave him a bionic knee.”

“Patched me up as best they could,” Kevin grins. “Put the glue back in my kneecap.” Like his brother Mark, Kevin’s steer wrestling days are done. But he’s back roping calves at Cricket Valley rodeos.

And Gust Junior, the most driven of the Malavite cowboys, shrugs off the two knee operations, the horn through his hand and the various broken ribs and unhappy landings his steer wrestling has cost him and continues to pursue a world title. The difference, he says, between being one of the top steer wrestlers and calf ropers in the world and being the top hand is the number of rodeos you compete in, the number of chances you have to score points.

“You have to haul to at least a hundred rodeos a year to win the Worlds,” he explains. “Last year, we made 88 rodeos. This year, we’ll try for a hundred.”

“And if we don’t make it this year,” Gust Senior adds, “then we’ll make it next year.”

“And if we don’t win it next year,” Gust Junior shouts, “we’ll win it the year after that. The Malavites ain’t quitters.”

“The Malavites,” Gust Senior says, “are lovers.” Kevin’s eyes light up. He begins to sing, “I got my education, out behind the barn. I ain’t a-foolin’, nosiree . . .”

The room suddenly fills with the music of the Malavite Hallelujah Chorus: “Passed each examination, out behind the barn, but it almost made a wreck out of me . . .”

Gust Senior is yodeling his head off as the four men leave the arena for a night at the Red Dog Saloon. Once outside, he stops yodeling and listens to what sounds like a fiddler’s convention in full swing down by the fishing pond.

“Crickets,” he says happily. “I’ll always love ’em.”