For Family

Stanford’s Olympic gymnast Brody Malone takes motivation from those closest to him

04/13/2022

THERE IS A video on Brody Malone’s phone that he returns to from time to time. He’s about 9, wearing jeans, boots, and a helmet, and sitting on the back of a young bull.

The bull is released and bucks and kicks down the small rodeo arena as Brody grips the rope tightly. 

“Go Brody!” 

It’s his mother’s voice. 

In the distance, Brody is thrown to the dirt and the bull leaves the boy behind. His mother continues to cheer.  

“She was always super supportive, always cheering,” Brody said. “That’s my favorite video.”

Tracy Malone passed away from breast cancer when Brody was 12, and the video is among the ways he remembers her. When Tracy’s hair fell out in a prolonged battle with the disease, she wore bandanas. Brody collected some and attaches one to his backpack at every competition, including the Olympic Games last summer. 

Malone -- Stanford senior and reigning NCAA and USA all-around gymnastics champion -- doesn’t seek individual honors. He works hard to become the best in the world. But when he imagines winning an Olympic medal or an NCAA title, it’s the team version that entices him most.

At the close of the Olympic men’s gymnastics team finals at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre, Malone was asked about the pressure. 

“Were you nervous?”

Malone, 21 and a first-time Olympian, considered his answer. 

“You know what?” Malone said. “I was a lot more nervous for the NCAA team finals.”

To be sure, these were no conventional Olympics. The Games were postponed for a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and spectators were banned from the competition because of health protocols, dampening the overall atmosphere.  

But the NCAA Championships? Talk about pressure. 

In 2019, Stanford trailed four-time defending champion Oklahoma by a huge margin – four points -- going into the final rotation. Still, the Cardinal pulled out an improbable victory. The freshman Malone captured three titles, including the all-around, and Stanford needed every tenth of a point to win.

“You would think the Olympics would be more nerve-racking than the NCAA Championships,” he said. “But there’s just something about it.”

That something is family. Loyal to his Stanford teammates or his family in northwest Georgia, Malone competes for others as much as himself, and the pressure he feels comes from the faith they have in each other. 

As the Cardinal attempts to capture its third consecutive national championship and eighth overall at the NCAA Championships on Friday and Saturday in Norman, Oklahoma, it’s both – teammates and family – that Malone keeps close to his heart.

FROM HIS FATHER, Brody learned competitiveness. JD Malone didn’t understand the nuances of gymnastics, but he did know sports. A college athlete himself, JD understood the attitude an athlete needed to win.

“Suck it up,” was among JD’s favorite phrases.

“I would come home tired and tell him I was struggling on this skill today and explain why I think I was struggling,” Brody said. “And he’d say, ‘Just suck it up and do it.’”

And Brody would.

“Sometimes, that’s what you need,” Brody said. “Stop thinking about all the excuses in your head and suck it up and do it. He always pushed me hard to be the best.”

Competition was everywhere around the Malone household. Brody and brother Cooper, two years younger and now competing for the University of West Alabama rodeo team, were especially competitive.

In rodeo, the Malone boys were team roping champions, tracking a sprinting calf while on horseback. Brody was the header, the cowboy who tossed a rope around the calf’s head. And Cooper was the healer, looping the rope around the hooves.

At one point, the Malones had 13 horses. Tracy loved horses and gathered them like stray cats. They hardly could be contained in their 10-acre property in Cedartown, Georgia, where Brody spent most of his childhood – in the same valley vacated by the Cherokee and Creek peoples during the Trail of Tears, and in a town burned to the ground by Union soldiers during the Civil War.

The boys cleaned the stalls and watered and fed the horses before school each day. Even after 4-5 hours of gymnastics, and the 45-minute commute to and from the gym, Brody knew his work wasn’t done. He would spend the next three hours riding and exercising horses.

Brody was a natural gymnast. Legend has it that Brody somehow vaulted out of his crib at two years old and broke his arm. He was so active at three that he was signed up for tumbling to work out his energy. It’s been a long time since then, and Brody doesn’t recall a time in his life when he wasn’t in a gym.

He competed in other sports too. There was baseball and, of course, rodeo. But as the commitments increased, a choice needed to be made – a decision that was hastened when Brody fell off a bull and was stepped on. Brody feared his swollen foot might be broken.

“Nope, we’re done,” JD said. “Gymnastics is too important.”

The family moved to Summerville just before Brody began high school and a switch to Cartersville Gymnastics after his previous gym folded, provided a renewed energy and a deeper focus.  

“I always wanted to work hard and be good,” Malone said. “But it was like a switch was flipped.”

Malone trained with and observed an older gymnast, Christopher Root, who would compete at Illinois-Chicago. He saw how Root paid extra attention to things like body position in a handstand and noticed how the small details mattered. Brody began taking the same approach and it paid off with an invitation to the U.S. junior national team camp when he was 15.

“That was the moment I realized: This is not just a pipedream,” he said. “I want to not just make the national team, but win nationals and compete against the best gymnasts in the world.”

TRACY WAS SICK for much of Brody’s childhood and bedridden for much of the final two years of her life. Brody was in the hospital, sleeping next to her bed, when he woke to her struggles. The room was cleared. A few minutes later, Brody’s grandfather emerged with the news that she was gone.

The oldest of four children, Brody felt the need to take responsibility for his two brothers and sister. He admires JD for never letting grief prevent him from being a good father.

“My dad handled it really well,” Brody said. “Looking back, I can’t imagine having four kids, and having to raise them after his wife just passed away. I can’t imagine how hard that was for him. But he did a phenomenal job keeping us together as a family.”

Taking cues from his dad, “I just knew I had to be strong,” Brody said. “And then when my stepmom passed away in 2019 (of a ruptured brain aneurysm), it was the same thing. Got to be strong, too. Be an example for the rest of the kids. And help my dad in any way I could.

“That’s part of why we’re so close as a family. That’s why I was so homesick.”

Malone knew that leaving the rural Deep South to come to Stanford would be difficult. Consider what he was leaving behind: Not just a family, but a lifestyle.

Early April is turkey hunting season. “My favorite thing to do,” Malone said. “By far.”

Unlike deer hunting, where Malone uses a crossbow and climbing stand and does a lot of sitting and waiting, turkey hunting requires communication and movement. It’s mating season, so Malone uses a calling device – a plastic gadget with a reed that he presses with his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Malone prefers a low gobble that turkeys answer but are not always drawn to. Malone enjoys the strategy.

Malone did not bring his 3D leafy camo hunting suit to California, and has hunted only once since he’s been out here – standing in a Delta swamp looking for ducks. The turkeys seem to know that Brody isn’t in Georgia anymore. They are so abundant they seem to mock him.

On a recent visit to Stanford, Brody’s girlfriend hiked at the Dish and was met by a whole flock of turkeys, which crossed her path. She sent Brody pictures.

“Oh my gosh,” he said with a laugh. “It was painful.”

When a few Stanford teammates came to Georgia a year ago, Malone provided them with a truly local experience -- frog gigging. This is a relatively new hobby for Brody, who was introduced to it during COVID by a friend of his brother.

“I was hooked,” he said.

It involves going out to a pond at night, looking for the reflection of a frog’s eyes from a flashlight or headlamp. The frogs are stunned by the light and in that moment, they easily can be speared with a multi-pronged pole. The result? A nice snack of fried frog legs.

When his interest in hunting comes up in conversation at Stanford, it’s often met with a … “Really?” Stanford is far removed from that life as can be.

Malone had five recruiting trips planned and took two by the time he was in the Atlanta airport for the trip to Stanford, when he got a call informing him he was accepted. With the prestige of the university and the gymnastics program, combined with the outstanding coaching he would receive, “I just knew this is where I needed to be,” he said.

But as soon as Malone stepped foot on campus for summer classes before his freshman year, “It was culture shock. I was not prepared for the homesickness. It started the second I got here.”

The beauty of a team is the community it can create, and that was the case for Malone.

“It gets easier over time,” he said. “This is my family now.”

ON MARCH 5, Malone was the last to be honored on Senior Night, after the top-ranked Cardinal’s final home competition of the season, a double-dual with Cal and Air Force at Burnham Pavilion.

Malone walked on to the floor exercise mat with his father on one side and his mother’s parents, Jerry and Ann Tillison, on the other. As the spotlight shone, a list of accomplishments were read to the crowd:

• Five-time NCAA individual champion.
• Twelve-time All-American.
• Four-time Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Gymnast of the Year.
• Fourth on the horizontal bar and 10th all-around at the Tokyo Olympics.
• World Championships horizontal bar bronze medalist.
• One gold and two bronze medals at the 2022 World Cup in Cottbus, Germany.
• Management science and engineering major with an emphasis on analysis and design of financial and strategic planning.

When Stanford’s Thom Glielmi recruited Malone, “He really didn’t stand out that much in juniors,” the coach said. “He came from a small gym, so I knew he was pretty raw in understanding what it was going to take to progress on the senior level.

“I didn’t know if he’d develop into a solid all-arounder because his pommel horse was labored. And he doesn’t have the prototypical body type for a pommel horse guy. But what was very apparent early was his coachability. He put his trust in us, and that never wavered.”

Malone, who is 5-foot-5, competes with a style once described as “so American,” by then-Stanford assistant coach Karl Ziehn.

“Yeah, that’s awesome,” Malone responded.

“No,” Ziehn said. “That’s not a compliment.”

Malone doesn’t have the slim body type of the Chinese or Japanese gymnasts, who impress with their elegance and gracefulness.

“You look at me and the U.S. guys in the past and they’re all super-jacked and bulky, and don’t necessarily have the same lines and techniques that the Japanese do,” Malone said. Instead, “My routines are constructed in a way that limit how bad my body can work. I guess that’s the way to say it.”

Malone stepped to a pommel horse and demonstrated how he compensates for a relative lack of mobility in his shoulders because of his muscle mass.

“I do most of my skills in a side support,” he said. “If we’re doing circles like this, it’s hard for me to get my arms behind my back. I end up having to circle a little bit off-center. That’s called skewing, and that’s a deduction. So, I do side-support skills, which keep my hands mostly in front of me. This limits the deductions I can get.

“You have to play to your strengths and not your weaknesses. The stuff you’re good at, you work to get really good, and that’s the direction you go. I’m pretty strong in the Planche position. Those are the kinds of skills I do on the horse now.”

The Planche is a difficult move that requires great strength and balance. The body is held parallel to the ground, while being supported by straight arms.

Malone said if forced to do a party trick, it would be a Planche, which seems to defy the laws of gravity and requires muscle-popping effort. He said he’s never actually done one at a party, but he did do a backflip while wearing a tux and dress shoes in a dance circle at his Summerville High senior prom.

“What surprised me was his willingness to work on his weaknesses,” Glielmi said. “His ability to translate how a skill is supposed to be executed to his body type has been very impressive – probably the thing that separates him from most other top-level gymnasts I’ve worked with.

“Work around your limitations, but accentuate your strengths.”

For the record, it may not be the last Senior Night in Malone’s Stanford career. He is exploring ways to manipulate his schedule to receive a grant-in-aid for a fifth year. Either way, Stanford will be Malone’s training base through the 2024 Paris Olympics and Glielmi will continue to coach him.

In the gymnastics world, Malone will be remembered no matter how he does in Paris. He has a skill named after him, and it’s registered officially in the Code of Points, the rulebook that defines the scoring system.

Malone debuted the new element, a parallel bars mount, in the Olympic individual all-around final, but nearly was beaten to the punch.

First of all, the world should be doing “the Curran Phillips,” instead of “the Brody Malone.” Phillips, Malone’s roommate, used the element in competition before Malone himself. However, it can’t be registered unless performed in an Olympics or World Championships.

Malone was prepared to unveil the move in the Olympic team prelims, but while in the training gym, he noticed an Italian gymnast performing the same skill, probably learned from a Stanford video. 

“That’s mine,” Brody joked to him, sort of.

Depending on the schedule, there still was a chance Brody could do it first. But when Malone fumbled the move during warmups, Glielmi, the U.S. Olympic men’s head coach, ruled it out for the competition, against Malone’s protests.

“It’s a very technical skill and timing is pretty important,” Glielmi said. “It was more about the competitiveness between the USA guys because only two can advance to the all-around finals. I didn’t think it was worth the risk.” 

The Italian, however, botched it and failed to qualify for the all-around final. That left Malone with another chance, and he nailed it, making history.

As his career takes a sharper turn toward the international stage, Malone understands how difficult it will be for the United States, which finished fifth in Tokyo, to overcome the world’s traditional top three countries – China, Japan, and Russia.

“I want to win an Olympic medal – a team medal,” Malone said. “It drives me.”

Every day, Malone opens his locker and looks at a photo of Russia’s Nikita Nagornyy, the 2019 world all-around champion and the leader of the Russian Olympic Committee team that won gold in Tokyo.

“Every day I walk in the gym, I see his face,” Malone said. “I’m thinking, How am I going to beat him? That guy’s working right now. I need to be working my butt off too.”

Malone looks around the gym. It’s mostly empty on this afternoon, except for a few teammates getting in some extra work.

“I would do anything for them to win an NCAA championship,” he said. “There’s something special about doing something for more than yourself.”

For his teammates, brothers, sister, father, grandparents … that’s what drives him. And for a mother whose encouraging voice can be heard on a video, still.