Rodeo clown is stamping out bullying

After unloading hogs from a truck one morning to earn extra cash and help his mom pay the electric bill, Marvin Nash was running late for school, so he didn't have time to scrape the manure off his only pair of cowboy boots.

He heard about it as soon as he walked into math class.

"Whoa — you stink!" shouted one of his classmates. Soon, everybody was laughing and pointing at him, holding their noses. "You reek! Take a bath! Go home!"

It was a small embarrassment, but it's one that Marvin never forgot.

"Bullying hurts," says the 54-year-old rodeo clown, who now devotes his life to helping children who have been singled out for being overweight, shy, unfashionable, athletically challenged, slow to learn or owning just one pair of shoes.

"There are kids out there who miss school every day because they're afraid of bullies," says Marvin, "and that's just unacceptable. We're never going to get rid of bullying entirely. But we can do something to make the struggle easier for kids."

Marvin, who has spent a lifetime staring down ornery bulls in the rodeo ring, decided to take on a bigger challenge five years ago when he and his wife, Darlene, learned about the problem of school bullying.

The Nashes, who live in Wyoming, came up with a program called "Bullying Hurts," where high school kids teach elementary students how to cope with taunts and threats in positive ways, rather than resorting to violence.

They never dreamed that their idea would spread to 300 schools and kids' clubs in 37 states, including Utah, but the concept has taken off like a bucking bull out of a chute.

"It's something that was sorely needed," says Marvin, taking time for a Free Lunch chat during a trip across the border to train Salt Lake teens for the program. "We've seen the repercussions of bullying that goes unchecked — school shootings, street gangs, all kinds of violence. These kids are angry and they want to let it out by hurting others. Our goal is to show them another way while they're young. Bullying prevention is crime prevention."

Using workbooks and posters designed by Darlene, Marvin travels coast-to-coast between rodeo gigs, training teens to become mentors for younger students in local schools and boys and girls clubs.

"A rodeo clown is a combination of an athlete and an idiot," he says, "so I knew early on that they'd relate better to high school kids than an old guy like me."

Over a six-week period, children are taught how to seek help if they are bullied and how to safely get out of a threatening situation.

"The older kids teach the younger ones, 'Hey, we got through it and you can, too,"' says Marvin. "They learn how to cope so the anger doesn't build up for years until they finally lash out."

As a rodeo clown, Marvin has broken his neck, his ribs, his fingers and jaw saving cowboys from run-ins with locomotive-size bulls. But nothing was more hurtful, he says, than being the "kid who was picked on."

"Bullying can scar a kid for life — that's why I want to get through to children while they're young," he says. "The only time you do something wrong is when you do nothing. We want to give every child a chance."

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