Garden tractors are only for cutting grass?
THINK AGAIN...

They thought James Naismith was crazy when he hung a peach basket on the wall at the YMCA in Springfield, Mass. Today basketball is as mainstream as you can get. New and lesser-known sports always have prompted people to ask a simple question. Why?

That's an easy one for competitors in garden tractor pulls. They have taken a workaday chore and turned it into a sport because it's a fun thing to do with friends and neighbors. You'll never see the TV networks in mega-bucks bidding wars like the ones they've had for Naismith's creation for the rights to show garden tractor pulls.

Nevertheless, the sport has carved its own niche of happy fans. And the Fredericksburg area is home to one of the state's top competitors, James Johnson of King George. Many of the sports loyal followers from the region gathered earlier this summer for a Shenandoah Valley Garden Tractor Puller circuit event outside Culpeper. It was the fourth pull in the series' eight-event season.

There was so much intermingling going on at the pull site that day, it was hard to tell the drivers from the spectators. Everyone seemed to know the deal, too, because they were either a participant or related to a participant. Families spread out along the main drag to get a close look at the action. It unfolded on a wide dirt strip, with tractors of all shapes, sizes and horsepower trying to go 200 feet under a steadily increasing load of weight. (Weight is transferred onto the tractor's pan by a trailing tractor)

This is a power motor sport, not a speed sport. Most tractors max at between 20 and 25 miles per hour and slow down the closer they get to the finish line because of the added weight. Later heats, with additional weight, weed out more tractors until only one makes it to the finish line. If no one goes 200 feet at a certain weight, the winner is determined by who goes the farthest.

THIS SPORT PULLS IT'S WEIGHT
Die-hard fans, competitors drawn by fun. "They don't do it for the [prize] money. Friendship is the thing."
-- Mark Douglas, Garden Tractor Puller --

"A variety of people enjoy doing this," said veteran puller Mark Douglas of Culpeper County "They don't do it for the [prize] money. Friendship is the thing." Many people assume this is primarily a pastime of farmers. "Actually, that's not true at all," said Eugene England of Stewart's Draft, events coordinator for the Shanandoah Valley pullers. "Farmers are too busy to be doing this kind of thing." Tractor pulling enjoyed a surge in popularity in the valley and parts of the Piedmont a few decades ago, then faded when organizational efforts slackened. Now pulling seems to be making a comeback nationwide. One constant in this area has been Johnson, the veteran puller from King George. He's been pulling for 24 years and has enough trophies and plaques to create space problems at his house on Midway Road.

"A friend of mine told me about a pull in Fredericksburg in 1973.'' said Johnson, who works at the U.S. Naval Warfare Center in Indian Head Maryland. "I worked a whole year getting ready for that pull and I've been hooked on its ever since." His regular job and a long stint in the National Guard--which ended in 1993--kept him busy. Not to busy to assemble winning tractors, however. "This is what I do in my spare time," he said following a recent pull. "I love taking a pile of junk in the corner and making it look good and function well. It's a challenge to try to make equipment myself and be just as good as everyone else."

Johnson is leading the circuit's pro-sportsman super modified class in points. There is still one event remaining on the 1998 schedule: Aug 25 at the Page County Fair in Luray (5:00 p.m.)