Post by Ryan Smith on Oct 31, 2009 15:09:42 GMT -5
967 of 996 DOCUMENTS
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
January 16, 1989, Monday, City Edition
For treads or trucks, this pull's for you
BYLINE: JANICE MARTIN
SECTION: TAMPA BAY AND STATE; Pg. 1B
LENGTH: 708 words
Saturday night, Tampa Stadium. There I was, with 62,000 other folks, soaking up all the atmosphere of a new - for me - sort of entertainment spectacle: The tractor pull.
Its sponsors called it the SuperBowl of MotorSports, but it was mostly a tractor pull competition with a few extra frills thrown in.
It took me awhile to get the hang of what was going on, but it came down to three main things: the pulling, in which trucks and tractors pull a weighted sled as far as possible down a dirt alley; the monster cars, standard bodies mounted atop humongous tires that then run over rows of junked cars as fast as possible; and mud racing, in which drivers try to navigate narrow, muddy tracks as quickly as possible.
One thing I noticed about this crowd was how quiet they were. Sure, they'd cheer a favorite driver, but all in all they watched and didn't say much. There wasn't any of that gratuitous yelling and booing and name-calling that is part of every Bucs game, for example.
Another thing about this event is that it's a test of endurance - for the crowd. It's 30 minutes of entertainment crammed into three and a half hours.
A typical race or pull takes only seconds. Then it's a long wait while the sled gets hauled back to the starting point and other trucks take the field for their turns.
The crowd compensates for this in part by milling around. I have never seen people so resolutely avoid staying in their seats.
Myself, I passed the time watching two honest-to-God regular tractors down on the field doing what they were designed to do: move dirt. They raked and rolled and groomed the dirt alleys between pulls.
(By the way, the stadium's playing field is covered with heavy plastic, then dirt is spread thickly on top for the events.) Lest you think otherwise, this is not a cheap evening. Those who showed up at the gate to buy tickets had to pay $ 18 ($ 9 for kids) to sit anywhere but the end zones. A program is $ 5. And then there are the sta-dium's usual prices of $ 1.50 for a small, tepid hot dog and $ 2.50 for the smallest beer.
The word on dress was a single one: demin. Denim jeans, denim skirts, denim jackets. That and cowbody boots and hats, western-cut shirts or Harley-Davidson T's, big belt buckles for men, permed long hair for women. Baseball caps bore slogans like "I'd rather push a Ford than a Chevy."
A lot of the show vehicles display American flags, and more than a few fly the stars and bars of the Confedera-cy. I'm not surprised the number of black faces was so few.
And I'll tell you what else: Don't look for little Honda cars or Volvos to wind up crushed under the wheels of those Monster Trucks. No sirreee Those are gen-u-wine American rustbuckets gettin' busted to smithereens.
The trucks have names, of course, in keeping with the spirit of the pull: Rambunctious, Intimidator, Green Monster, Madd Ox, Hijacker, The Beast, Dragon Lady (driven by Dusty Arfon, "the First Lady of Tractor Pull-ing"), HeartBeat (a Chevy), High Life (sponsored by Miller Beer), and Budweiser Boss (with a huge six-pack of Bud on the back). It's reminiscent of the names in professional wrestling.
Program ads are heavy on auto parts. But there are also ads for Four Wheeler magazine and a videotape titled Blood, Sweat & Gears.
What I finally figured was, this thing is for people who like to pet cars. People who like to talk cars. People who might go to an automobile showroom when they're not even looking to buy a car. The kind of people who enjoy spending a Saturday morning out in the yard changing the truck's spark plugs, and whose vocabulary is rich with words like "dual carbs" and "bedliner" and "lifters."
And if they enjoy watching a truck that travels on tank treads crush junked cars, well then, I guess that's what they ought to do.
LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1992
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DISTRIBUTION: TAMPA BAY AND STATE
TYPE: COLUMN
Times Publishing Company
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