A Family With Pull
After decades of tractor pulls, the Haneys have the sport in their blood. And their tractor is one bad dog.
By Jamie Cole | Photos By Jamie Cole
Wearing his fire-resistant hood, a determined and focused Louis Haney waits in line for the pull. He drives the diesel version of Cujo, a tractor well-known for decades in pulling circles.
Louis and Leon Haney remember watching the froth-flecked Stephen King thriller Cujo back in the early 1980s. Leon, a master mechanic who works with his brother Louis at Haney Equipment Company in Athens, Ala., was already running a pulling tractor nicknamed Home Brew. But there was something about that rabid dog movie and its tagline, “Now there’s a new name for terror.”
It had bite.
Ask him about it, and Leon grins. It’s the playfully twisted smile a guy wears when he’s talking about a very big toy. “I thought to myself, ‘If I could build a tractor as mean as that dog …’” he says.
Well, mission accomplished.
Cujo, the Allis Chalmers D21 that is the namesake of the Haney family’s pulling team, is still a terror at tractor pulls across the South 3 decades later. The high point, brothers Louis and Leon agree, was “winning Louisville,” the showcase tractor pull at the National Farm Machinery Show, in 1995. “For a while there,” says Louis, “we were winning everything.”
Cujo is still a hometown favorite, in both its diesel version and Leon’s latest creation, an alcohol-fueled beast called Cujo Unleashed. In Tanner, Ala., just down the road from the Haneys’ Massey Ferguson® dealership, is an annual tractor pull that draws thousands from around the South each summer and helps raise big money for Tanner High School’s athletic program.
The Cujo Pulling Team is a staple of the event, and last year was no different. They even brought along a Massey Ferguson 8680 from the dealership to display and pull in the farm stock division. The whole family turns out to hang around in the pit and work to get the tractors ready for their turn on the pull track.
For the Haneys, all the work in Leon’s shop and the sweat in the pit are worth the effort, if only for the fun of it. But after 30-plus years of competition and a reincarnation of Cujo as an alcohol machine, would the bad dog bite again?
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