NEW RICHMOND, Wis — Tractor pulls are loud, dusty, and tinged with gasoline and exhaust. Which is fitting for one of the sport’s most enthusiastic participants.

Chris Larson’s life has never been clean and tidy.

“It was just awful,” Sally Larson, Chris’ mother, says. “I don't even want to remember for sure how it was, when you think your 15-year-old kid is dying.”

In 1987, Chris was front-page news. That’s when the ninth grader at Ellsworth Junior High became the world’s youngest recipient of an artificial heart.

“Boy critical after implant of Jarvik heart,” Sally reads from an Associated Press article she keeps with other photos and newspaper clippings in albums.

Chris’ Minneapolis doctors at Abbot Northwestern Hospital received emergency approval to implant the heart after his own h

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