Life of Evel: Evel Knievel

Somewhat the worse for wear, Knievel had been boozing it up in a bar called Moose’s Place in Kalispell, Montana with his friend Chuck Shelton. Shelton spotted a calendar on the wall of the bar with a picture of the Grand Canyon on it and told Knievel he should try jumping that. Anyone other than Knievel would have laughed off the idea for the joke it was intended as, and, at least initially, that’s what Evel did. But gradually, through a haze of alcohol, the laughing stopped and Knievel began to realise he might just be on to something big. Very big. ‘The more I studied on it, and the more Montana Marys I put back, the narrower that durned [sic] hole in the ground seemed to get. People talk about the Generation Gap and the Missile Gap, but I suddenly saw that the real gap was right there in the heart of the Golden West. And I knew I could bridge the bastard.’ As an afterthought he added, ‘Ah well, what the hell? I always liked drinking and jumping.’

The Montana Marys Knievel was consuming on that particular evening have become as much part of his legend as his jumps, but the actual contents of Evel’s favourite drink have long been a source of speculation. Some claimed it was a near lethal combination of beer, tomato juice, Wild Turkey and vodka, while others suggested a touch of engine oil added to his beer was the magic ingredient. Like most things surrounding Knievel, the facts have been misinterpreted, distorted and exaggerated, and Evel was, more often than not, prepared to play along – or at least not deny any of his legend. However, he did finally put an end to the speculation surrounding the contents of a Montana Mary in 1998 when he disappointed many by confessing it was ‘…just beer and tomato juice [a drink favoured by Butte miners]. The stuff about Wild Turkey and vodka in it is just crap.’

Of course, even a daredevil wildly drunk on Montana Marys would realise that the massive, gaping chasm that was the Grand Canyon could never be jumped by any standard motorcycle. It was, after all, two miles wide at the spot Knievel was considering jumping and was as much as 5,700 feet deep in places. But that in itself was not enough to put Knievel off and he started making preliminary plans which would one day allow him to tackle the ultimate stunt. He initially conceptualised the building of a giant take-off ramp, 200 feet high and 740 feet long, which would allow him to tackle the canyon in the same way he tackled any other jump but on a much, much grander scale. He would have a custom bike built specially for the stunt, featuring a jet engine, wings and a parachute. Knievel even went as far as to claim he had made scientific calculations (for once) that would allow the bike to bridge the chasm. The bike was to be 13 feet long and weigh in at almost 1,000 kilos and, according to his calculations, it would reach a top speed of 250mph and would accelerate to 158mph in just 3.7 seconds. The total cost of building the ramp and bike he estimated at $1 million.

The whole idea seemed nothing short of ridiculous but, if nothing else, it gave Knievel something more to talk about and he announced these plans on national US television in late 1967, saying, ‘I’m going to try and jump across the Grand Canyon but I may have to parachute off the bike before reaching the other side. I know how to parachute and I can “track” with my body. If I bail off the bike, I’ll just aim my body toward the opposite rim of the canyon, open my parachute and land there.’ To those who scoffed at the idea and claimed Evel was just a publicity seeker, he added, ‘Before I even make the jump I may show these sceptics I mean business by riding a motorcycle across the Grand Canyon on a cable. I’ll be just like a tightrope walker in a circus, but I won’t have a safety net to catch me. That’d show those sceptics.’

In actual fact, the sceptics did have the last laugh as Knievel never did manage to jump the Grand Canyon, nor did he ride over it on a cable. Despite gaining preliminary permission from the Department of the Interior (who owned the land where Knievel proposed to take off from) to make the jump, this was later withdrawn when it was realised that Knievel was actually serious about the attempt. He had already announced a tentative jump date of 4 July 1968 but permission was withdrawn just a few months beforehand. For the time being, Knievel was grounded, at least as far as flying over the Grand Canyon went. But the seeds for jumping a canyon had been sewn; Knievel had promised his public he would see it through and the idea refused to go away. It would change shape and, eventually, location but it did not go away. One day, Knievel vowed, he would jump a canyon, some darned canyon, if only to prove the doubters wrong.

Unable to realise his ultimate dream for the time being, Knievel looked elsewhere for a means of breaking out of the rut that was jumping over cars. He finally found his location at the newly opened Caesar’s Palace casino and hotel resort, which was situated, somewhat appropriately, in the gambling capital of the world – Las Vegas. It was here, he decided, that he would take the gamble that would ultimately lead to worldwide fame and fortune or, equally likely, his own death.

Knievel was in Vegas for a middleweight title fight when he first clapped eyes on the spectacular fountains in front of Caesar’s grand entranceway. They gushed intermittently high up into the dry Vegas air and Evel realised straight away that they were perfectly suited to his needs: he vowed there and then to jump them. But even though he had built up a big-enough reputation to command national media coverage when he announced his jump, it wasn’t so easy gaining permission from the casino’s owners.

It is worth pointing out that Evel Knievel was a notorious yarn teller and it was often difficult to separate whole truths from half-truths, and half-truths from complete fantasy, when listening to his animated and entertaining speech. Over the course of almost 40 years he repeated and exaggerated the same tales to the point where he appeared to believe even the furthest-fetched stories himself. Knievel didn’t become the legend he is by telling modest, mundane anecdotes about himself; his larger-than-life character was very much part of the reason why he attained such fame, and his enthusiastic and often over-the-top story-telling went a long way to creating that character. Knievel himself may well have had the last laugh by telling tongue-in-cheek stories and fooling many into believing them. Indeed, it was once a running joke that in 20 minutes Knievel could tell enough yarns about his early life to keep a reporter busy for 20 years just checking them out. His famed rhetoric was exemplified in his explanation of how he gained permission to jump the Caesar’s fountains.

The day after the aforementioned Vegas title fight, Knievel called Caesar’s founder and executive director Jay Sarno, claiming to be a certain Frank Quinn from Life magazine. Knievel took up the story from both men’s points of view:

Knievel: Do you know Eval Neval?

Sarno: Eval Neval? Who the hell’s he?

Knievel: He’s the guy who’s gonna jump the Grand Canyon, says he’s gonna jump over your hotel.

Sarno: I heard about that nut, he ain’t gonna jump nothin’ around here. I gotta go, goodbye.

The following day, Knievel called Sarno again, this time posing as a reporter:

Knievel: Hi, this is Larson with Sports Illustrated. You ever heard of Evel Neevle?

Sarno: Evel Neevle? Who the hell’s this Evel Neevle?

Knievel: He’s the guy that’s going to jump the Grand…

Sarno: Oh yes, some guy called me yesterday about that guy. I don’t know, something around here…something’s going on. I don’t know. Call back.

Two days later, Knievel called again, this time impersonating a friend who worked for the ABC television network.

Knievel: This is Dennis Lewen from ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Do you know Evel Knievel?

Sarno: Eval Neval, Evel Neevle, Evel Knievel? Who is this crazy guy? Everybody’s calling me up about him. I think we’ve got a deal with him, I don’t know, call back.

With the ball rolling, Knievel then sent his fictitious business partners to work. Because he admired the Jewish community for their financial skills, Knievel had created three fictitious Jewish businessmen to head up his company, ‘Evel Knievel Enterprises’, the idea being that the list of names on his headed stationery would look impressive and persuade people to take him more seriously.

The president was named as H. Carl Forbes, the vice president was Mike Rosenstein and the secretary and treasurer listed as Carl Goldberg. Knievel himself did a very fine, if stereotyped, Jewish/ American accent and claimed he often called people up, on his own behalf, in this accent pretending to be any one of the three fictitious businessmen. With Sarno at least now aware of who Evel Knievel was, it was time for the killer punch and this time Knievel called impersonating Rosenstein:

Knievel: Hello, this is Rosenstein.

Sarno: Who?

Knievel: Rosenstein.

Sarno: Who the hell do you represent?

Knievel: Evel Knievel. He’s going to be in your office this afternoon about two o’clock to see you about this big jump. He’s gonna make you famous. Nobody ever heard of this Caesar’s Palace.

With the meeting set up, Knievel finished the story. ‘So I go to this Sarno, knock on his door, the secretary lets me into these big executive offices; she ran to the back [office] door and says, “It’s him, it’s him.” He comes running out of his office and says, “Kid, where you been? I been looking all over for you!”’

It’s an unlikely scenario and would depend on an extremely switched-on businessman like Sarno being fooled no less than four times, but it is indicative of the way Knievel worked, which was very much along the same lines as ex-carnival huckster Colonel Tom Parker who became a multi-millionaire representing Elvis Presley by promoting him in a similarly unorthodox but effective fashion. Knievel never took the obvious approach when it came to promoting himself, and in an era before PR executives and massive marketing agencies became all too commonplace his imagination and flair for self-promotion served him well.

However, Knievel actually gained permission to jump the fountains at Caesar’s, and he bartered a deal with Sarno which would see him performing three leaps there: on New Year’s Eve 1967 and on 3 and 6 January 1968. Promotional posters were placed all over Las Vegas inviting the public to see Knievel, who was already billing himself as ‘The King of Stuntmen’. By leaping over what the promotional posters billed as the ‘highest fountains in the world’, Knievel was claiming a world-record attempt and the posters even boasted that ‘a two-hundred-yard elevated takeoff runway ramp’ was ‘now under construction’.

The pre-jump publicity campaign was enough to rouse interest among Vegas regulars who would never dream of showing up at a small-time county fair, and crowd estimates on the evening of 31 December reached 25,000 – a figure which would later prompt Evel to boast that ‘Frank Sinatra couldn’t draw that crowd if he jumped naked off the hotel roof.’

With the ramp in place, the rear suspension on his Triumph Bonneville stiffened and special cams, pistons and valve springs fitted to give faster acceleration and a higher top speed, Knievel readied himself for his 2 p.m. matinée performance with what had, by now, become his standard preparatory routine: a few shots of Wild Turkey bourbon and a quick prayer. He was confident to the point that even a bad omen en route to his waiting motorcycle didn’t dampen his spirits. ‘The one thing I remember was coming downstairs [from his hotel room] for the jump. I’d had my good-luck shot of Wild Turkey, like always, and was walking past the tables and stopped at the roulette and bet $100 on red. It was black. I thought nothing of it, just put my helmet under my arm and kept walking.’

As he appeared outside the entrance to the hotel to the cheers of the crowd, Knievel waved and soaked up the applause before donning his helmet and mounting his motorcycle. Under normal circumstances, Evel would perform a few practice runs by heading straight for the take-off ramp before veering off left or right at the last second. At Caesar’s, however, there simply wasn’t the space to allow for such a luxury and Knievel would effectively be flying blind. All he could do was dump the clutch on the Triumph, hope his rear wheel would hook up and grip the wooden runway, then kick his way up through the gears to gain whatever speed he felt he needed. If he dropped the clutch too harshly when setting off his back wheel could easily lose traction and spin up, and if he fluffed just one gear change he could easily fail to gain the required momentum. There could be no stopping at speed halfway up a ramp to have another run. Apart from possible rider error, there was also the danger of component failure – and that risk was much more pronounced in Knievel’s era than it is now. British bikes in particular, like Knievel’s Triumph, were renowned for spouting oil leaks back in the 1960s, and that was only one potentially lethal hazard. Another very real danger was the possibility of a chain snapping under the strain of the launch, leaving Evel with no drive and the threat of the chain becoming entangled in his rear wheel, which would almost inevitably cause a crash. Or the engine could develop a misfire for any number of reasons, again leaving Knievel down on power and unable to clear the distance. His throttle could stick open as he sped down the runway, meaning he would be travelling way too fast and would overshoot his landing ramp, again putting him in great personal danger. And those were just the problems he faced on the take-off. Other problems, like a rear wheel collapsing on landing (which would actually happen during a 1970 jump in Seattle), or the rear suspension bottoming out and spitting him off (which happened many times), or even brake failure, were all to be considered. Motorcycle jumping, especially in Knievel’s pioneering days, was extremely dangerous.

But it was danger which had drawn 25,000 people out onto the streets of Las Vegas and Knievel wasn’t about to have any second thoughts and disappoint the biggest audience he had ever attracted. It was make-or-break time and Evel knew it. His reputation and career would stand or fall on this one jump alone. There could be no backing out, even if his nerves were screaming, his palms sweating and his heart racing.

With Knievel and his mechanics satisfied that the bike was set up as well as it could be and sounding as it should as he revved it in neutral, Knievel finally decided the crowd had waited long enough and kicked the Triumph into gear. He gunned the bike down the runway, revving it out to maximum revs in each gear until he reached 90mph. It was the highest speed he could achieve in the distance he had to work with but he still had no more idea than anyone watching if it would be enough to carry him to safety. Still, Evel’s run was looking good. He seemed to have the speed and his launch looked perfect; he even had the measure of the bike in mid-air, purposefully dropping its tail in search of a smooth rear-wheel landing. He sailed through the spray of the ornate fountains, travelling what seemed an impossible distance for anything without wings, and the Las Vegas revellers gawped in disbelief at what they were seeing. He had done it. This crazy kid had actually gone through with what he’d promised, and hell, did it look impressive. As man and machine descended back down towards the landing ramp things still looked good; it still looked like Knievel was going to pull off the apparently impossible. Then his worst nightmare happened.

Just one foot further and Evel may well have got away with it. He’d travelled a distance of 141 feet – way further than he’d ever managed before – but he landed just inches short and his rear wheel smashed into the safety deck which guarded the lethal edge of his landing ramp to prevent him from being decapitated in the event of him falling short.

The term ‘rag doll’ is over-used when describing a rider being thrown from a motorcycle either in racing or stunt riding, but there is no other way to describe how Knievel’s body was slammed and battered down the Tarmac when the impact of the landing threw him off the bike, tearing its handlebars from his grasp. He was thrown over the front of the motorcycle and landed first on his back before tumbling at great speed end over end, limbs flailing helplessly as his head took an equally brutal battering from the Las Vegas asphalt. The crowd, who split seconds earlier were expecting victory, looked on in horror.

Some reports said that Evel actually slid further than he had jumped, and the only thing which eventually stopped him from tumbling even further was a decorative brick wall which he slammed into while still carrying speed. What happened next was nothing short of chaos. The crowd went hysterical, screaming and wailing, convinced they had just witnessed a man killing himself right in front of their eyes. Smoke poured from the twisted metal of the once-immaculate Triumph as medical crews, hangers-on and rubberneckers surged round Knievel’s battered and apparently lifeless body. General panic reigned until Knievel was removed by ambulance to the nearby Sunrise Hospital. It would be 29 days before he woke up again, but when he did, he would be a star.

4Theatre of Pain (#ulink_26a34c9a-a9f3-5181-b5e9-b9fdfa41ad75)

‘I’m Evel Knievel. I’m not supposed to be afraid.’

The Caesar’s Palace crash resulted in the worst injuries of Evel Knievel’s career. He landed so hard that his left hip was forced up into the pelvis, leaving both structures comprehensively smashed. He also broke his nose, sustained several broken ribs, smashed out several teeth and fractured his jaw. But the immediate and most serious concern was for the head injuries which left Knievel in a coma. His head had taken repeated blows as he was thrown viciously along the Tarmac, and even though crash-helmet technology in 1967 was extremely basic by today’s standards, Knievel’s Bell Magnum helmet had at least saved his life. In acknowledgement of the fact, he has kept it to this day.

Evel lay unconscious for day after day and week after week with his devoted wife Linda at his bedside, wondering if her husband would ever wake up and, if he did, would he be brain-damaged? Would he be able to walk again? She knew better than anyone that a man as active and daring as her husband would never tolerate being confined to a wheelchair and would never be able to accept being dependent on others.

As the weeks crept by, feeling like years, it became increasingly unlikely that Evel would regain consciousness, but after an agonising 29 days for Linda, Kelly, Robbie and Tracey Lynn, the man they all loved and admired showed his true mettle: he woke up. The family, not to mention the nurses who had tended him night and day, were understandably beside themselves when Knievel not only opened his eyes but proved that he’d lost none of his abilities of speech and understanding. It was a moment of unadulterated joy that few experience. Evel Knievel had, to all intents and purposes, prised himself from the very jaws of death and returned to life.

When he was stable enough and when his doctors were confident that he was in a fit state of mind to be told, Knievel learned the true extent of his horrific injuries, which, while they were gruesome and painful, were at least not life-threatening. A successful operation was carried out to insert an 18-inch steel rod between his left femur and pelvis, but, as a result of his hip being pushed up into his pelvis, his left leg was now almost an inch shorter than his right. Knievel would be left with a permanent limp, but that seemed almost irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was that he was alive when he really shouldn’t have been.

Surprisingly, Knievel remembered every bone-crushing moment of the crash (at least up to the point of being knocked out), but to this day he still doesn’t know quite what went wrong. When asked at what point he knew he wasn’t going to make the landing he replied, ‘I never knew it. I thought I’d made it. It was a surprise and a shock – a big shock.’ He added, ‘I was hurt real bad – landed on my head. That was the most serious of all. I remember the whole thing; every tiny bit of it. There was a little six-foot safety ramp and I landed right on top of it. It was just a piece of steel sitting on a van.’

When asked if he had any idea what actually went wrong, Knievel replied ‘I just wasn’t going fast enough’, while also explaining that he simply couldn’t go fast enough because the run-up ramp wasn’t long enough. But what was done was done, and, besides learning from the experience, there was nothing more that could be done about it. All he could do now was focus on getting better.

Knievel remained in hospital for a total of 37 days. It wasn’t his first hospital stay and it wouldn’t be his last, but it was certainly his longest. As he lay in bed recuperating, the world outside was going Knievel crazy, and it was largely down to the fact that Evel’s horrific crash had been captured in all its bone-crunching detail, not by ABC or any of the other mainstream networks but by future Dynasty actress Linda Evans. Evans was at the time married to movie director John Derek, who later married and made a huge star out of Bo Derek. Many years later, Knievel actually claimed that he was responsible for introducing John Derek to Bo, despite their insistence to the contrary. ‘John was filming a project at a Harley store where Bo worked for her father. I didn’t know her but I introduced her to John anyway. She has a sister that looks almost exactly like her. Anyway, to hear John and Bo say it they met on the Mediterranean. They met at a Harley store in Long Beach.’

Whatever the case, Knievel had struck a deal with John and Linda Derek allowing them to exclusively shoot his Caesar’s jump on 16mm IMO cameras. It proved to be a wise move, as Knievel explained: ‘The film that was shot of the Caesar’s Palace jump has been said by a lot of people who are in the film business to be one of the greatest pieces of film footage ever filmed. This was filmed by one of the most beautiful blondes; her name was Linda Evans. John Derek shot the jump at the take-off and Linda shot the landing and the accident.’

The footage shot by the couple was aired over and over again, both in real time and in slow motion, and it was unquestionably responsible for transforming Evel Knievel from a fairground attraction into a national star. So frequently was the footage shown that it was widely believed to have been played more times than any piece of film since the infamous Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas back in 1963. Knievel always believed that ‘In any adversity there is the seed of benefit’, and that never proved to be more true for Knievel than now. He may have come close to losing his life, and, having survived, had to endure enormous pain as physiotherapists forced his limbs back to life, but the upside of the Palace crash was that it had captured the attention of the great American public: Evel was famous at last.