Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (15 page)

The X-2 and Evel disappeared from sight, down into the canyon, and the once-rowdy crowd was hushed as everyone waited for news. The television commentators feared the worst, as did Knievel’s family and friends and the majority of the gathered spectators. Perhaps only the Hell’s Angels were rubbing their tattooed hands with glee at the prospect of ridding themselves of one of their most outspoken critics.

Two helicopters hovered low, churning up the 18-foot-deep waters of the Snake as several rescue boats honed in on the stricken daredevil. No one above the rim could yet see if he had struck the canyon wall and landed on a ledge or if he’d sunk straight into the river. Then suddenly, out of the underhang of the canyon wall, a white figure standing upright on a boat, waving up at the gathered thousands, told the story – Evel was alive and relatively unscathed. The crowd, which had been so hushed, erupted with approval at the sight.

The Sky Cycle had drifted down into the canyon at around 15mph, bounced off a rocky ledge and continued down until it had come to rest on another ledge just 20 feet from the river itself. Had it bounced just 20 feet more, Evel Knievel would almost certainly have drowned, strapped into the cockpit as he was in a five-point fighter-pilot seatbelt. He was extremely lucky to be alive.

The first man to reach Evel was an old personal friend called John Hood. He had scrambled down a rope from a helicopter onto the small canyon ledge into which Evel had crashed and helped the star into a boat, then he himself waited in turn to be retrieved. Knievel was lifted back up to the canyon rim by helicopter while the unfortunate Hood waited patiently to be rescued. By nightfall, help still hadn’t arrived and it seemed that Hood had been completely forgotten amid all the furore surrounding his more famous friend. Shamefully, he was forgotten about all the following night and was forced to wrap himself in the X-2’s parachute for warmth until morning, when, apparently still unmissed, he somehow managed to scale his way more than 500 feet unaided up the canyon wall to safety. Sometimes it helps to be famous.

As Knievel was set down by the helicopter back up near the launch site he was completely swamped by reporters, spectators, fans and security men. He seemed genuinely dazed and his face was bloodied from the impact of the crash landing. David Frost, professional as ever, was the first to thrust a microphone in the star’s face to ask what had gone wrong. ‘I don’t know what happened. The machine, it turned sideways. I tried to steer and then I felt, like a brake. I didn’t know the chute was open…the jolt I got…I couldn’t get my seatbelt undone. Thank God I didn’t go into the river. Boy, I could have never gotten out of it. It hit the shelf of rocks and then bounced into another shelf of rocks. Shit, I don’t know what happened; it went sideways, it turned. Bob [Truax] told me if I saw the canyon wall and not the sky, for Christ’s sake to let it go. When it turned, I let her fly. It just about knocks you out. They came and got me out down there and put me in the boat…I couldn’t get my safety belt un-harnessed. If I’d a [sic] gone in the river I’d a [sic] never got out of it. Never.’ When another reporter asked Knievel if he was going to try to jump the canyon again, he replied, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I sat in it and gave it my best, and…I don’t know what to tell you.’

Evel retired to the cool sanity of his air-conditioned trailer to greet his long-suffering family, who had clearly responded to the event in very different ways. His daughter Tracey said, ‘We were certain he was dead. He had prepared us for his death. When we discovered he was alive, it was more of a shock to get that news than any other.’ Robbie, on the other hand, seemed to believe his father was invincible. ‘I was so used to him surviving every jump that this event was no different for me. I think I would have been more shocked if he had failed.’ Linda was overwhelmingly relieved and cried for joy at her husband’s safe return.

Dazed and confused as he undoubtedly was immediately after the jump, Knievel could have had no idea of the far-reaching consequences of his failure to leap the Snake River Canyon. It wasn’t the failure as such – after all, his audience had always thrilled to see him wipe out as much as seeing him make a perfect landing – it was the nature of the failure, in that many suspected foul play. When it became common knowledge, through pictures in the press and the television coverage which was eventually shown, that the Sky Cycle hadn’t even left the launch ramp before its drogue parachute blew out, many people thought Knievel had planned it all along; that he knew he’d never make the jump (after all, the first two test shots didn’t) and had decided to go along with the sham, make as much money as he could, and pull the chicken switch as soon as the rocket was fired.

For the remainder of his life, Knievel seethed with rage when anyone dared to mention such a possibility. ‘I waited seven years and then had an engineering mistake made, a malfunction, and the parachute blew out on take-off because of an electrical malfunction. The engineer didn’t know what the hell he was doing.’

Despite all his impressive qualifications, the blame was to fall on Bob Truax – at least as far as Knievel was concerned. He claims he himself hired parachute specialists in the early days of the project and that Truax replaced them with his own people. ‘That idiot fired my parachute team. He got his own parachute guy. It mal-functioned on blast-off, nearly cost me my life, cost me making it across. I should have made it a half-mile across that thing.’ He added that he would ‘never put my life in his [Truax’s] hands again’.

It seems unfair to blame Truax, since his credentials were impeccable and Knievel had forced him to work on a shoestring budget which itself was not forthcoming. Further, Truax stood to gain a $100,000 bonus if Knievel made it across the canyon, so it seems certain that he did the very best job he could with the limited funds he was given. Even so, Knievel was so incensed about his reputation being under threat that he later appeared on a US television show called
Lie Detector
and took a lie-detector test in a bid to prove that the failed canyon attempt had not been his fault and that he hadn’t copped out. For what it was worth, he passed.

Those who blame Knievel for a cop-out need to consider several issues, the first being that releasing the chute early was actually more dangerous than attempting to go all the way. A gentle 15mph landing on the opposite canyon rim – or even halfway across, down in the river – would have been much less dangerous than being blown back into the canyon wall where he could have been knocked unconscious before dropping down into the water, or even killed as the flimsy X-2 smashed into the wall. And if the chute had not opened so early, the X-2 would not have spun so dangerously as it left the ramp. It is debatable if Knievel even
could
have released the chute so instantaneously with the blast-off. Slow-motion footage shows the chute literally blowing out simultaneously with the blast of steam that sent the rocket on its way. Perhaps the tremendous force of the blast-off jolted the parachute release lever out of Evel’s hands. But the one overriding factor, which Evel’s critics seem to forget, is the man’s reputation for having a go at anything. After all, aborted attempt or not, it took a lot of courage to be strapped into an under-developed, prototype rocket, press the fire button and be launched 1,000 feet into the air above a deep, craggy and watery canyon.

In a sense, Knievel couldn’t have won either way, as he often admitted. ‘If I had made it across that canyon, people would have said, “See, that was easy.” If I had died, they would’ve just said a daredevil died – Evel Knievel – it was his last big jump. But excuse me – I’m still alive.’

If Evel had proved anything in his career it was that he wasn’t afraid of getting hurt and he wasn’t afraid to get back up and try again. There is no reason to think he did not also give the canyon jump his best shot. Knievel was the only man who ever knew if his courage left him at that crucial moment, and he certainly never admitted to it. More than 30 years after the event he still valued his reputation too much to damage it by admitting to any weakness. It seems that in the case of the canyon he must be given the benefit of the doubt. He did, after all,
attempt
to jump it, and that’s what he’d always promised he would do. That fact remains his proudest achievement – the fact that he had kept his word after seven years of promises.

The Snake River attempt made worldwide headline news on 9 September, overshadowed only by the news that President Ford had pardoned former president Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Estimates as to how much money Knievel actually made from the attempt vary greatly. Certainly the $6 million cheque was proved to have been a mere publicity stunt, but he still claimed to have made between $2.5 and $3 million from the jump.

The crowd on the day had been disappointing, and closed-circuit television sales had returned much less revenue than expected. The event was only broadcast in 250 venues, not the 400 that had originally been envisioned, and at least one showing had to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales. Even Bob Arum declared the response to Snake River very disappointing, and admitted that the overall gross was in the region of $4 million rather than the $32 million he and Knievel had been hoping to make.

Whatever anyone’s personal opinion on whether or not Evel Knievel faithfully attempted to jump the Snake River Canyon, one fact remains: no one else has ever been mad enough to try the stunt, despite there being a wealth of Evel imitators out there, and it was a fact not lost on the man himself. ‘There’s all kinds of guys said they wanted to jump that canyon. And God hasn’t moved it one inch. Not one inch! And I don’t see no big long line of daredevils standing out there wanting to try it.’

If notorious American gangster Bugsy Siegel had not had the vision to create Las Vegas in the mid-1940s, Evel Knievel would probably have done it for him. Never was a city more suited to an individual than Vegas was to Knievel. The glitz, the glamour, the gambling, the hustle, the shows, the bars, the girls, the sheer unashamed gaudiness of the city captivated Knievel more than any other place on earth.

He had already been making regular trips to the Nevada oasis to watch world championship boxing matches before he turned himself into a star in Vegas by jumping over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace. As he made more money, so he made more and more trips to Vegas, often flying in a group of friends in his Learjet to party for days and weeks on end. Knievel considered himself the biggest gambler that Vegas had ever seen, not because of the amount of money he threw around the craps tables, but because he felt he had gambled his life there in 1967 when trying to jump the fountains.

At the heart of his fascination with the city was his love of gambling. Throughout his adult life Knievel was a compulsive gambler who would bet on practically anything, the more bizarre the better. Legend has it he once bet the tip of his own finger on a single putt in a golf match, and having lost the stroke he chopped the end of the finger off with a shovel, it being the only sharp object at hand. The finger was later, according to the legend, sewn back on.

On another occasion, while heavily under the influence of his favourite poison, Wild Turkey, Knievel bet his friend Wayne Newton $10,000 that the reclusive multi-billionaire Howard Hughes was dead because no one had seen him for so long. The bet stuck for several months until, according to Knievel, Hughes chartered Knievel’s Learjet to fly to Houston, Texas and was found dead on arrival, proving that he had actually been alive at the time the bet was placed. Knievel found the circumstances so incredible and darkly amusing that he happily coughed up the ten grand, which was easily covered by his charter fee anyway.

Knievel had even bet the famous tennis hustler Bobby Riggs that Riggs could not set out from Las Vegas on a Harley-Davidson under 200cc (Riggs had never ridden a bike before) and arrive at the Snake River Canyon, which was 616 miles away, within 72 hours and in time for Knievel’s jump attempt. Riggs immediately took, and passed, his motorcycle test and turned up at the Snake River jump site a day early. Knievel was forced to stump up $25,000, which Riggs later donated to charity.

Playing golf offered Knievel almost endless opportunities to bet and he took every one of them. Rules would be set before the start of every round: if your ball went in the water you paid all the other players $100; if you landed in a bunker it cost $250; if your ball landed in the rough it cost you another $250, and so on. But there were ways to win back lost money too – if any player managed to hit a duck or bird and kill it, for example, he could expect to receive $1,000 from each player.

The tales of Evel’s gambling have become part of the myth that surrounds him and only he knows for sure how many of them are true, how many are exaggerated and how many are complete figments of his talent for spinning tall tales: ‘I once won $50,000 on a round of golf, beat this guy one up.’ ‘I lost $250,000 at blackjack once. Didn’t hurt though, cos I had $3 million in the bank at the time.’ ‘I won $100,000 betting on football in one year alone.’

But the stakes weren’t quite so high when one particular journalist joined Knievel and his friend Chuck Cosgriff for a round of golf shortly before the Snake River jump. Having heard all the tall tales surrounding Knievel’s gambling, the journalist was extremely disappointed to report that Evel only ‘won $5 from Cosgriff on the afternoon, an afternoon in which the betting ran to hundreds of dollars but finally cancelled out nearly even. So much for those $1,000-a-hole golf matches that have entered the legend.’

While he always maintained he was a man of his word, Knievel was never averse to stacking the odds in his favour when it came to gambling. For years he carried a silver dollar with heads on both sides. Not surprisingly, he claims to have never lost a coin toss in his life. Yet despite his apparent recklessness, Knievel believed he was a ‘sensible’ gambler, if there can be such a thing. ‘I like to gamble and I am good, but I am no maniac. If I had just a dollar left I would bet 50 cents but not the whole dollar. That kind of gambling is for snivelling failures.’

It is no surprise that Knievel was so fond of gambling, given the nature of his chosen profession. No matter how many safety measures he took before a jump (and they were few), when he twisted the throttle of his motorcycle and aimed for a take-off ramp or the edge of a canyon, the end result was always a gamble. If he landed his bike safely it was counted as a win and he was suitably rewarded financially. If he wiped out he still got paid, but his penalty for ‘losing’ was a whole lot of pain and weeks or months spent recuperating. Almost everything Evel Knievel ever did was a gamble to a certain extent, and in 1975 he took a new gamble with his career in deciding it was time to try a new market: Knievel flew to the UK for his first-ever performance outside the United States.

While he was still massively popular with the kids in America, his Snake River failure had taken its toll on Knievel’s reputation with his older and more cynical followers. The UK promised a fresh, new market where he figured he might possibly meet with less cynicism. It also promised to be a lucrative visit as his planned eight-venue tour was set to net him $250,000. But there were reasons other than money that tempted him across the Atlantic, as he explained: ‘I’d never been to England and wanted to go. In Europe, I’d only been to France, with Jackie Stewart and Princess Grace’s brother for the French Grand Prix. I wanted to tour all of Europe because my great-grandparents were from Germany and I wanted to jump the Berlin Wall. I also wanted to jump the River Thames but political bullshit put an end to that.’

The original plan had indeed been to restore the Sky Cycle and launch it over the Thames from Battersea Park with the aim of landing in the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, an idea which now sounds quite absurd. If Knievel had organisational headaches in such an isolated spot as the Snake River Canyon they were going to be multiplied a thousand-fold in central London, and so it proved. Instead of simply being able to lease a stretch of land on both sides of a canyon, to jump the Thames Knievel would have needed permission from various authorities including the Port Authority, the Water Authority, the Department of the Environment, the Pollution Authority and the Metropolitan Police. It clearly wasn’t going to happen in bureaucratic Britain but happily there were other obstacles that could be jumped and in more convenient places too.

Working with British television stalwart David Frost on the canyon jump had clearly paid dividends for Knievel as the relationship indirectly led to his UK trip. Frost owned a promotional company that was handled by British promoter John Daly, and, having commentated on the canyon coverage, Frost suspected the brash American could be a hit in the UK – if only the team could decide on a suitable spectacle.

Aside from the River Thames and the Berlin Wall, Knievel ludicrously talked of jumping the English Channel, having presumably never seen it and thus not realised that the only way he could ‘jump’ it would be in his Learjet. It was finally decided that a standard motorcycle jump in a controlled environment would be the only realistic option in the centre of Britain’s capital, and where better to stage it than the then-home of English football, Wembley Stadium.

With the venue having been decided on, Knievel then announced in a superb promotional flourish that he would not be jumping cars, vans or Mack trucks in the capital’s stadium, but 13 traditional red London buses, before moving on to perform in Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Bristol, Portsmouth and Southend, then winding up the tour, very appropriately, in Blackpool – England’s seedier seaside version of Las Vegas.

To jump London Corporation red buses – a very symbol of the city itself – in the world famous Wembley Stadium was an inspired touch of marketing, but there was one slight problem which no one had anticipated: the great British public didn’t seem to know anything about Evel Knievel, apart from the fact that he was some nut who had failed to jump a canyon in America. Knievel was going to have to make himself famous all over again and he only had a few weeks in which to do it.

Evel arrived in the UK in early 1975 to begin his whirlwind promotional tour and to make the as-yet-unconverted Brits sit up and take notice of him. He was filmed being given a guided tour of London and looked utterly bemused as a Beefeater at the Tower of London gave him a history lesson concerning the decapitation of Henry VIII’s wives. He showed his contempt for the various authorities governing the River Thames by driving scores of golf balls into the river and he caused traffic chaos in central London by refusing to drive on the left-hand side of the road in his custom-built Cadillac pick-up.

Bizarrely for a supposedly fearless daredevil, Evel had a row with a London cabbie who he felt was driving too fast and ended up storming out of the Hackney cab and hailing another. Knievel also cycled round the capital carrying his famous cane and stopped to talk to anyone who would listen, all for the benefit of television cameras and all in the name of selling tickets. Knievel condensed ten years of self-promotional experience into three short weeks and used every trick he knew to draw attention to himself – and it worked. From having sold just 7,000 tickets prior to Evel’s promotional activities, the event became completely sold out by show time as 90,000 people booked tickets to discover for themselves what the madcap phenomenon of Evel Knievel was all about.

Knievel seemed to appreciate his new fans as much as they took to him and he seemed to genuinely enjoy his time in England making new friends – and new conquests. ‘The English crowd and people were great to me. I spent three weeks in London and made a lot of friends like Henry Cooper and Graham Hill. And I dated a pretty little English girl who worked in a golf shop…and a French girl.’

Behind the scenes, John Daly had been having his share of headaches with the Wembley authorities. Accustomed as they were to staging football matches and the Horse of the Year Show, the officials expressed all manner of reservations about Knievel to Daly. ‘They were about to put on a show which quite honestly they became more and more terrified over. Let alone filling the stadium, they were also concerned as to whether the people would get full value for money. What about the turf? What exactly does this Evel Knievel do? Is there any chance we could change his first name?’

Eventually Daly and co-promoter Bob Arum, veteran of the canyon jump who obviously thought there was still some mileage left in Knievel, soothed the nerves of the Wembley officials and the jump was given approval to go ahead. Even though Wembley was Britain’s biggest stadium at the time there was still insufficient room for Knievel to make a fast-enough run-up to clear 13 buses and he reverted to building yet another ski-jump-style ramp reaching up into the highest seats of the stadium. But when Knievel first set eyes on the ramp and the 13 buses he knew it still wasn’t enough, as ABC commentator Frank Gifford – who was present when Knievel first saw the Wembley set-up complete with the 13 buses – explained: ‘The first time he looked over and he saw the buses he said, “Hell, I can’t do that.” I said, “Can’t do what?” and he said, “I can’t jump that far.”’ Gifford suggested that Knievel remove one or two buses but Knievel was adamant: ‘I said I’d jump 13.’

During some practice runs before the big day, Evel discovered that he had the wrong gearing to reach the required speed for take-off and knew he would never get the correct parts shipped over from Harley-Davidson in the US in time for the event. But with all the hype he had struggled so hard to generate, Knievel decided to go ahead with the jump rather than risk his reputation in the UK to add to his now rather tarnished image in the States.

The day of the jump was, somewhat unusually for Britain, scorching hot, and the capacity crowd stripped off to enjoy the May sunshine and watch majorettes, high-wire motorcycle performers and a man setting himself on fire and diving 50 feet into a tank of water, while they awaited the appearance of the main man. By the time Knievel was ready to make his appearance they had worked themselves up to fever pitch, eager to get their first glimpse of the all-American hero in the flesh.

Knievel had brought his growing collection of branded trucks and vehicles and displayed them on the hallowed turf alongside the doomed Sky Cycle. The tunnel which led onto the famous football pitch had been fitted with microphones to capture and amplify the noise of Knievel’s Harley-Davidson as he revved it up. After a rendition of both the British and American national anthems, Knievel gunned the bike into life and revved it wildly to work up his audience. Then, as the screams and cheering reached a crescendo, he roared out into the stadium, one hand in the air, and rode round the circumference of Wembley, waving to his new-found adoring audience.

In another touch of marketing genius, Knievel had – for the first time since making it his trademark – abandoned his white jumpsuit and replaced it with a navy blue outfit, mimicking the colours of the Union Jack while still keeping his American stars. When it came to working an audience, Evel Knievel never missed a trick, and with his own personal tribute to all things British he sent the Wembley throngs into a frenzy. Whatever happened afterwards, Knievel had cracked the UK. For one man to attract such a massive crowd for a show that would last only a matter of minutes was a real tribute to his talent for self-promotion and a true measure of the popularity of Evel Knievel in the mid-1970s.

What did happen next cemented his fame in Britain in a way that a successful jump could never have done. After two practice runs to gauge his speed and play to the crowd, Evel came storming down the flimsy, narrow ski ramp at around 80mph, raised his body slightly off the seat of his Harley and took off smoothly to rapturous applause and the flutter of thousands of camera shutters. The jump was long and low (Knievel was actually jumping single-decker buses and not double-deckers as is commonly believed) and all looked to be going well, but his analysis of the gearing proved accurate and Knievel landed roughly and slightly sideways on the safety deck covering the thirteenth bus. The resulting crash footage has since become almost as famous as the Caesar’s Palace wipe-out which had first made Knievel’s name eight years before.