Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (16 page)

Evel was thrown high into the air, almost performing a handstand while still desperately struggling to hold on to the Harley’s handlebars, and, as the bike bucked and tossed at high speed, Knievel was finally forced to let go, and his body was slammed onto the Wembley turf, where he rolled end over end, churning up dust. The rogue bike eventually caught up with Knievel and slammed into him hard, chasing him down until both man and machine gradually ground to a halt in front of a terrified, and now silenced, audience. ‘I tried to hang on to that motorcycle all the way down that ramp, just like riding a bull, but I just couldn’t hang on to it. It finally threw me off and I went over the handlebars and when I landed it caught up with me and got right on top of me and just burned the hell outta me. And of course I was unconscious for several minutes after that jump. I didn’t know where I was.’

Just as he had blamed Bob Truax for his failed attempt on the canyon, Knievel wasted no time in pointing the finger of blame for the Wembley crash, and this time it was his mechanic, John Hood, who copped the flak. ‘I just didn’t have enough speed to make the jump. I needed to be doing 90mph at the bottom of the ramp but I was only doing 80mph. I shifted gear three times but I knew at the bottom of the ramp I wasn’t going to make it. My idiot mechanic didn’t get the gearing right. He was a complete idiot – he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In the end we couldn’t get the right gearing from Harley-Davidson in time so we just had to go ahead with the jump. The crowd had paid their money.’

Knievel’s injuries were bad. He had fractured some vertebrae, broken his pelvis, and broken his right hand and one finger as well as suffering a concussion. Yet, with pure Knievel bravado – still pumped full of adrenalin and in too much shock to feel just how bad his injuries were – Evel asked to be helped to his feet so he could address the crowd. Battered, bruised, cut, bloodied, and covered in dust from rolling end-over-end on the parched Wembley turf, Knievel shocked the stadium with his announcement. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country, I’ve got to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will ever see me jump because I will never, ever,
ever
jump again. I am through.’

The crowd applauded wildly, feeling relieved that their new hero was still alive, and feeling that little bit special in having witnessed what was to be the great Evel Knievel’s last-ever public performance. With that, Knievel was laid on a stretcher and whisked off in an ambulance, his career apparently over but his sense of humour still intact. As he apologised to John Daly for wiping out and ruining the planned UK tour, he excused himself by saying, ‘My grandma always taught me to catch the last bus.’

But 24 hours is a long time in the motorcycle-jumping business, and, speaking from his hospital bed the following day, Evel declared that it had only been the pain talking when he announced his retirement and he wished to withdraw his statement.

No matter how willing he was to carry on jumping, he certainly wasn’t able to do so, at least in the short term, and the seven other dates on his UK tour were cancelled, much to the disappointment of all those who had not made the trip to London. Flying back home to the USA, Knievel might well have intended to return to the UK in the future to capitalise on what was essentially a whole new market, but his Wembley appearance was to remain his only-ever performance outside America and Canada.

Back home in the States, Knievel was reunited with Linda and his children who had not travelled to England with him. It was only then that he discovered the true extent of his Wembley injuries. ‘Doctors in the UK made some mistakes after the Wembley jump. They took an X-ray of me and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with you.” I didn’t say anything but I’d split the whole of my pelvis. They couldn’t see it on the X-ray though, so they told me to take these Percodans [painkillers]. I couldn’t walk. I knew my pelvis was busted and a week later I was sitting on a motorcycle and I almost passed out because the pain was so terrible. It turns out there were two cracks as wide as your finger up the back of the pelvis. I was a mess after Wembley. I was hurt bad.’

Battered and broken once more and having lost out on the chance to make some serious money with his eight-date tour, Knievel began another process of recuperation, nagged by the constant worry of how he was going to keep himself and his family in the manner they had become accustomed to. His gambling and extravagant lifestyle had begun to take its toll on Knievel’s bank balance and Evel was realistic enough to know that the only way he could earn more money was to jump yet again. He hadn’t performed in the US since the canyon fiasco more than eight months previously. Maybe his American audience would be ready to receive him now the furore over the canyon had died down?

His mind troubled by the constant need to make money and his body racked by pain once more, Knievel was not a good patient when recovering from injury. He gobbled down painkillers in a bid to gain some respite from the constant hurting, and, unable to play golf, fly to Vegas, to gamble or even womanise, Evel turned to his life-long companion, Wild Turkey, for solace. ‘I had my share, and everybody else’s, of beer, whisky and major painkillers.’

For a man who thrived on action and the adrenalin rush of performing dangerous stunts, being cooped up at home was hell itself and he often took out his frustrations on those around him, which usually happened to be Linda. Despite all Evel’s infidelities, Linda still very much wanted her marriage to work and wanted, more than anything, to put an end to her husband’s suffering. She had almost lost count of the times she’d had to nurse Evel back to health and, at 36, Knievel’s body was not healing as easily as it did when he was a younger man.

Evel did everything within his powers to keep Linda sheltered from the press, perhaps fearing she might reveal more than he wanted known about his private life. Yet on the few occasions when she did speak to the media she always stood by her man while admitting that she lived in constant fear of losing him – if not to another woman, then to a fatal accident while performing. ‘It was always scary from the very beginning. His first jumps I know I would kind of hang on to his arm. I think I bugged him a little until he finally told me to leave him alone because it was hard enough to make the jump without somebody bugging him. So I finally kept my mouth shut and let him do what he wanted to do, and this is the only thing that’s ever made him happy.’

The pressure on Knievel to retire must have been immense, both from himself and from those who cared for him. But in his mind the pressure to make money was even greater. He was far too proud to lose the status he had suffered so much to attain, and his expensive tastes simply couldn’t be catered for if he took a regular job or even managed to dream up a way of cashing in on his name without actually having to perform.

It seems strange that Knievel was unable to turn his marketing genius to anything other than jumping, and, try as he might to come up with a viable alternative to leaping a motorcycle, he drew a blank and eventually announced his plans to jump again on home soil. This time he would attempt to leap over 14 buses in Ohio, almost five months to the day after his horrific Wembley crash. In his willingness to trade pain and discomfort for cold, hard cash, it appeared that Knievel would happily have sold off limbs and organs if the price was right. The decision to attempt 14 buses when he had failed to clear 13 in London appeared to be optimistic in the extreme, but with a longer run-up area Evel believed it was possible, and, besides, as he said, ‘I wasn’t going to jump 13 buses – that’s an unlucky number. I decided to jump 14.’

Knievel’s Wembley crash – which was televised in the States on ABC – seemed to have gone some way to winning back his American audience. Ironically, it was the very fact that he crashed which persuaded at least some of the offended populace that he
was
still prepared to pull the trigger that he
was
still prepared to get hurt and that he’d shown those Brits what true American heroism was made of. An easy landing would simply have added fuel to the fire that Knievel couldn’t hack it any more and was simply churning out con trick after con trick to make money.

Certainly, ABC seemed happy enough to continue their partnership with the daredevil; the channel showed no fewer than three Knievel-related programmes over a one-month period in the build-up to Knievel’s 14-bus leap at the Kings Island Family Entertainment Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. A one-hour documentary called
Evel Knievel: Portrait of a Daredevil
was followed by an appearance by Evel on
Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell,
in which the stuntman goofed around with Muhammad Ali, a man he had met on several occasions through their joint associations with promoter Bob Arum.

Knievel had first met Ali before the Snake River Canyon jump at a party in New York, and the clash of egos must have been audible for miles, though the two did get on well together. When Ali turned to Evel and proclaimed, ‘You know what you are? You’re the white Muhammad Ali!’, Knievel readily responded, ‘Then you’re the black Evel Knievel.’ Years later Knievel would boast, ‘I was prettier and just as great as Ali. Every time I saw him I used to kid him and give him one of my pictures, autographed. He is still my champion…I will always admire him because he is the greatest even to this day.’

While he didn’t actually make an appearance, Knievel was clearly the inspiration for a two-part episode of ABC’s hit show
Happy Days,
which starred Henry Winkler as the Fonz, another Seventies icon and one who was the very epitome of cool. Although often repeated, the two-part show was originally screened just before Evel’s 14-bus attempt, and, in a bid to prove his cool, the Fonz attempted to clear 14 trash cans on his motorcycle, proclaiming as Evel himself had done that ‘13 is unlucky’. He may have fallen from grace at the canyon but, at least judging by ABC’s listings schedule, Knievel appeared to be as popular as ever once again on the eve of what was to be the longest jump he would ever make.

It’s a fact that Evel Knievel is better known for his failures than his successes, and no jump proved this more than his perfect leap over 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island, Ohio on 25 October 1975.

Most people with even the slightest passing interest in Knievel have heard of the Caesar’s Palace crash, the failed Snake River Canyon attempt and the horrific Wembley wipe-out, but few have heard of Kings Island, the scene of Knievel’s greatest success. This has largely been due to the media who, while repeatedly screening Knievel’s horrific crashes, seemed to ignore the many times he did manage to make safe landings; although, to be fair, the media is at the same time pandering to what viewers want to see and read about – and, more often than not, that’s blood and guts.

Evel arrived in Dayton, Ohio on 13 October to visit the Kings Island jump site and perform some practice jumps before the main event. He had already completed a seven-city, non-jumping promotional tour to publicise the event, taking in Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville and Cincinnati.

A jump stadium had been specially built for his attempt just outside the Kings Island Family Entertainment Center. Able to hold 70,000 people, it was hailed as the largest temporary-seating arena in the United States. Even so, there were fears that it might not be big enough as word started getting around that up to 100,000 people might turn out to see Knievel’s longest-ever jump. The attendance record in the entertainment park itself was 43,000, and everyone involved fully expected this to be broken. The centrepiece of the arena was a 400-foot-long ramp leading up to where the 14 Greyhound buses would eventually be placed, but Evel built up to that number slowly during the week, initially jumping just five, six and seven buses.

When the first five buses were lined up for his initial practice leap, Knievel complained they were not close enough together and that he wanted them ‘so close together that the paint would rub off’. The drivers then parked them just eight inches apart but Evel still wasn’t happy until a local friend called Pete Ankney suggested he bring in two fork-lift trucks to lift the buses into place so they were actually touching. Knievel obviously wasn’t taking any chances on this one. As Ankney commented at the time, ‘Eight inches may not sound like much, but when you multiply that 13 times you’re talking about more than eight feet.’

Unusually, and perhaps showing a new-found caution after one crash too many at Wembley, Knievel continued making practice jumps throughout the week before taking a day out on Friday to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday. The mayor of Dayton, James H. McGee, presented Knievel with the keys to the city, and Montgomery County officials commissioned a six-foot birthday cake designed to feed 300, which featured 14 buses and a model of Knievel on his bike suspended above them. A reception was held in Courthouse Square where Knievel cut the cake and distributed it to onlookers and officials.

Knievel explained to gathered reporters that, after a week of practising, he was mentally ready for his record-breaking attempt. ‘I’ve never been in a better frame of mind for a jump than I am now. I was scared to death at the Snake River but I think the greatest thrill I’ve ever had in my 10 years of jumping was hearing the countdown by 5-4-3-2-1 and pushing that button.’

In view of his Wembley disaster, Knievel also explained that he had switched to taller gearing which would allow a greater take-off speed, and that he had extended his approach area by some 85 feet in order to build up as much speed as possible.

On the morning of 25 October, exactly five months and two days after announcing his retirement at Wembley, Evel Knievel was back in the arena once more and ready to risk everything again. The show kicked off at 2 p.m. with eleven skydivers plummeting 13,500 feet into the arena in the shape of the initials ‘EK’ before hot-air balloons were released and biplanes performed stunts, all adding to the carnival atmosphere. In the arena itself, live bands churned out music and the usual circus-style acts attempted to keep the crowds entertained. As usual, Knievel’s continually growing array of vehicles were on display, this time being joined by a new Formula 1 race car and a ‘crash car’, both full-size versions of the toys which were on sale.

Despite all the efforts of building a 70,000 capacity arena, only 25,000 spectators turned out on the day, paying $8 a head to watch the jump alone or $12 if they also wanted admission to all the rides in the Family Entertainment Center. It was still a healthy crowd for one man to be able to command but Knievel’s act often suffered on the crowd-pulling front because it was over so quickly. In 1975, $8 was a lot of money for a show that would be over in a few minutes, and more and more people were waking up to the fact.

Contributing to the lower-than-expected attendance figures was ABC’s decision to show the event live in a one-hour-broadcast special. It was a wise decision on the channel’s part. While just 25,000 turned up to see Knievel in the flesh, an incredible 32 million television viewers switched on at home to watch the comeback of the greatest daredevil of all time. It remains ABC’s highest-ever viewing figure with a 52 per cent audience share. The Snake River Canyon failure had quite obviously been forgotten.

Those who did make the effort to attend the live show went wild with excitement as Knievel finally entered the arena and made his usual round of wheelies before addressing the audience and explaining his decision to jump again after he had announced his retirement. ‘You can’t be the best in the world and fall off and get up and say, “I quit.” Not if you’re an Evel Knievel you can’t. And I’m not gonna quit that way. I will try it again: if I make it, I’ll continue, if I don’t…if
I
don’t…I’m gonna pack it all in.’

Set against a spectacular backdrop of roller coasters and Ferris wheels, Knievel was back where he belonged; back in carnival land, only on a much grander scale than his early county-fair days. For his biggest-ever jump Evel had come full circle, and his son Robbie, now 13 years old, made his real performance debut pulling wheelies round the arena in a miniature pale blue version of his father’s famous suit. Evel rode alongside, his huge cape billowing in the wind, looking more than ever like Elvis Presley on a motorcycle. But Robbie remembers the Kings Island jump for very different reasons. With Evel still in great pain from his Wembley crash, Robbie explained his concern: ‘You know, he was in a lot of pain cos the doctor wouldn’t shoot the Xylocaine into him to numb him up cos he was busted from the jump before. I held his hand while he shot the Xylocaine in himself…so every time he went off that ramp it scared me – it scared me pretty good.’

Pumped full of Xylocaine to numb the pain signals being emitted from so many parts of his body, Knievel finally made his approach to the ramp that would take him into orbit over 14 ten-foot-wide Greyhound buses. The approach was fast, nearing 100mph, and, as usual, Evel stood on the footrests of his bike just before take-off and eased his body into a semi-standing position to gain better control of the bike in mid-air. Thousands of camera flash-guns exploded in the audience as the deep, guttural roar of the V-twin Harley-Davidson reached a crescendo before the split second when Evel left the ramp. Then, with traction left behind and the rear wheel spinning freely, the revs fell away in an eerie, limp silence as the back end of the bike dipped, as Knievel intended, ready for a rear-wheel landing. As he soared down onto the safety ramp covering the fourteenth bus the bike was approaching the near-vertical, and it looked for one chilling moment like Evel was going to wipe out again. Instead, the rear wheel slammed hard down onto the landing ramp followed almost impossibly swiftly by the front wheel. The crowd erupted. He had done it.

Speeding out of the arena, Knievel glanced back towards the ramp, apparently unable to believe he had actually bridged the gap; that at 37 years old, battered and broken, he had jumped 133 feet – further than ever before – and executed a safe, almost perfect landing. There was life in the old dog yet.

While he may have travelled a further distance in the air at Caesar’s Palace (141 feet), his crash-landing back then meant there was little glory in the achievement. After all, as Evel himself said, anyone can jump a motorcycle, the problems begin when you try to land it. Jubilant and more than a little relieved, Evel rode back into the arena and up the landing ramp to accept the wild applause of his audience; of those who still believed that they were looking at the last of the gladiators; a man whose spirit simply refused to be broken; a man who defied age, gravity and pain. But his post-jump speech to the crowd revealed that, in a sense, his spirit was broken, or at least not as wildly optimistic as it had been hitherto. Sounding emotionally drained, he announced, ‘I am going to continue to perform throughout this country and throughout the world, and I hope that I’ll meet success while doing it, but as far as I’m concerned, I have jumped far enough.’

It was only in later years that Knievel admitted he had actually wanted to retire after Kings Island. ‘I really wanted to quit then. It was the first jump that I made that was successful where I thought, “Yeah, I might hang it up – I did this.” But, of course, I went on from there.’

Knievel had admitted that this was the end of the line, at least as far as distance went; that his bike ‘didn’t have wings’ after all, and that he had to be wise enough to know when to stop before he really did kill himself.

Once, while en route to a performance in Austin, Texas, Knievel had heard two locals talking about him in a Mexican café in Deming, New Mexico. They were – unwittingly – grossly exaggerating Knievel’s achievements while fully believing they spoke the truth. Evel had jumped 152 cars, not to mention the Grand Canyon itself. Unrecognised, Knievel listened in and realised that the myth and legend which had grown up around him had got out of hand; that people fully expected the impossible from him and that his real achievements were always going to pale in comparison. ‘I’m going to get killed,’ he thought, ‘living up to what people want me to be. I’ve got to quit.’

The other major problem was that in a very real way he could never actually win, at least among the cynics of the world. If he wiped out he was no good; he didn’t make the jump stick. Yet if he did land safely then the jump must have been too simple. A journalist covering the Kings Island show expressed this very opinion all too clearly. Bucky Albers wrote of the event, ‘The descending ramp was built in such a manner that it began with plywood stretching from the centre of the tenth bus. So, despite the implication that he would crash if he did not clear 14 buses, Knievel had to clear only 10 to come to a safe landing.’

Evel was extremely relieved to be able to admit to himself that the big jumps were over; that the big risks were over. ‘After missing 13 buses in London, England and then coming to Kings Island and jumping 14, don’t think I wasn’t nervous. There was never anybody gladder in the world than me when that jump was over.

‘People said I wasn’t scared before a jump; that’s bullshit, I was scared. I’d have a shot of Wild Turkey whisky before each jump to calm myself. I’d get this knot in my stomach and this lump in my throat every time. People who go around wearing “No Fear” T-shirts now are full of shit.’

Fear or no fear, Knievel would continue to perform as he had stated, but his performances in the future would be more like exhibitions mixed with personal appearances, with much shorter jumps being attempted. His philosophy from that point on was to ‘Put on the shows and try and provide the best entertainment possible and try and stay alive and not get hurt any more.’

This statement showed a fundamental lack of understanding as to why people flocked to see him jump in the first place. Was it any surprise that Knievel’s popularity went into decline when he had actually publicly admitted that he wouldn’t be taking risks any more? That he wouldn’t be making long jumps any more? And that he wasn’t prepared to get hurt any more? Knievel himself had long been aware that a certain percentage of his audience came to see him crash, get hurt or even die. To deny them any of those possibilities was to deny them a show. It was tantamount to Frank Sinatra announcing that, while he would still be staging concerts, he wouldn’t actually be singing any more, just making a walk-on public appearance. Effectively, Knievel’s various statements to this effect marked the beginning of the end of his career.

But while his career as a serious stunt performer may have been all but over, Knievel was still popular enough to attract the attentions of Hollywood, and he spent much of 1976 preparing for, and filming, the second Knievel-related film,
Viva Knievel!
In the hoopla following Snake River, Warner Bros. had signed Evel to a three-picture deal, and the first was to be
Viva.
It was not to be an updated biography following on from George Hamilton’s 1971
Evel Knievel
movie, but rather a fictional action-adventure with Evel starring as himself. His list of co-stars was fairly impressive, if at times miscast. Most notably miscast was legendary dancer Gene Kelly starring as Knievel’s alcoholic mechanic, but other star names in more suitable roles included supermodel Lauren Hutton as the love interest, with roles also for Leslie Nielsen (later of
Naked Gun
fame), Red Buttons and Cameron Mitchell. Frank Gifford, Evel’s long-standing crony from ABC, also made a cameo as himself.

The rather lame plot (although to be fair it was like Hamilton’s movie, fairly representative of many films being made at the time) revolved around Evel trying to foil drug smugglers who were using replicas of his trucks and trailers to bring cocaine from Mexico into the US. While Knievel played himself he was not permitted to perform any jumps for the movie for obvious reasons: if he was hurt it could cost the studio hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. Warner Bros. turned to another respected stuntman, Gary Davis, to stand in for their star performer. Davis explained why Knievel had to take a back seat when it came to the riding segments in the movie: ‘Evel Knievel was the star of the movie, he was not Evel Knievel the daredevil. If, for any reason, Evel would have gotten harmed…all he needed to do was catch a cold and it shuts down the show. During one of the sequences I was out riding, getting the crowd excited – they [the production team] wanted to shoot the crowd. Evel decided he was gonna come out and entertain too. Something went wrong and he fell off the bike; it flipped over on a wheelie. That was it. Warner Bros. [had] a lot of money invested in him at that time and they said, “You’re done, you will not ride.” It’s not that he couldn’t have done the stunts, it was that they couldn’t afford to allow him to do it.’