“Aren’t you going to buy a round?” was what Knievel said.
His personal relationships depended on his moods. His moods could change in a moment. Smart as he was—and everybody pretty much admitted he worked from a well-disguised intellect—he still could be profane and stupid. He could be incredibly rude. He also could be canny, clever, shrewd. He could be thoughtful, but seldom quiet. Never shy. Never reserved. A friend from his early motorcycle time in California, Skip Van Leeuwen, told him years later that money had not changed him a bit: he was just as arrogant rich as he was when he was poor.
Arrogance made him an expert at everything, even things he didn’t know. He always figured that the best advice came from his gut, not from someone on or off his payroll. This got him into assorted stretches of hot water, eventually landed him in jail and killed his career. He seldom apologized for anything he did or said to anyone. He seldom backed away or backed down from a challenge.
He lived for the challenges.
“I have a proposition,” he would say to a stranger, a new listener, when a lull came to conversations. “I bet you …”
There always would be another proposition, another bet. There usually would be a twist somewhere in the outcome, a trick. The football game on the television might be shown on a tape delay. Something like that. The trick would make Bob Knievel, Bobby Knievel, Robert Craig Knievel, eventually the famous Evel Knievel, the winner. The loser would not be happy with the twist.
“I’ll bet you that my penis is soft longer than your penis is hard,” he suggested more than once, an example of a proposition handed to a new listener.
The words might be a little rushed, slightly garbled, the emphasis on some parts of the proposition, not on the others. The new listener would hear what he wanted to hear, usually a slightly dyslexic arrangement of the sentence. Sure, he would bet on that. His penis, hard, had to be longer than this guy’s penis was soft. The new listener would conjure up an erection by some means, show the bulge in his pants to Knievel, and prepare to collect the bet.
“Not so fast,” Knievel would point out. “My penis will be soft longer than yours is hard. That was the bet. You can’t keep that erection all day. You thought the bet was supposed to be that your penis would be longer hard than mine was soft? Why would I bet on something like that? You must have heard wrong. Pay me.”
The new listener would have a choice: pay or fight. There would be no big ha-ha-ha, fooled you, don’t give me any money, just a joke. Pay up and shut up. That was the rule. The moment, the tension, would arise out of nowhere, totally driven by Knievel. He created the situation. He controlled the outcome. He would not budge. What would this guy do in response? What next? This was the action, the challenge. This was the reason for the bet in the first place. Anything could happen.
The daredevil life was a full-time occupation. At least it was for this daredevil.
Always had been.
A story. The two cousins played together so often, they thought they were brothers. Bobby Knievel was five years old, and Pat Williams was six, and on this day they were in the kitchen of Bobby Knievel’s grandmother, Emma, in the house on Parrot Street in Butte. The linoleum floor had been shined, and the two cousins were in their stocking feet, sliding across the high gloss the way kids do. Maybe they were whooping a little bit, bouncing off each other, in the process.
Pat Williams was in awe of his younger cousin, a tough fact to admit when the year’s difference in their ages was a sixth of his life, but true. The kid not only had an easy athleticism about him, but also had a quirky mind and boundless energy. He would and could do anything. Five years old. He was a brass band all by himself.
One of his less attractive attributes, alas, was a tendency to pinch other people. He not only liked to pinch, he liked to pinch as hard as he could for as long as he could, simply to see the reaction from his subject. The reaction from Pat Williams, whom he had pinched often, was anger. Pat Williams had told his cousin, again and again, how much he didn’t like to be pinched. Bobby Knievel continued to do it.
In fact, he did it again in his grandmother’s kitchen. As the two boys slid on the floor, he came up from behind and pinched Pat Williams as hard as he could and held on. Pat Williams turned around and hit him with one punch, hard as he could, to the stomach.
Knocked him out.
It was an amazing punch, really, probably went straight to the solar plexus. Bobby Knievel made the sound a balloon makes when the air suddenly is released, pfffffft, then went straight down. His head hit the linoleum, blam, and then his eyes rolled backward, and then they closed and he didn’t move. A trickle of blood came from one ear. Pat Williams yelled at him to wake up, wake up, at the same time fearing the worst. One cousin was convinced he had killed the other cousin. He would spend his life behind bars.
Wait.
Bobby Knievel started to move.
Yes.
He came back in stages, the way knocked-out people did in the movies. He twitched a little, moaned a little, seemed to tip a big toe back into consciousness, then wade forward. A curious smile appeared on his face as his eyes finally opened, thank God. He said nothing, even as Pat Williams kept asking if he was all right. He pulled himself upward, still smiling, and assumed something that looked very much like a football lineman’s stance. He stared straight ahead.
A pantry door had been left open, just a bit, on the other side of the room. Bobby Knievel suddenly sprang from the stance, ran as absolutely fast as he could across the linoleum floor, socks or no socks, put his head down, and, ka-pow, hit the pantry door headfirst and was knocked out again. Same sequence. He fell backward, hit his head again on the floor, eyes rolled back and closed. He was out again.
Pat Williams didn’t know what to think. Was his cousin dead this time? No, the recovery process was also repeated. Bobby Knievel had the same small smile, same stare when he opened his eyes. Except this time it was directed straight at his cousin.
“You see, Pat,” he said, “nobody can hurt me.”
Five years old.
Where did that come from?
“Jesus Christ,” the six-year-old Pat Williams said to himself as he looked at the five-year-old Bobby Knievel. “There’s something wrong with this guy.”
This guy was different.
He was from Butte, Montana, and television made him a star. Once he ducked under the rabbit ears and climbed into the living rooms of the United States through that open twenty-one-inch window in the final hours of 1967, the first hours of 1968, he pretty much made himself at home for the next decade. People never had seen anyone quite like him. Not up close.
He was a character straight from the dusty back roads of self-promotion, from the land of carnival shows and fast talk, three-headed goats and cotton-candy excitement. He didn’t have a talent, really, couldn’t sing or dance or juggle pie plates, but his fearlessness, his courage or craziness, depending on the point of view, was certainly different. The size of his guts, his nuts, his stones, agates, crokies, testicles, family jewels, balls—the balls of a giant, biggest balls on the planet, etc., etc.—attracted instant attention. The size of his mouth kept that attention.
He could talk. Yes, he could.
“He always was talking,” Jack Kusler, who grew up in Knievel’s neighborhood in Butte, said. “You couldn’t shut him up. He was always the best, the best in everything. He was the best motorcycle rider. He was the best skier, the best skater, the best athlete. He wasn’t the best in any of them. He was the best bullshitter. That was the only thing he was best at.”
“He could talk to anyone,” Rodney Friedman, his onetime boss at Combined Insurance, a door-to-door operation, said. “He wasn’t afraid to talk to lawyers, doctors. A lot of guys are intimidated by education. Not Bob. He went right in there. And women just loved him. He’d go inside a beauty salon, and he’d sell everyone in the place. They’d all be laughing. He had that charm. Good-looking guy. They’d all buy policies for their husbands too.
”
“He knew how to get attention,” Doug Wilson, a producer at ABC’s Wide World of Sports, said. “He was the world’s greatest barnstormer. Everyone always would compare him to Muhammad Ali, the two athletes who got all the attention at the time. The difference was that Ali had the mythology and tradition of the heavyweight championship to help bring attention. Evel Knievel had nothing. He generated every bit of attention that ever came to him.
“These were the two athletes who dominated their time. Ali succeeded in an established sport. Evel invented his sport.”
He landed in front of the cameras at exactly the right time. Ten years earlier, 1958, he would have been stranded on the county fair circuit, his voice gone hoarse, his body battered, as he tried to gather a live crowd each night and sell tickets all over again. In its grainy infancy in 1958, television, black and white and limited in all it could do, never could have captured the danger in his performances. If he had arrived ten years later than he did, in 1978, he would have had to fight his way through a crowd to find attention as technology opened the field to more channels, more sports, more attractions. Color! Instant replay! UHF! Choices! Daredevils were everywhere.
In 1968 he was a revelation. The viewers of America still watched the three networks with happy dedication. There was no cable, no satellite, no pooh-bah on the couch with a clicker. There was no clicker. The shows that were successful were giants, huge, a weeklong parade that went from Bonanza, The Ed Sullivan Show, and the controversial Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on Sunday night through Gunsmoke and The Andy Griffith Show (Monday), The Red Skelton Hour (Tuesday), The Beverly Hillbillies (Wednesday), The Dean Martin Show (Thursday), Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (Friday), all the way to The Jackie Gleason Show and The Lawrence Welk Show on Saturday.
If a man could force his way onto the screen, on any network, he was assured of a good audience. If he could force himself onto the right show, the numbers were staggering. Knievel never had his own show, but with frequent appearances on Wide World, mixed with talk shows like the one with Dick Cavett, with news reports, sports reports, with comedy walk-ons, with whatever came along, he was able to deliver his life story to the American public in well-watched installments.
He was reality television before reality television was invented, an outrageous and outspoken personality who became prime water-cooler conversation on a Monday morning. An American Family, a twelve-part series in 1973 on PBS about Bill and Pat Loud of Santa Barbara, California, their disintegrating marriage, and their five kids, especially their gay son, Lance, would be seen as the start of the reality trend, but Knievel certainly was in the territory before these people arrived. The costs were low to televise what he did, the ratings were high, the story dramatic and intimate.
“It’s hard to imagine now how big he became, how he was such a cult figure,” said Dennis Lewin, former senior vice president of production for Wide World of Sports. “Evel, Ali, Monday Night Football, Howard Cosell. They were all huge. Everything was anti-establishment at the time. Evel was a reaction to that. He really did believe in America … He always was a real package. He always delivered. He always did it.”
“He was part of seven of the ten highest-rated shows in Wide World history,” Doug Wilson said. “People loved him.”
There was no competition. He was a strobe light brought into a darkroom. There were no home computers. There was no Internet. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube, no sports sites, no porn sites, no MapQuest to tell a person where to go, no Google to answer all other questions, no dark hole to capture time and attention. The home computer would not start to appear until 1978. Watch Evel Knievel or, oh, read a good book.
There were no video games. There were no Mario Brothers, no Ms., no Mr. Pac-Man, no space aliens to be handled, no Grand Theft Auto, no Wii, no joystick, no Xbox, not even Atari. The video game Pong would not be introduced until 1972. Watch Evel Knievel or play a good board game of Chutes and Ladders.
There was no ESPN, so there was no SportsCenter, no Baseball Tonight, no highlights package featuring great athletic plays in a twenty-four-hour cycle. The replay camera had been invented but was costly, primitive, and used sparingly. ESPN did not begin operation until 1978. Watch Evel Knievel or watch, oh, American Fisherman.
There were no extreme sports. Surfing had been around forever, and the Beach Boys sang about it every day on the radio, and the 1966 movie The Endless Summer had made it even more appealing, but most American kids did not live next to an ocean. The skateboard was around, but very low priority. The polyurethane wheel, the basis for all good tricks, would not be invented until 1972. The first national snowboard race would not be held until 1982. Even motorcycles were in a low evolutionary stage. The first U.S. motocross event was held only in 1966. If you wanted to see someone flipping and flopping, flying through the air like a largemouth bass on the end of some fifteen-pound test line, you pretty much had to, yes, watch Knievel.
He was different. America always has loved different.
A story. The two cousins went in separate directions through the succeeding years. They lived at different ends of Butte as kids, made different friends in different neighborhoods, went to Butte’s two different high schools, then to different career paths. Bobby Knievel, of course, became what he became, storied in word and song and Saturday afternoon television. Pat Williams went to the University of Montana and the University of Denver and eventually became a nine-time congressman from Montana, which was pretty good because Montana only had two congressmen for much of his time, then only one.
The cousins did remain in touch, linked by age and familiarity, by common knowledge. Family stuff. When they would bump into each other somewhere in Butte, somewhere in the rest of America, they would pick up the easy and natural dialogue from those childhood mornings and afternoons on Parrot Street.
“You’re sure good on those takeoffs,” Pat Williams would say about his cousin’s new occupation. “You’re not so good sometimes with those landings.”
“And you’re still an asshole,” Bobby Knievel would declare.
Williams always saw his cousin as an engaging rascal. There was nothing hidden about his deviousness. He had an attitude that should have made any buyer beware, tied to his track record of sometimes shady dealings. What saved him was a twinkle in his eyes, a little stage laugh, a sort of “heh-heh-heh” that made all sins smaller, got him off a succession of hooks. Trouble that he was, he was fun to be around. He lit up people’s dull lives.
“I came back to Butte after college with a little MGB sports car,” Pat Williams said. “That was really different in those days. I think I might have been the first person with an MGB in Butte, maybe all of Montana …”
Williams was getting into the car when Knievel drove past, braked fast, and double-parked. What kind of car was this that his cousin had? Very sharp. Let me drive it. Williams said the last thing he would ever do in this world was let his daredevil cousin drive his good-looking sports car, oh, no, never, and of course they were taking off in a moment, Knievel at the wheel.
The speedometer and the tachometer were spun to numbers never seen previously in this particular car. The speeds were two, then three times and maybe more above the limit. The cornering, while terrifying, seemed to be very good. Three minutes into the test drive, coming down the original street, Knievel spotted three men standing around his double-parked car. They clearly could not move their own car because it was boxed in by Knievel’s car.
“Hey, what are those guys doing with my car?” Knievel asked.
He hit the brakes on the MGB. He turned the wheel hard left. The sports car went into a 180-degree turn, accompanied by 180-degree squeals and the 180-degree smell of burning rubber. The car skidded, squealed, sent the smell through the air as it flew sideways at Knievel’s car—Pat Williams braced for the grand crash and demolition of both cousins’ cars in one accident—and stopped, yes, a foot short. Perfect.
“What’s the problem?” Knievel
asked the three strangers.
Just like that.
“Are you scared before you do this stuff you’re doing?” Williams asked once.
“I’d better be,” his cousin said. “Yeah, I’m scared every time. That shows that I’m not crazy. If I was crazy, I wouldn’t be scared.”
The cousins would run into each other, say, at Stapleton International Airport in Denver, headed in their different directions. Pat Williams would laugh as the rods and plates inside Knievel’s body sent the metal detector into high dudgeon. (“It’s okay, Mr. Knievel,” the attendant would say. “Come right through.”) They would run into each other at the 5-Mile Bar in Butte, Knievel surrounded by people, buying them drinks. They would meet anywhere, and Pat Williams would want more attention, more time, because he liked his cousin, still was fascinated, but more time wasn’t possible because now the world was fascinated.
“I was somewhere, and I clipped out a story about Bob,” Williams said. “He was having trouble with the people who ran the Astrodome. I forget what it was about. He was threatening not to jump. The wording made it sound like he was going to jump over the Astrodome, not in the Astrodome. I put the clipping in my wallet. Saved it.”
At one of those occasional extemporaneous meetings with Knievel, Pat Williams took out his wallet and took out the clipping and read it aloud and said, “What kind of shit is this? You’re going to jump over the Astrodome?” They both laughed. The conversation continued for a while, and as the cousins said good-bye again, Knievel took out his own wallet and also unfolded a newspaper clipping. This was a story about Pat Williams, a state assemblyman in Montana, running for Congress.
“What kind of shit is this?” Bobby Knievel asked. “You’re going to run for Congress?”
Pat Williams was flabbergasted again.
This guy always could surprise you.
He was from Butte, Montana, and his life was a grand, sloppy American saga. It was one of those morality tales filled with immorality, lust, a certain amount of violence, greed, fame (and the loss of fame), twists, hairpin turns, and more than an occasional “I told you so.” It could have been written long ago by Theodore Dreiser, by Frank J. Norris, by John Steinbeck, then brought up to date with golf and motorcycles, with go-go dancers and Playboy bunnies, pinball machines, bars and lounges, private jets and press conferences, toys that went whirrrrr and shot off into the night. A substantial dollop of religion was available to be added or skipped at the end by the writer.
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