Evel

by Leigh Montville

  One impressionable eight-year-old who was fascinated lived in Butte, Montana. Or so he always said. He said that his grandmother took him to the Chitwood show and he always remembered it, especially the rider who did tricks on a motorcycle. Knievel always was quick to say that the earliest notions of doing what he did were inspired by Joie Chitwood’s heroics.

  Which, of course, made Evel Knievel a direct descendant of Lucky Teter.

  The Wide World of Sports segment was run three weeks after the Ascot jump, on March 25, 1967. The show, which started in 1961 as a summer replacement on ABC, had become a staple of Saturday afternoon television in the 5:00–6:30 time slot, offering coverage of a smorgasbord of sports that existed outside the familiar choices of football, baseball, and basketball. Technology dictated that many of the events were taped and often shown on an exaggerated delay.

  The Knievel jump was shown in the middle of the 100-lap motocross race, which was won by Van Leeuwen, a first prize of $1,750. Bill Fleming was the announcer, a classic baritone boomer, a man who projected a definite excitement in his voice. He interviewed Knievel in one segment, then came back for the jump in another.

  The Knievel in the interview was the young man on the rise, the insurance salesman, white shirt and sedate brown tie, quiet tan sports coat, boy’s regular haircut, pleasant smile, slight squint into the sun. One hand held on to the other, the way someone would stand in the back of a church or in front of the class giving a book report. Fleming proclaimed him “a most unusual young man” and said that his “specialty in sports” would be to jump fifteen automobiles on his motorcycle.

  “Have you ever jumped fifteen before, Evel?” Fleming asked.

  “Bill, I never have,” the clean-cut daredevil said. “I missed a jump in the northwest part of the United States over thirteen, and I was hospitalized and laid up for over five months. And I sure hope that doesn’t happen today.”

  “How many cars were you attempting at that time?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen and you missed it?”

  “I did.”

  “You’re trying fifteen today?”

  “The parachute’s ready, the motorcycle’s ready, and I’m ready. And I’m not going to miss today.”

  The jump segment went perfectly. Knievel changed into the black-and-yellow leathers he had worn with the Daredevils. The words “Evel Knievel Motorcycle Daredevils” and “Hollywood” were sewn in black on the back of his yellow leather vest. A line of black stars went down the sides of each of his yellow pants legs. He looked good.

  After the usual false start, part for safety, part for drama, he hit the ramp at the proper speed, stood up, held the front wheel high, landed at the proper spot, kept riding. Fifteen cars were gone. The record. ABC showed the jump again, and Fleming, at the end, boomed that this was “a wild way to ride a motorcycle.”

  In households across the United States, any memories from the jump no doubt were consigned to the same mental wastebasket that contained Wide World pictures of lumberjack competitions, Ping-Pong matches, and perhaps pairs figure skating or bull riding, but for Knievel this was another line for the résumé. He was legitimate. How legitimate? He was on Wide World of Sports.

  He also was signed to a string of shows at Ascot Park. Part of the ABC picture of the jump showed J. C. Agajanian walking around on the sidelines in his cowboy hat, then standing by the side of the landing ramp to watch the jump as closely as he could. He obviously liked what Knievel did, and especially liked the jump in attendance.

  There are people who have an inherent knack for grabbing attention. This kid certainly had it, had it as much as anyone J. C. Agajanian ever had seen in the most attention-grabbing city in the United States. Knievel was in the Long Beach Independent only a week after the jump, talking about the proposed canyon jump. He made it sound like a historic and newsworthy undertaking.

  “I feel that the thing has significant value to people right now and in the future,” he told columnist Rich Roberts. “It’s just like Lindbergh when he flew across the ocean. People said, ‘Why does he want to fly across the ocean, and if he does, so what?’ Well, now we’re all going across the ocean, although we didn’t know then that there was any significant value to it.”

  Roberts, unable to stop himself, did mention that Lindbergh was flying an airplane. Knievel would be trying to fly a motorcycle.

  “That’s the only way to fly, baby!” Knievel replied, Roberts wrote, in “a moment of exuberance.”

  In the next two months, the daredevil would do at least three shows at Ascot. He would jump fifteen cars, fourteen cars, finally sixteen cars, all jumps successful. He also put together a reconstituted daredevil show called “The Evel Knievel Stunt Show of Stars” just for Ascot and a motorcycle convention in Sacramento. The only holdover from the Motorcycle Daredevils was Butch Wilhelm, the midget. The other stars were the best riders from the Tourist Trophy steeplechase races, the first generation of motocross at the track. Van Leeuwen, Eddie Mulder, Gene Romero, Rod Pack, Bryan Farnsworth (who had to race under the name “Clutch Cargo” because he was employed in the motorcycle industry), and Swede Savage were familiar Ascot names.

  The shows were slapstick hilarious. Everybody buzzed around, did wheelies, busted through flaming boards, made a lot of noise. Clutch Cargo dressed up like a woman, riding a motorcycle out of control. It was a circus.

  “One night the flaming boards didn’t burn like they were supposed to burn,” Van Leeuwen said. “Everybody looked at everybody else. Nobody wanted to hit those boards. Knievel, he just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and took off and went through ’em, one after another, blam, blam, blam. He bruised his knuckles. He was woozy at the end.”

  Rod Pack had an act where he climbed to the top of a very tall telephone pole. After appropriate dramatics, he dove off the pole. A pit had been dug, filled with a number of large inflated air mattresses, and Pack landed fine, but the effect from the stands was that he had landed on the ground and was seriously injured. He milked the moment, then bounded up, happy and healthy.

  Wilhelm, the midget, still had problems riding his miniature motorcycle. One skit involved a pickup truck hitting a collapsible outhouse. The walls fall down. Wilhelm comes flying out on the miniature motorcycle. The pickup truck chases him. He collides with a fake brick wall, falls down. The men in the pickup truck grab him, throw him in the back of the truck, appear to beat him up, then throw a dummy from the truck that looks like him. All of this worked fine on one given night … outhouse, chase, fake brick wall, into truck … except for the ending.

  “I was driving the truck,” Van Leeuwen said. “I can hear the midget just screaming in the back. I said to myself, ‘This guy’s a great actor, making a lot of noise.’ Then they threw the dummy out and the guy still was screaming. Turned out he’d broken his collarbone when he hit the fake brick wall. I could see the bone just sticking out.

  “He was in a lot of pain. He still was supposed to jump the toy cars with his miniature motorcycle. Said he couldn’t do it. Knievel comes out of his trailer and says, ‘Get back out there. You don’t do that fucking jump, you don’t get paid.’ He did the jump.”

  Knievel fit into the group with the motorcycle racers, everybody young and fearless. They drank hard, partied hard, chased the Hollywood night. Van Leeuwen, Mulder, and Farnsworth were early TT champions, traveled around the country to race. (“I found a life right there,” Eddie Mulder said years later. “Motorcycles, beer, all those pretty women. What was wrong with that? I never had to grow up and get a job. I just raced.”) Savage would switch to Indy cars and die from injuries suffered at the 1973 Indianapolis 500. Pack already had a certain amount of fame. He was the first man to make a recorded jump from an airplane without wearing a parachute. The stunt on January 1, 1965, was captured in a photo spread for Life magazine. Pack jumped out of the plane without the chute. Bob Allen, his friend, jumped from another plane 1,500 feet away with an extra chute. Pack and Allen met in midair. Allen h
anded Pack the second chute. Pack slipped into the chute, pulled the rip cord, and landed safely. He now did a lot of stunt work in movies. Mulder also was a stunt man. He said Knievel was not.

  “Stunt work is very precise,” Mulder said. “You have to take a lot of orders, follow orders, for everything to go right. Knievel was not very good at taking orders from anyone.”

  Knievel was the last arrival to the motorcycle group, but was the fastest talker, the self-promoter. He was the same commanding presence he was everywhere else, with one exception. The unspoken truth was that he couldn’t ride a motorcycle nearly as well as these other guys.

  “Between you and me and the skeletons in the closet, Evel Knievel was not a very good motorcycle rider,” Eddie Mulder said. “He just didn’t have the natural talent. Plus, he wasn’t in good physical shape. Never was.”

  He did have one quality in abundance that nobody else in the group had.

  “He was crazy,” Mulder said. “Just crazy. He was a character, man.”

  The final Ascot show was on May 30, 1967, and Knievel soon was back in Butte. He scheduled a string of jumps in the state of Washington. More than any place, even Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest was where he performed in his early career. The area was dotted with little racetracks and fairgrounds, and he knew most of the proprietors—or at least knew their names—from his racing days and motorcycle sales time in Moses Lake and Sunnyside.

  A couple of lists eventually would evolve, dates and records of his jumps, looking as official as a major league baseball schedule and results, but some of the earliest jumps would be missing. Any number of jumps happened in a publicity vacuum, never reported in any newspaper, remembered or only half-remembered by the people who were there.

  An example was a jump Knievel performed for Ted Pollock, the promoter and owner of the Yakima (Washington) Speedway. Maybe it happened around this time. Maybe earlier. Maybe later. Pollock was sure that it was one of Knievel’s first jumps in the state. He had never met Knievel before he scheduled this event.

  “He showed up one day, asked if I would promote a jump here,” Pollock said. “We talked, and he said he’d want $3,500. I agreed and asked if he wanted $1,000 in advance. That floored him. He said no one ever had offered him an advance like that before.”

  The two men agreed on a date—whatever it was—and a promotion. He would jump ten Pepsi trucks. Not the big ones, the smaller Pepsi trucks. Pickups. The show was scheduled for a weekend night, and Knievel appeared that day to set up his equipment. He was alone, traveling with a little house trailer that he parked in the middle of the infield. The Pepsi people somehow had made a mistake and sent thirteen trucks instead of ten. Knievel, as he put up his ramps, said that the extra three trucks might as well be added to the line. He thought he could clear thirteen trucks.

  Except a couple of hours later, he thought he couldn’t. He called Pollock and expressed his fear.

  “Come down and have a drink with me in my trailer,” Knievel said to the promoter. “Talk with me.”

  Pollock was taking care of his ten-year-old son, Tommy, for the day, so he went to the trailer with his son. They sat around a cramped table with the daredevil. The daredevil said they should have whiskey. He pulled out three glasses, poured a shot of Wild Turkey bourbon in each. The two men and the boy all drank, just like that. The boy’s eyes were opened very wide.

  “It was okay,” Ted Pollock said later about his son’s debut with hard liquor. “There’s worse things to say than you had your first drink of whiskey when you were ten years old with Evel Knievel.”

  Knievel kept drinking.

  He outlined his concerns. He never had jumped thirteen Pepsi trucks, never had gone that far. There was a finite limit to the power and possibilities of one man and one motorcycle. This well could be it. He still would jump, mind you, because he had said he would, but he did not think he would land safely. The news was both a relief and a burden to Pollock, a relief because he would not have to refund any ticket money from a good house, a burden because he didn’t want the death of this stranger on his soul.

  The afternoon moved into the evening, and the evening moved into showtime, and the promoter noticed that the bottle of Wild Turkey was pretty much empty and no one else had joined the party. Knievel was shattered, drunk. He still said he had misgivings about the jump, but he left the trailer to cheers, staggered to the bike, kicked her into action, and went down the ramp. The takeoff was perfect. The flight was uneventful. The landing was perfect.

  “The guy couldn’t walk,” Ted Pollock said. “But he could jump thirteen Pepsi trucks.”

  Pollock would wind up promoting seventeen Knievel jumps in the Northwest.

  The summer trip through the region—not promoted by Ted Pollock—was not a great success. The crowds were fine, four thousand people the number quoted at most stops, but he crashed in three of his four jumps. He cleared thirteen automobiles from Centralia Dodge at the Lewis County Fairgrounds in Centralia, Washington, on June 9, 1967, then appeared the next day to speak at the Seattle Cycle Show at Exhibition Hall in Seattle on a bill that included actor Nick Adams and Miss Cycle, Linda Humble, but his next three stops all ended with hospital visits.

  In Graham, Washington, he tried to jump sixteen Volkswagens at the Graham Speedway on July 28, 1967. He was supposed to be moving at seventy miles per hour when he went off the ramp, but was only at sixty. He came up short. The front wheel hit the sixteenth car, and he bounced and rolled, bounced and rolled, for nearly seventy feet. He wound up with a concussion.

  “I don’t feel too bad,” he said from the hospital. “They haven’t taken any X-rays yet, though. I guess I’ll be here for another four or five days.”

  What did he remember from the crash?

  “I can’t remember anything after hitting the car,” he said.

  He promised from his bed that he would return in three weeks and complete what he started out to do. He returned on August 18, 1967, faced the same sixteen Volkswagens, and crashed again. He completed the jump but couldn’t hold on to the handlebars. He broke his left wrist, his right knee, and a couple of ribs. He was back in the hospital again.

  On September 24, 1967, five weeks later, still in recovery from the broken left wrist, right knee, and assorted ribs, he tried to clear sixteen Allen Green Chevrolets at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, Washington. His failures were spelled out in the ad for the event: “Two months ago he tried to clear 16 Volkswagens and wound up in the hospital twice.” Again he completed the Evergreen jump, cleared all sixteen Chevys, but landed hard enough to compress his spine. Back in the hospital.

  “A motorcycle coming down thirty feet at seventy miles per hour gives you a terrible jolt,” he said.

  A losing streak in this business had consequences.

  10 Caesars (I)

  Finances had become a problem. The publicity was nice, but the payoff certainly had not arrived. The future always was delayed by the latest crashes in the present. Not only did hospital bills eat up the profits, time in the hospital ate up time on the job. If he couldn’t perform, he had no income. The most daring part of the daredevil business, once again, was trying to sustain a workable bottom line.

  Knievel had three days of jumps lined up at the San Francisco Civic Center in the last week of November and four days at the Long Beach Sports Arena in the first week of December, but he was floundering for capital. Even his backup, his grandmother, had told him that funding from Parrot Street was no longer an option. That was why he was pretty much broke when he arrived in Las Vegas to join the tavern regulars of Butte on their vacation.

  The trip was almost mandatory for the tavern regulars. One of their own was boxing for the world light heavyweight title on November 17, 1967, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. A story would evolve later that Knievel liked boxing and traveled to Las Vegas to see Dick Tiger, the famed champion from Nigeria, at work. The truth was that he went to see Roger Rouse kick the famed Dick Tiger’s ass. Everybody from B
utte did.

  Rouse was a thirty-two-year-old divorced father of two from Opportunity, Montana, which was an afterthought extension of Anaconda, Montana, which was a town built at the turn of the century twenty-five miles outside of Butte around the toxic smelting facility that handled all of the copper from the mines. (“Why did they name your town ‘Opportunity’?” Rouse was asked. “Somebody was trying to be funny, I guess,” he replied.) A solid workman who could knock people down and out, he had reached the quarterfinals as a middleweight in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. He then slowly put together a 30-5-3 record as a professional in the next ten years, a record that established him as the number-one contender for Tiger’s crown but brought little other recognition. Most of his fights were in Montana and the state of Washington. Five were in the Butte Civic Center, five more in Memorial Auditorium in Anaconda.

  The promoters brought him to New York for introductions at other televised title fights, dressed him in newly purchased boots, hat, and string tie from a Manhattan western wear store in an attempt to sell him to the American public as a Montana cowboy, but he was not exactly Roy Rogers or Tom Mix. He was another tough guy from a tough Montana town. He was the same as Knievel, same values, same background, same as the other Butte tough guys. Some of his best boxing work had been done for free, back to back with his three brothers, punching against other angry drinkers.

  “When we were young, drinking was a matter of dissipating our aggression,” Rouse’s older brother, Don, said. “Now Roger’s drinking is incidental to getting women.”

  “I don’t train for the fight,” Roger said. “I train for the party after the fight.”

  He and his brothers were friendly with Knievel. Anaconda had arguably the highest tavern-to-population ratio in the country—thirty-seven establishments to serve 12,054 men, women, and census-counted children—but the brothers often took the road to Butte for added evening excitement. That was how they knew Knievel.