Evel

by Leigh Montville

  “We used to hang out together, drink and raise hell,” Jim Rouse, another brother, younger, another boxer, said. “He always used to say, ‘You guys are crazy, going in that ring and letting someone hit you in the head.’ We always said, ‘If we’re crazy, what are you?’ ”

  A story. One night, as part of the drinking and raising hell, Knievel left a bar, maybe it was the Yellowstone, maybe not, with a prostitute. A short while later, the phone at the bar rang, a call for the Rouse brothers. This, remember, was before the time of cell phones and instant communication. Knievel was on the line from a phone booth at a gas station on Harrison Avenue. There had been a problem with the prostitute, a bigger problem with her pimp. Knievel needed a ride from the Rouse brothers, needed it now.

  En route to the gas station, right in the middle of Main Street, right in front of the M&M, right at the stoplight, the Rouse brothers passed Knievel’s car. The doors on both the driver’s and passenger’s sides were open. The car was still running. No one was in the car. No one was around.

  “The pimp pulled up beside me in his car, pointed a gun out the window right at me,” Knievel reported when rescued at the gas station. “I got the hell out of there. He wanted to kill me.”

  Knievel never did explain why the pimp was mad.

  Now Roger Rouse was matched against Dick Tiger for the title, and the fight felt like the greatest international moment in Butte athletic history, not only up there with that hockey meeting between the Butte Bombers and the Czech Olympic team but bigger, bigger, bigger. Roger Rouse actually had a chance to win. Or at least Knievel and the rest of the Butte tavern regulars thought so.

  They arrived days early for the Friday night fight, checked into a succession of $6 per night, fleabag Vegas motels, began to party extensively, and looked for the best price to make underdog bets on their man. Knievel, with his troubled finances, drove into town in a used Volkswagen off his father’s lot with $300 in his pocket. He checked into one of the $6 motels and joined the crowd.

  Somewhere in the next few days, he answered a knock at his motel door. He was surprised to see Rouse, the man of the moment. The fighter had brought someone with him.

  “I was writing a long story on Roger,” Gil Rogin, a longtime writer and editor at Sports Illustrated, one of the magazine’s earliest employees, said years later. “I’d been up to Montana, met his family, learned a lot about him. He said one day in Las Vegas, ‘You want a story? I’ll introduce you to a guy you won’t believe. He wants to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle.’ ”

  The first thing the thirty-seven-year-old Rogin noticed about the guy who wanted to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle was how small his motel room was. The writer never had seen a room this small. Knievel had been forced to put his suitcase underneath his bed because that was the only place it fit.

  The second thing Rogin noticed was how talkative Knievel was. The man was a quote machine. He didn’t seem to realize that his room was so small he had to keep his suitcase under the bed. He talked with a confidence that sounded like he was the one who was fighting for the world championship.

  “I always liked to do stories about underdogs,” Rogin said. “And I always liked to do stories about people who could talk. That made everything so much easier.”

  Evel Knievel? The Sports Illustrated writer was interested.

  The biggest attraction in Vegas in November 1967 was Caesars Palace, the $25 million, fourteen-story casino and hotel that had opened fifteen months earlier. Built with a $10.6 million loan from the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund and Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa’s blessing, the casino was unlike any of its eleven competitors on Las Vegas Boulevard, “the Strip.” With its seven hundred rooms, mirrors over the beds, waitresses and keno girls dressed as Roman goddesses, with its Circus Maximus showroom featuring top entertainment, with its daily celebration of hedonism and decadence, Caesars was a double-down bet on the Vegas future, an opulent operation that never had been seen anywhere. A first. It was the Vegas future.

  “I dreamed up the plans for this whole place, and I designed or supervised everything,” Caesars president Jay Sarno told reporter Jane Wilson. “I’m a builder, and I’ve always been very impressed by Roman architecture. It’s very romantic. You ever been in Rome? What do you think about the fountains out front of the hotel? Fantastic, eh?”

  Sarno claimed that a million dollars had been spent on the casino opening on August 5, 1966. Andy Williams, backed by a full orchestra, sang in the Circus Maximus. Harry and Jimmy, the two surviving Ritz Brothers, played in the Nero’s Nook lounge. A well-comped planeload of eighty-two writers was flown in from the East Coast. The guest list was cut down from 20,000 to 1,800 lucky high-rollers who consumed, among other things, 30,000 fresh eggs, 50,000 glasses of champagne, and the world’s largest Alaskan king crab. Lorne Greene, Al Hirt, Eva Gabor, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, and 550 Vietnam veterans were among the people in attendance. Robert Cummings, the actor, flew his own plane to Vegas to join the fun. A blond woman dressed as Cleopatra welcomed everyone at the front door. Her vital statistics were noted in newspaper accounts as 40-20-37.

  This was overkill, of course, the Vegas party to top all Vegas parties. The first wedding at Caesars, sixty-six-year-old bandleader Xavier Cugat and his teenage singer, Charo, was held two days later. All the appropriate ribbons were cut. Performers ranging from Woody Allen to Jack Benny to Johnny Mathis to Victor Borge and Petula Clark headlined the Circus Maximus in the first year, but the main attraction still was the place itself.

  The fountains, as Jay Sarno pointed out, were the most extravagant feature of the architecture. Unlike the other Vegas casinos, Caesars was set back from the Strip. A 135-foot circular driveway led to the front doors and easy entry to the low-ceilinged casino, which featured “the world’s largest chandelier.” In the middle of the circular driveway were eighteen fountains, forming “the world’s largest private fountain display,” that pumped out 350,000 gallons of water per minute, 10,000 gallons per second. A series of cypress trees, new to the Nevada desert environment, imported from Italy, provided a stately guard for the rushing waters.

  “I don’t worry if the trees die off,” Jay Sarno said. “I’ll just keep replacing them. People say to me, ‘So why not have palm trees?’ But I say they just don’t have the character we want here.”

  The visitors from Butte were as entranced as everyone else by the spectacle. They checked out the goddesses, the blackjack tables, and, of course, the bars. Knievel sneaked away at times to call himself from a pay phone, his familiar routine. Since he couldn’t be connected to himself, he was paged.

  “Paging Mr. Evel Knievel. Mr. Knievel.”

  Knievel was Knievel.

  “He says, at Caesars, ‘Give all these guys a drink,’ ” Dick Pickett, a bartender at the Freeway, one of the guys from Butte, said. “The bill comes. He signs for it. The waitress can’t read his writing. There’s a reason for that. He was signing it to someone else’s room.”

  Somewhere during the time at Caesars, another one of the guys, Billy Yganatowicz, a Butte fireman, made a suggestion. It was a moment that should have been recorded with more precision.

  “Hey, Bob,” Billy Yganatowicz said. “You should get a motorcycle and jump those fountains.”

  What?

  “That would be good.”

  Once more an idea was laid out, a throwaway line, simple conversation, much more than half in jest, that sounded so good that Knievel adopted it immediately. Good Time Charlie Shelton in Kalispell had given him the Grand Canyon as an ultimate goal. Billy Yganatowicz, the Butte fireman, gave him the fountains at Caesars Palace, 350,000 gallons of water per minute, 10,000 gallons per second, the largest private fountain display in the world, as an immediate goal.

  Knievel went to work. Immediately.

  “He called me up,” Dennis Lewin at Wide World of Sports said. “He said he was going to jump the fountains at Caesars Palace and we should do the broadcast. I rea
lly didn’t remember him at the time. I wasn’t interested, but I told him he could send me some film after he did it and we would take a look. That’s the best we could do. I forgot all about it. I guess from there, he used my name as if we had a deal. That’s the story that I heard.”

  The story had many versions, the names and organizations and details tweaked by Knievel, exaggerated with each rendition, but the basic tale always stayed the same: he proceeded to bombard Caesars president Sarno with hoax phone calls. He drove Sarno crazy. All of the calls involved Knievel and his attempt to jump the fountains with a motorcycle. Sarno was romanced as if he was the last customer in the world and Knievel was at his door with the last W. Clement Stone $3 policy in the world. Urgency was part of the sales presentation.

  “Dennis Lewin of ABC Sports calling for Mr. Sarno …”

  “Gil Rogin of Sports Illustrated for Mr. Sarno …”

  “Fred Blumenstein from NBC in Los Angeles …”

  Knievel changed his voice with each call. He used some real names, but mostly fictitious substitutes, mostly Jewish lawyer–sounding business names. The queries all were about this daredevil guy, this Eagle Beagle, Deevil Spleevil, Evel Knievel, whatever his name was, and this crazy plan to jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace. When was this happening? We might want to get a crew out there to cover something like this. We might want to be involved. What is the date? What is the time? What do you mean you don’t know? Everyone is talking about this.

  The final call—well, the next-to-final call—was brilliant. Knievel again impersonated a lawyer. Say the name was Epstein. Say it was Rothfarb. Whatever. Attorney Epstein/Rothfarb/Whatever represented Mr. Evel Knievel of Evel Knievel Enterprises, Butte, Montana. Mr. Knievel, a nationally known daredevil, had been fielding a bunch of telephone calls about a supposed jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace. He didn’t know a thing about this. He had no contracts. His inclination was to sue the hotel for using his name without his permission.

  “But I have a problem,” Epstein/Rothfarb/Whatever admitted. “I am also the attorney for Lawrence Welk, the bandleader. Perhaps you have seen his show on television? I am supposed to leave tomorrow with Mr. Welk and his band for a European tour. If I weren’t leaving, I would be filing a lawsuit in the morning, but as it is, I am going to have my client call your office. Hopefully you can meet with him and come to some accommodation. If not, I will file suit when I return.”

  The forty-five-year-old Sarno was not a pushover. He stood only five-foot-six, had one of those roly-poly bodies, but he already was a large Vegas presence, a gruff gambling man in a gambling town. A University of Missouri graduate who had built successful businesses in Miami and Atlanta and other stops, mostly on loans from good friend Jimmy Hoffa’s union, he had headed west for the action. He ate big, partied big, already was involved in the construction of a second casino to be called Circus Circus. He was known for his nightly trips up and down the Strip with his chauffeur, Little Jimmy. Sarno would start out each night with $10,000 in gambling money. That was his budget. Every casino was instructed to refuse him credit, no matter how much he begged. He either would come home with a lot of money or come home broke. The odds always favored broke. The next night he would start out with Little Jimmy and another $10,000. He was a one-man boost for the local economy.

  Making deals was a basic part of his job. He and his entertainment director had completed a much larger, much messier transaction a month earlier when he signed Frank Sinatra to a multimillion-dollar, three-year contract to appear at Caesars, beginning in 1968. Sinatra’s final confrontation, in early September, with the management of the rival Sands Hotel, which ended his sixteen-year association with the hotel, had included a crash-filled ride through the casino in a golf cart, followed by a punch in the nose from Sands president Carl Cohen. The indignant singer promised to bring Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, and Joey Bishop, the rest of his “Rat Pack,” to Caesars with him. Sarno, of course, would be happy to oblige.

  He also was happy to deal with Knievel.

  “I arrived at Sarno’s executive suites and was greeted by his secretary,” Knievel later said in the book Evel Ways: The Attitude of Evel Knievel. “She ran behind a door and I overheard ‘Mr. Sarno, it’s him, it’s him.’ Sarno comes running out of his office and says ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you.’ ”

  Knievel signed a contract that day to jump the fountains at Caesars at two-thirty on the afternoon of December 31, 1967. If he was successful, he would jump the fountains again on January 3 and January 6, 1968. The fee for the three jumps would be $4,500. He also would receive a complimentary room and meals at Caesars, plus drinks. He would not receive complimentary gambling privileges. This was not a Sinatra-sized contract perhaps, but it was the biggest contract for Knievel in his short daredevil career.

  This was the stage he always wanted. Someone was going to pay attention to what he did. A lot of someones.

  Roger Rouse, alas, did not become the light heavyweight champion of the world on November 17, 1967. He was knocked down for the mandatory eight counts in both the ninth and tenth rounds, and when he was dropped again fifty-two seconds into the twelfth round, referee Jimmy Oliva simply stopped the fight. The thirty-eight-year-old Tiger, worried father of seven children back home, his country embroiled in civil war, retained his crown.

  A first-generation computer that filled an entire room somewhere had been fed assorted pre-fight information and along with the boys from Butte had predicted a Rouse upset. Tiger sounded as happy to beat the computer as he was to beat the boxer from Anaconda.

  “A computer is just handmade,” Tiger said. “I call him a liar and prove it tonight.”

  The boys from Butte went back to the Freeway, the Met, the Acoma Lounge, the assorted haunts. Knievel, who supposedly lost $1,000 on the fight, went back to work. He jumped one hundred feet, ramp to ramp, for three straight days, November 23 to 26, at the San Francisco Civic Center as part of a sports cycle exhibition. He was at the other end of California four days later, seated behind a table at Long Beach Honda from three to six on the afternoon of November 30 to sign autographs, talk motorcycles, talk danger, the first of four appearances to promote his jump on December 2 at the Long Beach Sports Arena.

  The motorcycle talk now involved a different motorcycle. In San Francisco he had switched from his Norton 750 to a 650cc Triumph T-120. The switch came at just the right time. Norton had determined that the motorcycle it gave Knievel was worth more as a motorcycle, even used, than any publicity he might give the company in return. One of his financial woes in Las Vegas was being a motorcycle daredevil without a motorcycle. Bob Blair wanted the Norton back.

  Triumph came up with a replacement partly because of the Caesars Palace deal, partly because Knievel had worked his contacts in the motorcycle business in the state of Washington. The contacts had convinced management at the Triumph/BSA distribution and racing facility in Duarte, California, to give Knievel a bike. This was a big deal.

  “Companies didn’t give away anything in those days,” Bryan Farnsworth, part of the Hollywood Motorcycle Daredevils shows and also a mechanic for Triumph, said. “I raced the bikes, and the company gave me $30 off dealer cost, plus a break on parts, and I thought I was in heaven. It was a big thing to give away a bike.”

  Knievel drove to the Duarte garage to finalize the agreement in a Chevrolet El Camino pickup truck with his Norton motorcycle in the back. This was considered bad form. Motorcycle brand rivalries were huge, such a big deal that a plywood wall had been built directly down the middle of the garage, because although Triumph and BSA motorcycles had merged business operations, they had not merged racing teams. There were so many animosities between the mechanics on the two teams that the wall had been built to keep the peace.

  And now this guy with a Norton in his truck bed wanted a new Triumph motorcycle? Pat Owens, the chief racing mechanic, wouldn’t even touch the box that contained the new bike. He said Eve
l Knievel was “a carnival act,” not a racer, and refused to assemble the bike. The job had no dignity.

  Farnsworth, who always had been charmed by Knievel, did the job. He set the bike up the way he would set up a bike for desert races at the time, a heavy, four-hundred-pound monster with no real springs, no shocks, none of the basics for big jumps that light, bouncy bikes would have in the future. There were no light, bouncy bikes for big jumps in 1967.

  This was the T-120—which had been advertised as “the world’s fastest motorcycle” since Detroit Triumph dealer Bob Lipper set a speed record of 245.66 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1966—that Knievel would use at Caesars. This was the bike he used at San Francisco and Long Beach.

  “There’s a publicity picture of him making one of the jumps at San Francisco,” Farnsworth said. “He’s in the middle of the air, and you can see a black dot in the middle of the picture. You think it’s some ink that was left there by the printer or some imperfection. No, it’s the rubber guard from the foot peg flying off. There was a cotter pin that I forgot to fasten. We got it for the next jump.”

  The Long Beach jump on December 2, 1967, advertised as an attempt at an indoor record, was supposed to cover ten cars. The hard part was a short run-up of only 90 yards to get up to speed. The distance Knievel really needed was 125 yards, but just to get 90 he had to start in the lobby. Even then, he was backed up against a flight of stairs.

  Everything would happen in an explosive hurry.

  “You just got to grab and go,” he explained. “You got to gas that motorcycle and don’t let go. Speed doesn’t necessarily get distance. You got to get up right on top of the power curve, right at the peak so that the rear wheel is driving fast off that chain. It’s just like a person crouching and springing up. You got to get up on the foot pegs on the balls of your feet, hang on and guide it through the air. If you’re going to miss, just grit your teeth …”