Evel

by Leigh Montville

  A local Butte politician, Paul Hoelnstein, tried to start a tongue-in-cheek campaign to run Evel Knievel for president of the United States. Hoelnstein held a press conference at the old Metals Bank Building to start the process. The mayor also came to this event. Lapel buttons that read “Vote for Evel Knievel” were distributed. The potential candidate was called on the telephone in Atlanta and informed of the grassroots movement. Someone tried to get a few political facts straight.

  “What’s your party?” he was asked into the phone.

  “Party?” Knievel replied through the speaker. “You bet! I’m ready. Where are you having it?”

  A story. Somewhere during this time, Knievel met Elvis Presley. There was a pop culture inevitability to the moment. The daredevil from Butte, Montana, and the rock ‘n’ roll singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, wore the same showbiz clothes, worked the same fan base, even shared the same snarl when cornered. They were bound to bump into each other sometime, King Meets Last of the Gladiators, something like that. Flashbulbs would flash. Icons would smile under their piled-up hair.

  The way it happened, though, was much quieter than that. Knievel’s half-sister, Loretta Young, had begun to date Presley. She introduced her brother to her boyfriend. No cameras were present.

  “Elvis was playing the Intercontinental Hotel in Las Vegas, which later became the Hilton,” Loretta Young said. “My brother came to a show. We sat in one of those high booths up front. When Elvis went into his last song, his manager, Joe Esposito, got us, and we went back to the dressing room. Elvis changed clothes, and we all sat around and talked.”

  Loretta, tall, blond, very pretty, went out with Elvis for two and a half years. He picked her out of the Folies Bergere chorus line at the Desert Sands, asked her for a date between shows. She refused because she already had a date with Jerry van Dyke, Dick van Dyke’s brother. Elvis persisted, came back the next night with yellow roses and a dinner invitation, and what was a girl to do? She was charmed.

  He was funnier than the world knew. He was deeper than the world knew. He was, truth be told, a much sweeter spirit than her brother. Maybe the darkness would get him in the end, fame and drugs and deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, but not now. He still read the Bible every day.

  “I found out what God’s real name is,” he declared one afternoon. “I read it in the Bible.”

  “What’s His real name?” she asked.

  “Hallowed.”

  “Hallowed? What kind of name is that?”

  “I don’t know, but it says it right here … ‘Hallowed be Thy name.’ ”

  The meeting with Loretta’s brother went fine. Knievel always had been impressed by celebrity. Who was a bigger celebrity than Elvis? Knievel had a line about him that he repeated often—“I guess I thought I was Elvis Presley, but I’ll tell you something. All Elvis did was stand on a stage and play a guitar. He never fell off on that pavement at no eighty miles per hour.” All of which was true, especially the part about thinking he was Elvis.

  “When he first got those white leathers, he said that he wanted to look like Elvis,” Loretta Young said. “And he did. He even had a rabbit’s foot for good luck. Elvis always had a rabbit’s foot for good luck too, until one day he realized where the rabbit’s feet came from. He said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this wasn’t such good luck for the rabbit.’ He stopped carrying them.”

  Elvis wanted to know what projects Evel had in the works. Evel told him about Snake River and the canyon. Elvis was impressed.

  “How far is that?” he asked.

  “It’s over a mile.”

  “On a motorcycle?”

  “No, I have this other thing. The Skycycle.”

  Knievel invited Presley to the jump, whenever it happened, at the close of the conversation. Presley said he’d be glad to go. The icons shook hands, went in different directions in the Las Vegas night.

  Knievel called Loretta a while later, thanked her for the meeting. He was back in Butte and bragged about the round bed he had installed in the bedroom of his new house. Loretta told him that was very nice. She said Elvis had a round bed in his personal airplane.

  “In his airplane?” Knievel said.

  “And he has a chinchilla bedspread for it,” his sister said.

  “Chinchilla?”

  Two weeks later, Knievel called again. He said, yes, he had had a chinchilla bedspread made for his round bed in Butte. He said that a chinchilla bedspread was toasty warm and comfortable on a cold winter’s night.

  “I know,” Loretta said with a wicked laugh.

  A story. Somewhere around this time, Jay Tamburina went to a dinner theater in Lincolnshire, Illinois, outside Chicago. He had been one of those salesmen with Knievel in the Combined Insurance days around Butte, one of the hard chargers who wanted to grow up to be district manager Alex Smith. Time had passed, and he was still with Combined and had reached his goal.

  He went to the dinner theater with a couple of other district managers. A meeting was scheduled at the Combined home office the next day, so they took advantage of the opportunity for a night out. They had very good seats, close to the stage. The star of the show was George Hamilton. Three very pretty young women sat at the next table.

  When the show was finished, Tamburina was moved to make a comment to the three women. He was not married at the time.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “George Hamilton played Evel Knievel in that movie. I worked with Evel Knievel for a couple of years, selling insurance.”

  “Really,” one of the women replied. “I’m George Hamilton’s girlfriend. George loves talking about Evel Knievel.”

  She invited Tamburina to stick around, meet Hamilton, to talk about Evel. Tamburina accepted. The other two district managers peeled into the night.

  The meeting with Hamilton went very well. There was a bunch of drinks, a bunch of conversation. One of the women peeled away. There was a band. Hamilton got up and danced with his girlfriend. When he came back, he suggested that Tamburina dance with the other woman, Mary.

  Tamburina danced. He danced a few dances.

  “Look, we’re all going to the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. You should come with us,” Hamilton then suggested. “Mary really likes you.”

  Temptation screamed through Tamburina’s head, a freight train of pleasant thoughts that included sex, sex, maybe a little more sex, mixed with drinking and dancing. This was his Hollywood moment, George Hamilton and him, two beautiful women.

  That other train chugged into the other side of his head, slow and steady, carrying a full load of Responsibility and Duty and all of that stuff. He couldn’t stop its progress.

  “I really can’t go,” he heard himself say to George Hamilton and the two beautiful women. “I have a meeting in the morning. I have to give a presentation.”

  He couldn’t believe the words as he said them. He wouldn’t believe them for the rest of his days. How stupid was he? This was the strangest decision he ever had made.

  Bob Knievel never would have done that.

  The best reports of the famous daredevil’s popularity came from the emergency rooms. The children of America—mostly adolescents, but some younger, some much younger—would arrive with cuts and contusions, compound fractures and missing teeth, every now and then a badly injured internal organ. The dialogue between doctor and patient always would be the same.

  “How’d you hurt yourself?”

  “Well, I saw this guy on television …”

  In Minneapolis, a nine-year-old cleared five garbage cans with his bicycle, but landed wrong and needed fifteen stitches and $400 worth of dental surgery. In Boise, Idaho, a sixteen-year-old cleared a ditch with his bike, but struck a house and suffered a severe concussion. In New York City, a nine-year-old drove his bike off a ramp and was impaled on his handlebars, suffering grave liver damage. In Salt Lake City, a seven-year-old girl, serious head trauma … in Brooklyn, a six-year-old, trying to clear three milk cases, critical c
ondition … in Muncie, Indiana, a seven-year-old, impact so hard that his backbone “acted like a knife and cut his pancreas in half.”

  On and on it went. In Boston, three young doctors started writing down the case histories for the injuries they witnessed at Boston City Hospital. The reports were the same as everywhere else:

  Case 1—MC, fourteen years old, had lacerations of the face and buckle fractures of the right digital radius and ulna. He had accepted a dare to ride his bicycle over a plank pitched against sawhorses to land on a plank on the other side. He came up short.

  Case 2—MB, fifteen, had fractures of both his right and left radius and a fracture of his mandibular symphasis. He pretty much had tried the same stunt as case 1, except he did it on a motorbike.

  Case 3—JF, eleven, had numerous facial lacerations and two missing permanent front teeth. He and his friends had been riding their bikes down a wooden ski jump they built. He landed wrong, shot over the handlebars.

  The three doctors, Joel Daven, J. F. O’Connor, and Roy Briggs, wrote a paper on the situation for Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. They pointed out the susceptibility of kids to what comes across the television screen, especially violent, risky acts performed by charismatic, heroic figures. The name of the paper was “The Consequences of Imitative Behavior in Children: The Evel Knievel Syndrome.”

  That was how famous Evel Knievel had become, how far away he was from home. He was from Butte, Montana, and he had his own syndrome.

  17 Deals

  The oft-promised canyon jump, no more than promotional whimsy for such a long time, a professionally painted line on the trailer, a subject for discussion on the talk shows, then not much more than a home workshop daydream for the rocket boys, Malewicki and Truax, finally became an actual possibility in the first months of 1974. That was when twenty-eight-year-old promoter Vince McMahon Jr. showed up in Butte.

  Destined for substantial and curious levels of fame and fortune in future years as the head of World Wrestling Entertainment, where he would star as a villainous character in his own raucous productions, McMahon was at the beginning of his career in 1974. Fortune was the dimmest of lights in the distance. He lived with his wife and young kids in a trailer park in West Hartford, Connecticut, and ran wrestling shows on weekends in the state of Maine.

  His father, Vince McMahon Sr., was a longtime promoter out of Washington, D.C. The wrestling map was sliced into a number of local fiefdoms, each part of the country run by a different operator, and Vince Sr. was responsible for all of the shows in the Northeast. Vince Jr. was a late addition to Vince Sr.’s life. He had lived with his divorced mother at first, never met his father until he was twelve, but now was determined to become an important part of the family business.

  Enthusiasm was part of his nature. He bubbled with ideas for expansion on all levels, everything bigger, better, amped up, flamboyant. Vince Sr., a veteran of the wrestling wars (his father also had been a promoter) took a more cautious approach. Maine was a fine place for his son to get started. Maine. How much damage could he do in Maine?

  For the younger McMahon, the trip to Butte was a way to break out of Maine. Knievel was his personal project. He had watched the Wide World jumps and was taken with Knievel’s natural ease with the camera, with the life-or-death excitement that crackled off the television set as he shot off that ramp. Vince Jr. knew about the toys, the products, the George Hamilton movie. This was the stuff of the same youth market that he wanted not only to inhabit but to dominate with wrestling. The jump from one “sport” to the other did not seem like a big jump at all.

  To him, Knievel very much resembled a wrestler with his over-the-top approach to life, with the clothes, the cars, the cocky pronouncements, the comic-strip exaggeration to everything he did. The daredevil had a substantial touch of Gorgeous George to him, worked with the same flair as the bleach-blond bad boy wrestler of the fifties who dispensed bobby pins, blew kisses to his fans, brought a revised importance to showmanship in the game. Knievel had some of the qualities of other wrestlers too.

  “Argentine Rocca, one of our biggest stars, always had a saying about wrestlers,” McMahon said. “ ‘Brains by the ounce, balls by the ton.’ ”

  Potential promoter never had met potential client before the trip to Butte, had talked with him only once on the phone to set up the visit. Potential client was waiting at the airport. He was driving a customized white Cadillac that rode on oversized tires. The tires were so large that they couldn’t complete certain turns.

  “The tires would hit the wheel wells if you turned much at all,” McMahon said. “So we drove some interesting routes through Butte that didn’t need much turning. Everything had to be figured out. You knew he was a different kind of cat right there. A showman.”

  Knievel always had been wary of promoters, battled with all of them, broke with most of them at some point, even J. C. Agajanian. He prefered to run his own shows, but knew he needed outside help in a production as large as the canyon jump. He also needed outside financing. A lot of outside financing. The plan was to show the event on closed-circuit television in theaters and arenas across the country, something that had been done with varying rates of success for major boxing matches since the fifties. McMahon’s father had been one of the distributors, one of the promoters for these broadcasts, so his company offered a history, a certain expertise.

  The meeting went well. McMahon thought he saw the same charisma from Knievel in person that he had seen on television. Knievel thought he saw, at last, someone who might get this production rolling. McMahon went home to try to cajole his father into backing at least part of the show.

  “The only thing that surprised me was the way Knievel treated his family,” McMahon said. “I’d never seen anything like it. He was pretty dogmatic with his wife, ordering her around, and he wasn’t all that kind to his kids. I kept wondering if this was a show he was putting on for the guy from New York or what it was. He was particularly rude to his wife.”

  McMahon wrote it off as cultural differences. Maybe this was the way marriages worked in Montana. Who could be sure? His unease surely wasn’t enough to make him give up the idea of backing the show. The rest of Knievel was absolutely what he expected.

  “He was a great self-promoter,” McMahon said. “His instincts were great. He was one of those larger-than-life guys. He had courage and wasn’t afraid to risk his life. Just the idea of getting into that thing, that rocket, and not knowing what would happen next … not many men would do that.”

  Vince McMahon Sr. did not share his son’s enthusiasm. He didn’t like the promotion, didn’t like the unknown, untested, untried aspects of the show. A rocket, a canyon, and a goofball left a lot of possibilities for disaster. Who would pay good money to see this? Vince Sr. was fifty-nine years old, would be sixty by the time the rocket took off. He didn’t need the bother.

  In the end, though, to please his son, maybe to deliver a lesson, he agreed to bankroll 50 percent of the costs. This did not mean he was happy about doing it.

  “He hated the canyon jump,” Vince Jr. said. “I had a chance to sell our interest later on, and my father was yelling at me to make a deal. He said I should take any price, sell it all for a couple of dollars, give it away, just get out. I never did.”

  McMahon Sr. did try to give his son the best possible chance of success. In recruiting a 50 percent partner for the production, the father approached forty-three-year-old Bob Arum, the Harvard Law School graduate who had emerged as one of the leading boxing promoters in the world. The request was personal.

  “I’d worked with Vince, the father,” Arum said. “He was a good, good guy. He asked me to be part of the canyon jump to look out for his son. He caught me at a good time. I didn’t have anything going on. I was a little itchy for some action.”

  Arum had begun his career in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, where he was part of a task force investigation for the Internal Revenue Servi
ce into underworld influences in the boxing business, specifically the tax returns from the heavyweight title fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. Studying the topic, he became fascinated with the mechanics of promoting big fights and the possibilities for financial success. He decided that he, a novice, could do a better job for everyone concerned than these old-line gangsters did. He quit the U.S. Attorney’s Office, put together some ideas, and convinced pro football Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, one of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s friends, to secure an audience with Ali’s Muslim advisers. The interview led to Arum’s role as promoter of the Ali–George Chuvalo fight in 1965, the first fight he ever had seen.

  Nine years later, after a long and prosperous run with Ali, directly after Arum’s company, Top Rank Inc., staged the second Ali-Frazier bout at Madison Square Garden on January 28, 1974, a twelve-round decision for Ali, the promoter suddenly found himself without his best client. Rival promoter Don King controlled present heavyweight champ George Foreman, and Ali had signed with King to fight Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in “the Rumble in the Jungle” on October 30, 1974. Arum was on the sidelines.

  Unless he went into the canyon jump business.

  “Ali came to me, asking what to do,” Arum said. “Don King and John Daly, the British promoter, had put together all of this money for Zaire. The fighters were guaranteed $5 million apiece. I told Ali, what the heck, take the money, and he did, but that still sort of stung. I was susceptible to doing something else. This was it.”

  He traveled to Cleveland with the younger McMahon and met with Knievel on the weekend of May 25–27, 1974. Knievel was appearing at Dragway 42 in nearby West Salem, Ohio, where he successfully jumped ten Mack trucks. Arum did not know much about Knievel, and Knievel did not know much about Arum. The meeting was not without its complications.