Evel

by Leigh Montville

  On the evening of August 8, 1974, the same people who read about Philippe Petit’s walk on the tightrope in the morning sat in front of their television sets and watched their president resign. Ending a national melodrama that had lasted more than two years, his other options gone, one by one, Richard M. Nixon announced to the country that he would leave the White House the next day. He would be replaced by Vice President Gerald Ford.

  Less than a week earlier, Nixon had insisted famously that “I am not a crook.” He still defended his conduct during his 2,026 days in office and through the saga that began with a janitor discovering five burglars in the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex. He drew refuge in history:

  “Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed,” the departing president said in his short television address, “but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt said about the man in the arena: ‘whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end triumph of high achievements and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.’ ”

  If the words sounded familiar, there was a reason. This was a quote that Robert Craig Knievel also used often in press conferences to explain himself.

  In the midst of the hoo-ha for the canyon jump, he had one last normal payday scheduled. He was supposed to jump thirteen Mack trucks on August 20, 1974, at the Canadian National Exposition in Toronto, sort of the state fair for all of Canada. Despite pleas from Arum to cancel the event, Knievel forged ahead. Part of the attraction was that both Kelly, now thirteen, and Robbie, eleven, would be allowed to perform with him, a first, everyone popping wheelies before Knievel did the big jump. Another part of the attraction was a $65,000 check.

  “It’s crazy,” Arum said. “There’s so much to lose if he gets hurt. This is not an easy jump.”

  Knievel turned the trip into a family outing. He left early with Linda and the kids, stopped for publicity interviews in Toronto, threw out the first pitch at a Cleveland Indians game, and was grand marshal for a parade in Akron before returning to Toronto for the jump. If Toronto went well, he was scheduled for a final pre-canyon press conference in New York the next day.

  He was on his best insurance salesman behavior.

  “If you put me in a rocket and send me at four hundred miles per hour and I have a chance to be killed … I’m interested,” he told Toronto writers on his publicity stop when they asked if he had gone on any of the rides with his kids on the expo grounds. “But I don’t want to go on the Wild Mouse.”

  He said that he never had jumped more than eleven Mack trucks, but what the heck, he might as well jump thirteen if he was going to do twelve. Thirteen was one of his lucky numbers. A few days earlier, August 13, he finally had received a permit to land on the far side of the canyon. The permit number was 1313. He would be fine with thirteen Mack trucks.

  “I’ll just come in here, get my leathers on, have a shot of Wild Turkey, and go out and do it,” he said.

  In Cleveland, he and the family were hustled from the airport to Municipal Stadium by helicopter, a grand entrance to throw out the first pitch before a crowd of 42,171 gathered for a “Rally Around Cleveland” promotion. Knievel said, “I’ve been all over the country, but it’s the first time I’ve had a chance to see the great Cleveland Indians.” The crowd roared. The great Cleveland Indians then proceeded to lose, 7–3, to the Texas Rangers.

  The Toronto jump turned out fine. He took a rare practice run during the afternoon, nine trucks, then hit the marks perfectly that night before an estimated crowd of 21,000, which also had been drawn by an appearance of the Canadian rock group Lighthouse. (A night earlier the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, featuring Myron Floren, Joe Feeney, and the entire television cast, was the main Canadian National Exposition attraction.) Knievel seemed emotional and proud when he introduced his sons, then did wheelies with them. The action was filmed for Wide World, Keith Jackson at the microphone, and couldn’t have looked better than it did.

  “Knievel’s 20-second sprint through the night air left him silhouetted against the blinking lights of the midway,” reporter Stephen Handelman of the Toronto Star wrote. “A tiny, taut figure, he looked like one of the ride-and-motorcycle toys he sells across North America.”

  (One literal-minded reader objected to Handelman’s sweet description. The reader did the math on the 112-foot leap and the 20-second flight. He might have found something. “Since this works out to a four miles per hour flight it appears that Knievel has achieved a startling breakthrough in motorcycle aerodynamics,” assistant professor P. C. Stangeby of the Institute for Aerospace Studies at the University of Toronto wrote in a letter to the editor published a week later. “We look forward to further details.”)

  Knievel finished his night by pumping the canyon event. He continued to talk about the jump in ominous tones.

  “You can say nothing better about a man than he kept his word, and regardless of my chances, I’ll keep my word,” Knievel said at the end. “It’s all I have to look forward to now, that clear blue sky I’m going to be looking at from my Skycycle on September 8.”

  In the morning, as scheduled, he traveled to New York for the final big-city blitz. One of the interviews was with Milton Richman, sports columnist for United Press International. The interview took place in a helicopter as Knievel and family were taken from La Guardia Airport to midtown for a general press conference. The words were shouted because of the wocka-wocka sound of the helicopter rotors.

  “How much do you think about whether you’ll make it or not?” Richman asked, wocka-wocka, about the canyon jump.

  “Enough,” wocka-wocka, Knievel replied.

  “Even when you lie in bed at night?”

  “Sure,” Knievel said. “It’s all I can think about when I’m by myself like that. Whether everything is going to be okay or not. It gets worse as it gets closer.”

  Richman doggedly asked the tough question about Knievel’s marriage, even with the family in the helicopter. How did he keep it together if he was seen in public with so many other women? Knievel thought about his answer.

  “I’ve known women when I was younger, but my wife is my girl,” he said, wocka-wocka. “We’ve been married for fifteen years now, and I’ve never had a better girl than the one I married.”

  At the press conference, he was asked about the well-publicized statements of Representative John Murphy (D-NY), who had promised to try to force the Federal Communications Commission to ban all coverage of the jump. Murphy called Knievel “a modern pied piper of suicidal mayhem.” He said he had received “hundreds” of calls from concerned parents.

  “One of the phone calls came from a parent who felt the promotion of this event was having a bad effect on young people and Mr. Knievel was a sick individual,” Representative Murphy said. “The gentleman stated that he had asked his eight-year-old son when he was going back to school in September and the boy replied, ‘The day after Evel gets killed.’ ”

  Knievel was prepared for this question. He put on his angry face. He became Mr. Responsible, Mr. Control, the baseline product that he sold in the toy stores to the imaginations of America’s children.

  “I’ve traveled this country for eight years talking about automobile safety,” he said. “I’ve also traveled this country eight years speaking to young people against narcotics. I wear a white suit when I ride my motorcycle, not a black one. Little kids don’t run away from me, they identify with me.”

  He paused.

  “You tell that congressman to go straight to hell,” Knievel said.

  Sixteen days were left before the canyon extravaganza.

  Work on the Skycycle, the rocket, had hit a snag. Truax and his helpers transpor
ted the test version of the X-2 from Saratoga, California, to the canyon in the first week of August, where they hoped to fire the thing into the air, accumulate the data from either a success or a failure, bring that data back to California, and complete the final version of the second X-2 rocket, the one Knievel would ride. This did not happen on schedule.

  One problem was that the promoters and Knievel didn’t want a test shot fired. They were terrified that some news organization, any news organization, might take a picture of a rocket blithely flying over the canyon. That, Bob Arum said, would kill the event. The attraction was whether or not the famous daredevil was going to be splattered on the canyon wall. If a rocket was shown on the nightly news zipping over the thing like the 8:50 commuter train arriving from Scarsdale, well, the attraction was gone. Nobody would buy a ticket.

  The second problem, which developed as Truax argued that a test flight was absolutely necessary for Knievel’s safety, was that static test firings of the rocket did not go well at the launch site. An autopilot had been installed so Knievel didn’t have to do anything, simply take the ride as if he were sitting on top of a fat Roman candle, but the autopilot was balky. The electrical system worked erratically.

  Truax and company had to sort through a solution because the autopilot expert in California had gone on vacation. All of this took time. Another problem was discovered with the shear diaphragm that blocked the nozzle where the steam was released to shoot the rocket into the air. A second diaphragm had to be made—difficult because there were no machine shop facilities in Twin Falls—and added. More time. Then there were problems in the electrical connections with the parachute system, even though the parachute hadn’t been installed. Again, more time.

  “What if we don’t make it?” Truax would ask himself when he woke up in the middle of the night and thought about his tight schedule.

  Knievel came down from Butte to sit in the rocket on the launch pad, try the fit, which turned out to be snug. He had trouble getting in and getting out, but didn’t seem worried. He wasn’t big on practice.

  The original rocket plan, the safest plan, would have put him in a closed cockpit that he could eject from the rocket in one piece, same as jet pilots did, separate parachute from the rocket, separate landing, but cost considerations had canceled out that possibility from the beginning. Now that cost considerations had been eliminated, it was too late to go back to the better plan. An order for a cockpit that could be ejected had to be placed with the manufacturer two years before delivery.

  The result was the open cockpit design. Knievel sat on a seat that had been taken from a go-kart. The parachute contraption, built by Ron Chase and a separate company from El Monte, California, would work with the entire rocket, not just the cockpit. Knievel would have to ride his craft wherever or however it went. The parachute system, though, was all theory.

  “We never practiced with the parachute attached,” Bill Sprow, one of the engineers with Truax, said. “The rocket would blow a lot of dust and debris around when we’d test. We didn’t want the parachute system, which had a lot of smaller parts, to be affected by that.”

  Early on the morning of August 25, 1974, not long after sunrise, at least three weeks later than they planned, Truax and his team finally fired off the test rocket, the first model of the X-2. Arum and Knievel finally had been convinced that the test was a necessity, that Knievel’s life would be in jeopardy without it. Everything was done in secret. Not only was the press not allowed, no one in the press even was told that this test might happen. If the flight was successful, the plan was to deny that it ever took place.

  The plan did not have to be put into action. The test was a failure.

  The parachute system, attached for the flight, malfunctioned. Almost as soon as the rocket left the launch pad, the parachute deployed. The trip was doomed ten yards into the flight. The rocket went straight until the chute was fully open, then it shifted from horizontal to vertical and made a long, slow trip to the bottom and a final splash. This time, unlike the X-1 when it crashed, the fins were visible, sticking up from the water, so the rocket could be recovered and brought back by helicopter.

  A medical dummy, the same height and weight as Knievel, nicknamed “Good Galahad” by Truax, had been the passenger. The medical dummy was also recovered, intact.

  “The combined cost of both vehicles which have gone into the Snake River is almost $500,000,” Knievel, now the next passenger on the next trip, told the Associated Press. “This makes the Snake River the richest river in the state of Idaho. In fact, there is a rumor that all the trout are turning to gold.”

  The figure was an exaggeration by five—the rocket that went into the river and the rocket that he would ride cost no more than $100,000 together to build—but the picture of the two rockets ending in the river had to be disconcerting. Knievel said, “The third time’s a charm,” but there clearly were issues to resolve and not a lot of time to resolve them.

  Truax asked for a postponement of a week or two, but Knievel told him that wasn’t an option. (“Do the best you can,” he said. “I would have survived that last test.”) The flight had to go on September 8. Truax and his crew returned to California and went into round-the-clock overdrive. He decided to junk the autopilot, which meant he ripped out all of the electrical instrumentation. Knievel now would operate the parachute manually with a spring-loaded deadman control. He would hold on to a lever, and if he should black out from the G forces involved at liftoff, his hand would go limp and the lever would open the chute.

  A bunch of other changes also were made as the engineers worked and worked. Truax and Sprow haunted the military salvage yards of the West Coast, looking for parts they needed. Knievel called and wanted a 35mm Nikon camera installed, part of a deal he had made. The camera was installed. The entire experience was like pulling an all-night study session on the eve of the big test. The participants knew they could do better if they had more time, but there was no time. They had to do the best they could.

  “I’m not sure how Knievel felt about any of this,” Bill Sprow said. “He was a promoter, and you never knew what to believe from him, but I’m sure that test didn’t do anything for his confidence in us. We were trying to put that rocket on the other side. And we didn’t.”

  On the afternoon of the test, August 25, 1974, another event happened in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, that didn’t help Knievel’s confidence. Bob Gill, part of the competition, one of the cycle jumpers the FBI thought had been muscled by Knievel’s associates, failed in an attempt to jump from one side of Appalachia Lake to the other side. He landed short, hit the wall of the riverbank head-on. He was thrown onto the land. His back was broken. He was paralyzed below the waist.

  Three weeks earlier, on August 4, another member of the competition, Bob Pleso, had crashed at a drag strip in Phoenix City, Alabama. Outspoken, Pleso had derided Knievel’s efforts at Snake River before his own jump. He said, “For $6 million all he’s doing is rocketing off a ramp … pulling a rip cord, and then he and his Skycycle will float like a feather to the ground.” Pleso then stepped onto his motorcycle, tried to clear a record thirty cars, landed on the twenty-ninth, was thrown forty feet in the air, landed on his neck, and skidded for twenty feet. He died in surgery two hours later.

  The daredevil business was in a bad stretch everywhere a man looked.

  A story. Before he went back to Butte, Knievel was scheduled to pose for the cover of Sports Illustrated for the September 2 issue, part of the last burst of pre-jump publicity. Heinz Kleutmeier, the SI photographer, convinced him that the best shot would be on the floor of the canyon, the long walls splashed with sunshine, the white knight in front of the natural wonder that was his opponent. Knievel agreed, but kept canceling the slotted times for the shoot.

  Kleutmeier made one more appointment, rented a helicopter and pilot to take them down to the floor. Knievel still stalled, dawdled over breakfast. They were in the middle of a restaurant not far from the rim
of the canyon. The clock already was running on the helicopter rental. Kleutmeier went to his last psychological ploy.

  “You’re scared, aren’t you?” the photographer said.

  “I’m not scared,” Knievel said.

  “Sure you are,” Kleutmeier said. “You’re scared to go down into that canyon in a helicopter. I can see it in you.”

  “Fuck you,” the daredevil said. “I’m not scared. We can go down right now.”

  And they did. And the picture became the most famous shot of the entire production, a portrait, Evel in his leathers, a man and his canyon.

  A story. Bob Wussler, head of CBS Sports, always had wanted a piece of the Evel Knievel franchise. The CBS Sports Spectacular, the network’s sports anthology show, was a pallid and irregular competitor to Wide World, often dumped off the seasonal schedule for football or basketball, never able to grab the same identity as the weekly “thrill of victory, agony of defeat.” Wide World invariably tapped into the more popular events—Knievel’s jumps, replays of Ali fights, international track competitions—leaving CBS a step behind.

  With ABC locked in for the Snake River jump, CBS again was consigned to the sidelines of a major event. Then an opening suddenly appeared.

  “I went to lunch at a watering hole named Mercurio’s, across the street from CBS headquarters,” Kevin O’Malley, then a young producer at the network, said later. “I ran into Jack Price, who handled a lot of the closed-circuit business for Bob Arum and Top Rank. We got talking about Snake River, which he was working on.”

  Price mentioned “that kooky thing that the attorney general of Idaho was trying to do.” O’Malley innocently asked, “What kooky thing would that be?” A couple of hours later, he was on an airplane. By nine-thirty that night he was in Boise, ready to write a check for $50,000 to ensure that CBS would be able to cover the canyon jump as it happened.