“Why don’t you guys go in and stop it?”
“We can’t. We have reports that the Hells Angels are going to burn down Twin Falls.”
“What about the people in there?”
“We’re going to capture them on their way out.”
The conversation was heading nowhere. Hanley repeated that he had to go back inside, riot or no riot. The deputy told him he was putting himself in peril because there would be no help.
“Don’t you dare call us,” the deputy said. “Because we won’t go in there.”
Hanley drove the bumpy road to the site. He counted fourteen separate fires, but didn’t see any people. The people all had gone. No, that was not right. When he reached the compound, or what was left of the compound, he found one last Visigoth, shirt off, climbing up and down the 108-foot track. He was carrying a flare, putting the fire to the ramp, which wouldn’t burn because it was metal.
Hanley called to the man, told him to come back down. The man obeyed. He stood in front of Hanley, swaying, a long day of substance abuse behind him. Hanley took the flare from the man’s hand, told him to go home. The man started walking.
One guy with a flare. That was the deputy sheriff’s riot. The Hells Angels did not burn down Twin Falls. Hanley took his third load, some balled-up fencing that had been ripped from the poles, some of the telephones that had been scattered everywhere. He came back to the site again at sunrise for more. He was there when John Hood arrived from the rim of the canyon.
“What are you doing here?” Hanley said, surprised.
“I’m looking for that chopper pilot,” John Hood said.
The big news in the newspapers the next morning was not the canyon jump. That was a final indignity. In an attempt to lessen the amount of criticism he might receive, President Gerald Ford chose Sunday morning to announce that he had pardoned Richard Nixon “for all offenses which he may have committed or taken part in from a period from January 20, 1969, through August 9, 1974.” The attempt did not work. The move drew a storm of criticism across the country, headlines and commentary everywhere.
The photographs and stories from the canyon jump, which sometimes had been called “the Event of the Century” by the promoters, were forced lower or even off the front page. A bigger event had happened on the same day as the event of the century.
The man of the moment commented on none of this. He flew back to Butte with Linda and the kids in the Lear jet on Monday morning. A crowd that the Montana Standard estimated at one thousand people greeted him at Bert Mooney Airport. He walked off the runway, picked up a handful of gravel, Butte gravel, damn it, kissed it, and threw the stones high in the air. He shook hands with everyone in sight as if he were a politician returning from an important trip, a serviceman back from a foreign war, a daredevil back from a canyon jump.
“I’m tired, but I’ll be all right in a couple of days,” he told the crowd. “That’s a very minor injury. I’ve been hurt worse in other jumps. I’m happy to be alive.
“I’m back home for the fall, the hunting season, Christmas and so on. But I feel I don’t want to try the canyon again.
“Thank you all.”
His voice cracked at the end. That was what the Montana Standard said.
23 Rebound
A column entitled “Sports Line” was a nationally syndicated feature that appeared in many sports pages in midsize and smaller newspapers across the country in the seventies. Readers submitted questions by phone or through the mail to their local daily, and some smart-ass somewhere delivered a smart-ass answer in the column. The format was a printed precursor to sports talk radio.
On February 6, 1975, the following exchange took place in “Sports Line” in the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail, among other papers:
Q. Can you please tell me what the great “King of the Stuntmen,” Evel Knievel, has been doing since the Snake River jump? Also, does Evel plan to jump his motorcycles over any cars or trucks in the future?
L.T.
Tarrytown, N.Y.
A. His highness has been counting his money since Snake River. There was a lot less to count, incidentally, than announced. Evel’s cut finally came to around $600,000. Our source says the misfire, which resulted in his parachuting dizzily down the canyon, left him badly shaken for the first time. No more cars or trucks for a while. When his nerves are steady again, Evel says he will ride his skycycle over Mount Fujiyama, near Tokyo.
Four months had passed since the bizarre Sunday afternoon at the canyon, and this was the first official “Where Are They Now?” or “Whatever Became Of?” entry in the Knievel saga. The unbylined smart-ass from Smart-Ass Central (in answer to the next question, “Does anybody really know what Portland Trail Blazer basketball star Bill Walton’s trouble is?” the SA’s answer was: “Walton’s great contribution to sport so far has been to dispel the idea that your typical problem athlete is that way because he’s black”) had some of his facts right, some wrong, most a half-turn from the truth.
His highness was not sitting at home, counting his dollars and licking any and all wounds. Yes, he might have been bruised in the wallet, more than disappointed about the financial outcome, and his reputation might have taken a coast-to-coast pummeling for his cantankerous, snarling approach at Snake River, followed by the odd finish, but his ego had emerged untouched, unscathed, ultimately undaunted. He was not hard to find.
He was everywhere.
He was playing tennis in Dayton, Ohio, paired with professional Jack Kramer against Bobby Riggs and television talk show host Phil Donahue. (“I haven’t played tennis very much,” Knievel admitted.) He was traveling with college senior football players from the East-West Game to visit kids in Shriners Hospital in San Francisco. In Seattle he was presenting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s award for athlete of the year from the state of Washington to bowler Earl Anthony at a banquet. Shyness, never a problem, had not intruded now. Everywhere Knievel went he gave speeches, signed autographs, shook hands. He also played golf. He definitely played golf.
In a three-week stretch in January, he probably played more golf than Jack Nicklaus. He probably played against Jack Nicklaus. He played in the pro-am at the Phoenix Open. He played in the pro-am at the Dean Martin Tucson Open. He played in the Joe Louis Open in San Dimas, California. He played in celebrity fields that included Bob Hope, Glen Campbell, McLean Stevenson, Maury Wills, Forrest Tucker, Dean Martin, Joe Namath, Hank Aaron, Jack Lemmon, and Lawrence Welk.
The Modern Great American Fame Machine, powered by the instant recognition of television, did not stop for one bad review, or one dropped pass, or even apparently one bad Skycycle trip. A familiar face was a familiar face, no matter what happened. The salesman in Knievel recognized this fact, and he returned to pre-canyon form to sell his basic product, himself. He cavorted. He charmed. He brought out the old W. Clement Stone, Combined Insurance Positive Mental Attitude (PMA). On the eve of the Tucson Open, he dropped one aphorism after another from the podium before a crowd of 1,200 at the Tucson Conquistadores Annual Sports Banquet.
“The price you pay for success in this country is too great.”
(Applause.)
“No one is ever really sincere. The farmers are praying for rain, and on the same day the golfers are praying for sunshine.”
(Applause.)
“Success is when you wake up in the morning and are happy with what you see in the mirror.”
(Standing ovation at end.)
He acted in public as if the events at the canyon never had happened. Okay, maybe they had happened, but they hadn’t happened the way everyone else described them. Knievel left the bad parts out of his personal narrative. The canyon was still a snarling behemoth, unconquered by mere men. He had tried, damn it, valiant and bold, and if he hadn’t succeeded, so be it. He was the Red Sox, losing to the rich and all-powerful Yankees in the bottom of the ninth, not some flimflam man leaving town in a hurry. He not only still was alive, but still had his dignity.
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If there had been any thoughts that he would move into a prolonged period of hibernation, they had disappeared by Christmas. An eighteen-foot-tall Santa, giving a peace sign, rode a twenty-foot-long motorcycle on the lawn in Butte, surrounded by thirty-five thousand lights strung on thirteen trees. This was not the house of a man trying to hide from people.
Two days after Christmas, before the decorations even came down, he was on the road, acting as if nothing bad ever had happened. The Butte Junior Chamber of Commerce had nominated him in November as a candidate for the United States Jaycees Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Year. (He didn’t make the final cut.) He was loved somewhere.
That other public figure who had been in the news on Labor Day, the pardoned Mr. Nixon, had declared in 1968 that he was “tanned, ready, and rested” when he came back from political oblivion to win the White House. This public figure was ready and rested, now working on that tan.
“Now the question arises: how do you identify the stars?” sportswriter John Lankford asked in the Tucson Daily Citizen on January 16, 1975, after he followed a fivesome that included Knievel, singer Glen Campbell, actor Greg Morris of Mission Impossible, golfer Bobby Nichols, and a local businessman around the golf course at the Dean Martin Tucson Open.
Knievel and Campbell are the stars of this group. On every hole, young and old clamored for their autographs, stopped them in their tracks, the wife or girlfriend posing with an arm around the waist while the husband or boyfriend snapped color Polaroids or Instamatics for posterity. The heavies of the entertainment world (Knievel is a strange mixture, really, of entertainment and sport) take the celebrity thing in stride. They have a way of signing autographs and being friendly in the face of exploding cameras without missing a step between tee and green.
The Negative Mental Attitude of the canyon jump was gone. The Positive Mental Attitude was back.
Lankford reported that on the sixth tee Knievel offered to bet Greg Morris $100 on who would hit the longer drive. Morris declined. Knievel then topped his shot, hit a ground ball. On the next hole, he wanted to bet Glen Campbell $1,000 that he could get down in two shots from 130 yards away from the green. Campbell also declined. Knievel got down in three.
The PMA not only was back, it was in familiar overdrive.
This did not mean that nothing had changed. Despite his selective memory of what happened, the dark moments from Snake River still hung around his name. The story quickly had emerged after the rocket failure that the $6 million check was promotional nonsense, that the actual takeout for Knievel was around $600,000, and that even that figure probably was inflated. Bob Arum said his company, Top Rank, cleared about $150,000. Promoters and speculators on all levels of involvement had taken a communal bath.
The canyon jump was a failure on all levels.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we think so few people would watch the event,” Arum said. “We were very, very disappointed by ticket sales.”
The goal had been to attract 1.8 million people to 350 theaters across North America at an average ticket price of $10. The final number of theaters shrunk before the event even occurred to 260. The number of people shrunk to less than 500,000 on the day it occurred. The hope for big profits, the big kill, enough money to last a lifetime, disappeared.
The results on the artistic side were as bad as the results on the financial side. Maybe worse. While publications like Time magazine and Sports Illustrated, perhaps sheepish about the attention they had paid to the event prior to liftoff, pulled their punches with phrases like “a nifty failure” (SI) and “a bizarre spectacle garnished with machismo and the threat of death” (Time), there were writers, like Dan Sellard of the Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard, who called Knievel “a star-spangled slob.”
“I’m hoping you do retire,” Sellard advised. “Take your $6 million check and disappear. We need somebody better for a hero.”
Bernie Milligan, sports columnist of the Van Nuys News, said, “Knievel’s pre-thing remarks, threats, promises, predictions and brags, when analyzed in retrospect, show that the entire performance above and into the Snake River near Twin Falls, Idaho, was Much Ado About Nothing.” Milligan called the show “a dud, about as thrill-defying as it was death-defying.”
“The hustle won’t work twice,” the Idaho State Journal proclaimed from its editorial page.
The magic in the idea has fled. Knievel might try it all again and draw only yawns. Who cares? Even before the abortive rocket shot, the tawdry trappings and the cheap carnival air surrounding the production had begun to wear … If Knievel does defy reason and try another canyon jump, we hope he will choose another site far away from Idaho. We shouldn’t have to put up with it more than once in any man’s lifetime.
The pile of bad reviews was capped off by Joe Eszterhas’s unfettered dissection of Snake River in the November 7, 1974, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Titled “King of the Goons,” the story ran for 35,000 words, the size of half a novel, covered 22 pages, and simply killed all aspects of the production. Without the pressure of a daily deadline, and working with an open-ended expense account, Eszterhas had been able to observe and record the excesses, the weirdness, the mud and nonsense attached to the scene, not to mention the ongoing hubris of the leading man.
“After a few minutes, with two or three thousand people still there, Evel Knievel climbs into his helicopter and Whatchamacallit takes him back to the Blue Lakes Inn,” Eszterhas wrote in his closing section.
As I watch the helicopter take off and the dust swirl and listen to those unending “Eeeeeeeeeeeeevel! Knieeeeeeeeeevel!” screams, I realize it is time for a final tally. So I check my list.
The million dollar party wasn’t a million dollar party.
The test failures weren’t test failures.
The Skycycle wasn’t a cycle.
The $6 million check turned into rubber.
The 200,000 people turned into 50,000 people.
The 50,000 people turned into 15,000 people.
Elvis Presley turned into an invisible being. So did John Wayne.
So did Steve McQueen. So did Dustin Hoffman …
The public-relations men turned into misinformation men.
The reporters turned into public-relations men.
The jump turned into a nosedive.
The abyss turned out to be harmless.
The Event of the Century turned out to be a farce.
I turned into a social leper.
The star turned into a palooka …
In the pop-culture pages of the newspaper/magazine where new music had been found and legitimized biweekly since 1967, where Dr. Hunter S. Thompson dueled with Richard Nixon, where rolling papers and hemp products were advertised, where trends and fashion were established for the sixties and seventies youth market, Knievel ultimately was painted as not only a fraud but a low-life boor. Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show had sung the Shel Silverstein lyrics “And we keep getting’ richer, but we can’t get our picture/On the cover of Rolling Stone,” a top-forty salute to the magazine’s power. The cover illustration by artist Ray Domingo on this issue showed a cartoon cowboy Knievel, King of the Goons, riding a cartoon rocket the magazine noted “may look like a bomb … in fact, may look suspiciously like Slim Pickens riding an A-bomb to his and the world’s doom in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove.” This was not the kind of exposure Dr. Hook was singing about.
Eszterhas, years later, remembered that “an Evel Knievel Alert” was posted in the magazine’s offices in San Francisco. Some phone calls had been made, allegedly from Knievel. Some threats had been made about physical revenge. Staffers were told to alert authorities if Knievel was spotted on the premises.
Nothing happened, but the depth of Knievel’s anger would be shown thirty-three years later. In 2007, writer Peter Relic would ask to interview him for Rolling Stone. Knievel would decline because the magazine “in 1974 sent ‘a shit named Joe Eszterhas’ to write about Snake River, ‘The King of the Goons,’ a
story that ‘hurt very, very much and I know a thing or two about pain.’ ”
In public, though, after the jump, he stayed away from the fight. He said nothing. Even the greatly reduced paycheck didn’t seem to bother him. He had survived Snake River in a lot of ways.
“What the hell,” he told Jurate Kazickas of the Associated Press in Butte two weeks after the event. “I’m still alive, I have the blue Montana sky. What do I need all that money for?”
The challenge was how to reconstruct his career, how to attract a paying crowd to watch him perform again. No matter how much attention he received at a golf tournament, he definitely was overcooked and damaged goods for the American public. Asking for an autograph was one piece of business. Forking over more money to keep the King of the Daredevils’ opulent kingdom solvent was quite another.
“When you charge a guy $25 for a ticket, you’ve got to give more than five seconds of action,” twenty-one-year-old Bruce Cougan of Seattle had explained to the AP at Snake River. “I know lots of people who wouldn’t pay to see him jump over a garbage can after this.”
No matter what death-defying stunt Knievel proposed, no matter how kooky, crazy, intrinsically challenging it might be, the public presumably would not bite. Throughout his travels, the canyon had been promoted as his ultimate test. If the ultimate test had been such a bomb, how could a new ultimate test be sold? Then again, how could anything less than the canyon, say, another night jumping over used cars at some dragway, be sold? America presumably would scratch, yawn, reach for the TV Guide to find other alternatives.
This was a real problem. The answer was simple and brilliant: forget the old public, the World’s Greatest Daredevil would work an entirely new public. He would appear in another country.
Assorted deals had been proposed during the buildup to Snake River, and while many of them had been pulled back a few seconds after the rocket’s inglorious landing, more than a few were still available. The thought of re-creating the Knievel commercial demand from the beginning in a new country, new market, was intoxicating. Even with the travails at the canyon, the Ideal Toys collection of motorcycle and jump toys had been the favorite Christmas choice of American boys for 1974 and had “outsold Barbie four to one,” Knievel boasted.
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