“I ran into Linda on the street after the divorce,” Jim Blankenship, Knievel’s friend, said. “I asked her how she was doing and told her that she should have gotten the divorce years ago. I said—this was when O. J. Simpson was in the news—that the O.J. thing made me think about her and Evel. She said, ‘Oh, yes, there was a lot of O.J. in Evel.’ ”
Knievel and Krystal Kennedy were married on November 19, 1999. The site was Caesars Palace, picked for reasons of both sentiment and economy. The altar was constructed on top of the fountains. Knievel drove up on a Harley. Krystal was escorted by a fake Caesar and a fake Cleopatra. She looked lovely. He looked ancient. The hair he had left was gray turning in a hurry to white. He wore red-tinted sunglasses. He was sixty-one years old, not so bad in the numbers, but sixty-one hard years old. She was thirty.
A renaissance had begun in the past few years for his career as a personality. In the court of public opinion, he apparently had served enough time in the corner. The kids who had watched him, who had played with the toys, who had hung his picture on their bedroom wall, were grown-ups now with their own kids. He was a certified blast from the past, a walking, talking irascible piece of nostalgia.
“He was a creation of network television,” Bob Arum said, asked to figure out what had made Knievel popular in the first place. “We had three networks. People got used to watching three networks. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, people watched the three networks. And ABC hooked onto Knievel because his jumping over buses and so forth attracted viewers and so forth, and they did a hell of a job promoting it.
“Everything is different now, of course it is, but how much different is that crazy reality television of today to that shit? It was the same thing! It was shit, it was shit, it was shit. It was shit that drove ratings at affordable prices … It was totally nonpurposeful shit, totally crap. That was what he was. That was what that was. There’s always a market for that.”
The shit of anyone’s youth lives forever. The famous daredevil was now a slice of bubblegum rock from long ago heard on the radio. He was a pair of bell-bottoms and platform shoes found in an old box in the attic. He was a fuzzy video from when the grown-ups of today were young. He was shit perhaps, but their shit. A small demand arose. He appeared in commercials. Better commercials. His name became repeated again on late-night shows. He became a guest. His influence was recognized, his jumps seen as the start of all these extreme sports that had taken root. Skateboards. Snowboards. BMX. Motocross. The X Games. He was the godfather of all of this. He had not only lived on the edge, he had discovered it before anyone else knew it existed. He had made it his home.
What was Evel Knievel doing now? He was right there at Caesars Palace, married again to a pretty blond woman, the wily old son of a bitch. There were possibilities. All kinds of possibilities. He boasted that he was back to making $300,000 a year from signing autographs, doing endorsements, making deals.
Except his health was awful.
“Hell, I thought the first 40 years were Round 1,” he told Jon Saraceno of USA Today on January 3, 2007. “I had 12 or 13 major open reduction surgeries, most of them major at least, and here since the Seventies I’ve gone through bleeding esophagus attacks and I had a liver transplant and I had a stroke. I had a stroke last September. And I have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis where I can’t breathe very easily and I just broke my ankle two years ago in Amarillo in a motorcycle parade. Damn motorcycle fell on me. I’ve had several things go wrong with me. This is Round 2. God never promised you a Rose Garden. That’s just all there is to it.”
He was a mess. The last ten years of his life were not pretty.
The clinks and clanks from all of that abuse to his skeleton, round 1, still were a problem. The seven different times he had broken his back left him with pain that he said, on a scale of one to ten, was a constant ten. It hurt so much on some days that he could barely talk. His broken hands, always bad, still were bad. He walked slowly with a stainless steel hip. The residual effects of all the surgeries, the plates and screws and rods, round 1, was an everyday ache.
“My back is really killing me,” he said one day to Jimmy Dick.
Dick offered some sympathy.
“It’s okay,” Knievel said. “It’s not like I was working in a library all my life, you know?”
Round 2 was a tougher pain to accept. This was the rebellion of his internal organs. This came from the rest of his life more than his daredevil life. This was from the dissipation, from the excesses, from the all-out ramble.
He was healthy enough when he first met Krystal, back in 1992. She remembered that the only pill he took every day was a Tylenol. Five years later, though, he was frail and tired. He thought he was going to die. His liver had broken down from the effects of hepatitis C, which he thought he had contracted from a bad blood transfusion during one of his surgeries, plus the effects of alcohol. All that alcohol. He now called Wild Turkey more dangerous than heroin.
He needed a liver transplant.
“I created the character called Evel Knievel, and he sort of got away from me,” the famous daredevil told Bruce Lowitt of the St. Petersburg Times in June of 1998 while he waited for a liver. “When I was performing, I thought I’d get killed. But shit, I’m not ready to die today.”
The liver arrived on January 28, 1999, a miracle right there, the operation performed at Tampa General Hospital, but he was left with a long recovery period, with the worry that his body would reject the new organ, with a shelf in his medicine cabinet full of pills to take every day. He still was recovering four months after the operation when he got married, still recovering more than a year later.
“This is a year and a few months after the transplant,” he said. “Before I had it, my doctors told me that it would be the biggest thing I ever had to face, and believe me, when they take your liver out of you and put another one in, it’s like replacing a football in your stomach.”
He never really was healthy again. He was better sometimes, still alive, making jokes and pronouncements and steely-eyed deals, but never healthy. The drugs from the transplant, he said, gave him mood swings. The mood swings killed his marriage less than two years after it began. He still wanted to be married, left flowers and notes on Krystal’s car, romantic stuff, then became angry when she refused to come back. Mood swings. She got an injunction against him two months after the divorce. He was angry on the steps of the courthouse.
“She’s lucky I didn’t hit her,” he said. “I never want to see her again.”
Yes, he did.
He had the lung disease, the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an advancing problem without a cure. He had diabetes. He had all of the other stuff. He had the mood swings. His mortality, which he had put on the line as a young man, challenged in the most direct ways, challenged and whipped, now looked back at him from the mirror every morning, winked and smirked. Round 2. The irony was that the man who had seemed destined to die in a flash, everyone wondering what he was all about, now took the long way home. He had time to explain before he walked out the door. He had time even to change.
An example. He made a public confession to his hometown. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Butte Press Club at the Knights of Columbus hall, usually a raucous gathering, a drinkfest for reporters, he apologized for the illegal acts he perpetrated as a young man. He was sorry he robbed Fran Johnson’s sports shop. He was sorry he robbed Star Lanes. He was sorry he tried to rob the Prudential Bank, but was unsuccessful. He said he was not sorry he robbed the treasurer’s office in the courthouse, because he didn’t do that robbery. But he knew who did.
He said that he had tried, through the years, to pay back most of his debts from illegal acts. He read letters from various government agencies saying that he had paid certain bills. He said he thought he would finish paying off the last $60,000 adjusted payment for his debt to the IRS by the end of the year. He said if he had missed anyone, he was sorry, but he probably was drunk at the time and could not
remember.
It was, on the whole, a public deathbed confession. Somber. He tried to pick up pieces he had knocked over in haste to get where he was going.
“I was a young man whose mind had not caught up with his body,” he said.
Krystal came back as a friend and a companion, a caretaker, and that was good. They spent time in Las Vegas, spent time in Florida, spent time in Butte every summer, living in the motor home, spent more time in Florida as traveling became more difficult. He began to need oxygen every day for the lung problem. He had neuropathy, which made his feet and hands burn. He sucked on lollipops loaded with fentanyl, a painkiller. He would take as many as fifty pills a day. He needed more and more rest.
“The price I have paid for notoriety and fame, it’s just not worth it,” he told the Montana Standard in 2004. “I would give anything for just one day of health. Anything.”
He said he would wake up, feel great, walk fifty feet to the front door of his motor home, and be exhausted. He wanted to turn around, go back to bed.
“People think I’ve been through something in my life from what they’ve seen on national television, my accident at Caesars Palace, for instance,” he told the Associated Press in 2006. “Look at what the hell I’m going through now. How much can the human body endure?”
The telephone became his best companion. He called everyone. He called without concern for clocks or time zones, called the way he always had. Three o’clock in the morning? Had to be that damned Knievel. He called with great regularity …
“He’d call me three times a week,” Ray Gunn said. “Always at one o’clock in the morning. Which had to be four in the morning for him. He’d drive me crazy.”
He called from out of the past, out of the long-ago blue …
“I was really surprised,” Gary Frey from Moses Lake said. “We hadn’t talked for a long time. I didn’t know what it was about. Then I sort of figured it out. He was apologizing. He knew he was an asshole when I knew him. I think he was saying he was sorry in his own way.”
He called, irascible as ever …
“He’d tell me he made love to all four of my ex-wives,” Jim Blankenship, married five times, said. “I don’t know. Maybe he had. We’d make bets. On football games mostly. He had everything figured out, the teams, the lines, everything. He made the football season a whole lot more exciting.”
In the first months of 2007, in a motel room in Daytona Beach, the famous daredevil said he found Jesus. Respectful, if not religious, during the quieter times in his life, challenging God in his unquiet times, laughing at Linda’s increased faith and involvement in church through the years, he now embraced the package of Christianity. He placed his bet on the Hereafter.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he told the Montana Standard. “I didn’t see it on a TV show or see it in the newspaper or hear it on the phone or read it in the Bible. Something happened to me just so seriously that I just all of a sudden woke up.”
Never afraid of sharing any thought about anything, Knievel called televangelist Rev. Robert Schuller and told him that he had “accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.” He asked to announce his feelings on Hour of Power, Schuller’s long-running television show from the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
Schuller flew to Clearwater to assure himself that Knievel’s feelings were real. Schuller came away more than convinced. He was ecstatic. The appearance was scheduled for April 1, 2007.
Shelly Saltman, still alive, still active at the age of seventy-six in the Los Angeles area, had a friend who knew Rev. Schuller very well. The friend heard about the upcoming show and had a suggestion: maybe Shelly could go to the baptism of Evel Knievel. It might be a nice moment of closure for everyone concerned.
“Sure,” Saltman said, “I’d be happy to go to see him baptized …”
Pause.
“But only if I get to hold his head underwater.”
Saltman did not go to the service.
Knievel looked weak when he stood at the altar, but he was his dynamic, forceful self as a speaker. There was more than one in the packed church and across America who thought that he would have been a very good evangelist if he hadn’t taken other paths in life.
“I rose up in bed,” he said about his conversion. “I was by myself. I said, ‘Devil, Devil, get away from me, you bastard you. I cast you out of my life.’ I went to the balcony of my hotel room, I said, ‘I will take you, throw you on the beach. You will be gone, I don’t want you around me anymore.’ I did everything I could. I put my knees on the ground. I prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever let me go.”
Less than eight months later Knievel would be dead.
A Story. Louie Markovich bought a plane ticket and went to Florida to see his friend one last time. The visit lasted for a week. There was little doubt about what would happen next as Knievel wore the oxygen tube all the time now and fought for each breath. He said the doctors told him there were no options left. Markovich felt an overwhelming sadness, didn’t want to see what he saw. He wanted to leave, but he also never wanted to leave.
The two men had pulled stunts together that no one else would ever know about. Just teenagers, then a little older, they had been a two-man crime wave in Butte and surrounding towns. They robbed anyplace that could be robbed, fancied themselves as burglars, safecrackers, desperadoes. They worked on adrenaline as much as needed, cut through locks and walls and bullshit, tiptoed through the dark, watched for guard dogs and night watchmen, got in and got out, robbed for the money and the excitement of it all. They had secrets.
“There was no one else around like him,” Markovich said about his friend. “He always wanted to do something. Hey, let’s go. I was the same way. We went.”
Knievel would come to his house on the bike, pick him up. His mother would start screaming, tell him not to go. He would jump on the back, Knievel would shift into gear, and they would disappear. He could hear his mother’s opinion, even now, that they both were crazy, both were going to die. The night always awaited.
In the early days of the motorcycle jumping, Markovich was part of the original group of Hollywood Motorcycle Daredevils, and helped build the first heavy jump ramps in the parking lot behind the Ford dealership in Anaheim, California. Plywood and two-by-fours. Ramps that lasted for an entire career. When the problem arose in that second show in Barstow, when Jack Stroh was hurt and couldn’t jump over the speeding motorcycle, Knievel offered the job to Markovich for an extra $50. Markovich said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” so that was when Knievel did it himself and was injured for the first of many times.
“We had no money at all,” Markovich said. “I won $2,000 one night, gambling in Reno, and that kept us going. When we went up to Yakima or someplace, we’d have to take the side roads all the way. We didn’t have enough money to pay the fee at those weigh stations on the highway.”
There was never any big announcement from Knievel that his career in burglary had stopped, it simply did. He didn’t suggest projects anymore, and Markovich, whose career hadn’t stopped, didn’t suggest any in return. It was a conscious decision. He didn’t want Knievel to get in trouble, screw up this possibility he had found.
Markovich eventually did get in trouble, went to prison, paid the price for his transgressions. When he came out, the friendship was still there. He went to places with the famous daredevil, rode on the jets, the boats, argued with him, made deals, argued, got back together, a routine. The bonds were there for a lifetime.
So now the two men sat in Clearwater, Florida, and told the stories one more time. They talked about football and women and golf. They talked about safes and locks and the development of the electric eye, shooting laser beams across a dark room. They talked about characters and family and adventures, talked about everything.
Knievel told Markovich he had plans for him.
“I want you to be a pallbearer,” the daredevil said.
Markov
ich declined. He said he hated funerals, maybe wouldn’t even go. He couldn’t be a pallbearer. Knievel said yes he could. The entire event was being planned. Right now it was being planned. Knievel went down a list of other potential pallbearers, debated each one. He went down a list of honorary pallbearers, debated each one. He laid out speakers, song selections, the entire program. He planned the funeral as if it were another jump over another obstacle. Which maybe it was.
“Here’s the thing,” Markovich said later. “Everyone he talked to, he told them he wanted them to be pallbearers. He must have given out the job a dozen times. It was perfect.”
That was Bob Knievel. Cash the check as soon as you can. Because you never know when it is going to bounce.
He died on the afternoon of November 30, 2007, in Clearwater about a week after Louie Markovich left. There was no great crash, no explosion, no gasp from any crowd. He died. There were no last words. A hospice worker, a woman, had been there in the morning. He died in the afternoon. Krystal was there. He had trouble breathing, not an uncommon problem for him, but this time he quietly died.
His funeral was held on December 10, 2007, at the Butte Civic Center, the same place where the Butte Bombers took on the Czech Olympic team. Rev. Schuller presided. Robbie spoke, and Pat Williams spoke, and Matthew McConaughey, the actor, spoke, and other people spoke. Louie Markovich, yes, was a pallbearer. A recording of Sinatra singing “My Way” was played.
The famous daredevil was buried at Mountain View Cemetery right on Harrison Avenue, not a long way from the Butte Country Club and the house he once owned. A large headstone, larger than most of the other headstones in the cemetery, marked his grave.
An etching of Knievel on his motorcycle, heading left to right, occupied the top third of the stone. A fluttering American flag occupied the bottom third. The words were in the middle.
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