Life of Evel: Evel Knievel

by Stuart Barker

  2

  Happy Landings

  ‘I could do a wheelie either sitting on the motorcycle or standing on it better than anyone else in the world.’

  Having flunked out of school, tried his hand at so many occupations and moved from one sport to the next, it seemed that Bobby Knievel would never be able to maintain enough interest or enthusiasm in any particular field to make a decent living. He was too restless, too ambitious to make something of himself and too opposed to knuckling down and accepting a regular nine-to-five job. The only real constant in his life, the only thing he hadn’t tired of since his schooldays, was riding motorcycles. Bobby simply loved to fool around on bikes.

  Motorcycles had first entered Knievel’s life when he was 15 years old, although he had fantasised that his bicycle was motorised long before that. He was given his first motorcycle by his father while visiting him in El Sobrante, California, where Robert senior had eventually settled with his second wife Jeanie Buis and had three daughters: Christy, Renee and Robin. After working as a bus driver for a time, Knievel’s father had managed to save and borrow enough money to open a Volkswagen dealership in Berkeley (he would later return to Butte and open another dealership there), and while young Bobby was visiting his father presented him with a little British-built 125cc two-stroke BSA Bantam – a massively popular machine at the time and one which was responsible for launching countless racing careers as well as the less-travelled route Knievel would eventually follow on two wheels.

  It might have seemed an extravagant gift, given the relative poverty Bobby was accustomed to living in, but it may have been his father’s way of assuaging his own guilt at deserting his son at such a young age. And, as the bike was part of a trade-in on a car sale, it probably didn’t cost him too much.

  As well as running a garage, Robert Knievel also raced cars on occasion in local events. He was never serious enough about the sport to attempt to make a career out of it but he was a competent driver and was responsible for generating Bobby’s interest in cars and bikes.

  Perhaps surprisingly, Bobby never displayed any real anger or bitterness at having been abandoned by his father (and mother) as a child. On the contrary, he usually spoke well of his dad. ‘Jeez, I thought my dad was a helluva guy,’ he would later say. ‘I used to go down there [San Francisco] when he raced midgets and sports cars. Helluva good driver.’ Whatever his true feelings were about being given up as a child, Bobby certainly had his dad to thank for kick-starting his two-wheeled career.

  The pattern for Bobby’s wild-riding style was set right from the first time he ever rode his little bike. Without any formal tuition, Knievel threw a leg over the Bantam, pulled in the clutch lever, engaged first gear, popped out the clutch, roared off down the street and smashed straight into a mailbox. ‘I couldn’t control it. I really got in trouble on that motorcycle that day. I almost got killed.’

  Undeterred, Bobby brought the Bantam back to Butte and set about learning the skills of his future trade as well as annoying and amusing the good citizens of the town in equal measure. ‘I used to ride through bars here and ride down the sidewalk, and my dad said, “What is the matter with you? You’re going to get killed.” ’

  Tales of his cop-baiting (in which he would spark off chases from Butte’s finest) have become legendary and are, at least in part, due to the depiction of such events in the 1971 George Hamilton movie Evel Knievel. Officer Mo Mulchahy lends some credence to the legend, however, with his testimony that ‘It got to be kinda fun. Most times you chased him you’d go have a coffee. If he didn’t wanna be caught, you didn’t catch him. But it was never nothing serious.’

  While Mulchahy’s version of events is certainly within the realms of possibility, other versions show how the legend of Evel Knievel has been added to over the years to the point of absurdity. In his book Evel Knievel: An American Hero, author Ace Collins relates one particular incident involving Knievel and the local police. Without crediting anyone as a source or witness, Collins tells of Knievel being trapped in a dead-end alley by police, who had barricaded the entrance with their patrol vehicle. Undeterred, Knievel rides straight towards the police car, but bears to the right at the last minute, hits a convenient earthen ramp and sails straight over the police car! At best it’s a highly unlikely scenario, and had there been any element of truth in the tale it’s certain that Knievel would have told and retold it over the years. The fact that he hasn’t done so would seem to prove that it is just another myth.

  However much truth there is in the cop-baiting tales, there is no doubt that Bobby Knievel loved his motorcycle and spent countless hours riding round Butte on it, his thrill-seeking character making him a natural when it came to trying wheelies and rear-wheel slides and gunning the little Bantam flat out for all it was worth. ‘I learned to do wheelies on my little BSA and when I later had bigger bikes I could do a wheelie either sitting on the motorcycle or standing on it better than anyone else in the world. And I mean that – better than anybody in the world. I was the first guy to do one standing on the seat. I could wheelie until the oil ran out of the pan and the engine seized up.’

  Knievel’s two-wheeled antics became something of an institution in Butte, and locals were particularly fond of turning out to watch Bobby race up impossibly steep mine hills on his bike. ‘I was goin’ up and down mine hills here in Butte. Everybody thought I was a nut. Fifty or sixty cars used to come out every night to this mine-hill dump. I used to climb it; I’d fall off ten times and make it once. They’d all sit there and blow their horns.’

  Bobby also started to discover that people would actually pay to see his motorcycle pranks, and he found he could make a buck here and there by amusing his drinking buddies. On one occasion outside Bobby’s favourite watering hole, the Met Tavern, a friend bet Knievel $10 he couldn’t ride over a Volkswagen car which was parked outside. With friend and Met owner Bob Pavolich riding pillion, Knievel hoisted the front wheel of his Bantam onto the boot of the car, rode up over the rear window, smashing it in as he went, then revved the bike up and over the roof and finally back down over the bonnet and onto the street. He scared the life out of Pavolich, amused the hell out of the gathered drinkers and won his $10. The owner of the Volkswagen was presumably less than pleased.

  Knievel may have been good at performing stunts on his BSA, but back in the 1960s there was no obvious means of pursuing motorcycle stunt-riding as a career. Therefore it was to becoming a motorcycle racer, rather than a stunt rider, that Knievel aspired, and in America in the early 1960s there really was only one kind of motorcycle sport and that was dirt-bike racing. Had Knievel been born 20 years later there is every chance he would have taken to road racing on purpose-built Tarmac circuits but back then this was almost exclusively a European pursuit. The Americans preferred to race ‘flat-trackers’ round dirt or shingle-based ovals ranging from a quarter-mile to a mile in length. It’s a fearsome spectacle, with riders racing their bikes flat out down the straights at around 140mph before slewing their machines sideways to scrub off speed into the corners. The nearest European equivalent is speedway, but speedway bikes are far less powerful than the big 750cc American flat-trackers, personified by Harley-Davidson’s legendary and enduring XR-750 V-twin machine – the same bike Evel would later use in his jumping career.

  Having gained his national racing licence from the AMA (American Motorcycle Association), Bobby headed out to California to try his hand at dirt-track racing. Borrowing all he could from his ever-supportive grandparents, Knievel was still extremely poor and his accommodation at race meetings, as often as not, was the back seat of his car, usually with Linda and Kelly along for the ride. On many nights the young family would camp out under the stars and wash themselves in rivers or creeks, all so Knievel could pursue his dream of becoming a professional motorcycle racer.

  Knievel did meet with some success in the racing world, but the prize money was poor and barely enough to keep him going to the next meetin
g. He also found his six-foot frame put him at a disadvantage next to the smaller riders. ‘When the AMA put us on 250s, the little guys who didn’t weigh anything would go past you like a rubber band,’ he complained. It was during one of these races in May 1962 that Knievel achieved something of a landmark in his life: he broke his first bone. It was his collarbone and it was to be the first of many bones he would shatter; enough, in fact, to earn him a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the man who had broken more bones than any other. The 1972 entry for this, however, is laughably inaccurate. It states that in that year alone, Knievel fractured 431 bones. As Steve Mandich correctly points out in Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel, that would average out at 1.2 bones being broken every single day of the year, a feat which even Knievel would find hard to admit to with a straight face.

  But back in May 1962, apart from being a month memorable for breaking his first bone, Knievel had good reason to celebrate as his second son, Robert Edward Knievel, was born on the seventh day of the month. He would become known to the world as Robbie Knievel, the world-class motorcycle jumper, but his relationship with his father would be stormy in the extreme. But right now, Robbie was just another mouth to feed and his father was still not earning any money worth talking about. Bobby knew he would have to try harder to support his family.

  His interest in racing and bikes in general had become such that by late 1962 Knievel made his first attempt to earn a proper living from motorcycles. Having been disillusioned with the carinsurance business, Bobby borrowed as much money as he could from his grandmother and his friend Joe Dosen, put it together with his own meagre savings and opened a motorcycle dealership in Butte called ‘Imported Motors’. He stocked a range of bikes including Hondas, Triumphs, BMWs, Indians, Ducatis and Matchless machines. With his innate gift for promotions and sales techniques Knievel should have been a natural as a bike dealer, but money was scarce in Butte and there simply weren’t enough people in the position to buy a motorcycle. The shop did a poor trade and in 1963 Bobby was forced to close the business, whereupon he fled to Spokane, Washington with his young family, which grew again to include a daughter, Tracey Lynn, born on 22 October of that year. In Spokane, Knievel tried, yet again, for a new start in life.

  The experience of having raced and of owning a bike store, albeit an unsuccessful one, stood Knievel in good stead when he arrived in Spokane. He’d made lots of contacts and friends within the bike industry and one of those, a man named Darrell Triber, readily offered Bobby a job in one of his Honda dealerships. This time Knievel flourished in the trade and was soon made a partner of the Spokane branch. Later, when Triber decided to add another franchise in Moses Lake, also in Washington State, he trusted Knievel enough to allow him to run the business. When Triber eventually wanted out of the motorcycle business entirely he sold the Moses Lake branch to Knievel, who was obviously determined to have another stab at being a successful businessman.

  Bobby knew from his previous experience that the challenge of running a successful bike dealership was in learning how to attract potential customers to his particular store rather than anyone else’s, and, once he’d got them there, how to persuade them to part with their money to buy a motorcycle. At first, Knievel thought small: he offered a $100 discount off the price of any Honda to anyone who could beat him at arm wrestling. (According to Knievel, no one ever did qualify for the discount.)

  But such wacky fairground gimmicks were never going to be enough to attract serious business, and as sales continued to be sluggish Knievel started thinking bigger. Having become more and more adept at the art of riding a motorcycle and, more importantly, at performing stunts and tricks on a bike through his racing, Knievel got round to thinking back to his childhood and the Joey Chitwood Auto Daredevil Show. It might now have been nineteen years ago, but childhood memories, especially such exciting ones, are forged strongly within the psyche and Knievel had never forgotten the experience. But only now, in 1965, did he see a way to turn what was just a happy memory into a potential money-spinner, or at the very least, a way to attract more customers through his shop doors. Robert Craig Knievel, at the age of 26, decided he was going to jump a motorcycle off a ramp over some obstacles in front of a live audience. A star, and a whole new medium of entertainment, was about to be born.

  Not content with an ‘ordinary’ ramp-to-ramp jump (which was anything but ordinary at the time), Knievel decided upon adding more danger and more novelty to the event. His elk protest from 1961 had taught him the value of original thinking when it came to drumming up publicity and this time around he excelled himself. In future years the world would know Knievel as the man who soared over cars, trucks and buses on a motorcycle, but his first ever jump was one of the most unusual of his entire career: Bobby had made up his mind to leap over two mountain lions and a crate containing 100 live rattlesnakes.

  Once more displaying a keen eye for promotional opportunities, Knievel chose a 350cc Honda from his dealership to make the jump on. Honda, now the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles, was a relative newcomer in 1965, and many people still mocked the little bikes from the land of the rising sun, associating them with cheaper, unreliable produce manufactured in the Far East. American riders in particular referred to Hondas as ‘rice burners’ and preferred their machines to be of wholesome American or British stock. But if Knievel could prove that a little Honda was good enough to jump 40 feet over a cage of rattlers then just maybe he could convince them to buy one from his store.

  The obvious choice for the jump site was at the Moses Lake Raceway, not far from Knievel’s bike shop, and it was arranged that he would perform his madcap stunt during the halftime break in race proceedings. Knievel says he never formally practised the 40-foot leap but it seems safe to assume he had attempted some sort of jumps prior to his public debut, even if they were on a much smaller scale. On the other hand, given that he never made a habit of practising for any of his later bigger jumps (‘No use practising – if you kill yourself in practice you’ll never make the jump for real’), it is possible that he was prepared to just twist the throttle and see what happened. He was, after all, well versed in the merits of positive thinking and was more than happy to take a risk if he thought there was money to be made.

  Obtaining the lions and snakes was in itself quite an achievement, and it would be hard to imagine such a performance being permitted today in our animal-friendly society. However, Bobby used his connections well and arranged to ‘borrow’ the hapless creatures from the zoo in Cooley City. The zoo’s manager was dating a girl Knievel knew well and he used all his charm in persuading her to fight his case. ‘She used to come into the store and sit around all the time and go to lunch with me and this and that and the other thing, so she talked him into doing it.’

  Even so, the owner of the mountain lions was still understandably nervous about subjecting his animals to the potential harm that could be caused them by a lunatic on a motorcycle. ‘The guy that owned the mountain lions was afraid I was going to kill them so he put both of them close to the take-off ramp,’ Knievel explained. No one seemed to care much for the well-being of the rattlesnakes, however, the general consensus probably being that if there were to be a hundred less poisonous critters slithering around Washington State then so much the better.

  With the snakes and lions in place and blissfully unaware of what was about to happen next, Knievel rode out in front of the crowd on his little Honda to prepare for his first ever professional appearance as a motorcycle jumper. There was little of the glitz and glamour which was associated with his later appearances; no sparkling red, white and blue jumpsuit, no spectacularly custom-painted Harley-Davidson and no entourage of helpers and hangers-on. But the showmanship was there from the very beginning as Knievel revved his bike and made several runs past the take-off ramp, an action which both excited the crowd and allowed Knievel to assess the speed he would need to be travelling at to safely make the jump. This was a
technique Knievel would use throughout his career to great effect.

  When he felt he had whipped his audience into a suitable frenzy, Knievel rode slowly back to his starting position and prepared to face the unknown. What he was about to attempt was no illusion, nor was there any trickery involved. If he didn’t carry enough speed he was going to be seriously hurt right there in front of a live audience, and if he couldn’t hold on to the bike as it smashed back down to earth he could even be killed. Like taking an aeroplane on its first test flight, there was no safe way to practise what Knievel was about to attempt, and that is precisely what drew the crowd’s attention.

  Racing cars or motorcycles is a matter of progressively gaining speed through experience. Jumping a motorcycle is do or die, Russian roulette on two wheels. Knievel would twist his throttle, launch himself off a flimsy wooden ramp and put his fate in the hands of the gods. He was little more than a human cannonball and the crowd knew it.

  But by his own admission, the young Knievel had ‘balls like a rhinoceros’ and a whole heap of faith in himself. He wasn’t about to back out, even if his nerves were on edge; on the contrary, the feeling of raw fear and excitement was just like the feeling he got when robbing a bank, but this time the source of his excitement was legal and it felt good. Better than the gloomy prospect of being lowered into a mineshaft, better than the drudgery of doing the rounds as an insurance salesman and better than being told what to do in the Army. Knievel was finally alone and calling the shots; he would quite literally stand or fall by his own decisions and his own skills. He felt more alive than at any other time in his life. It was time to go.