Life of Evel: Evel Knievel

by Stuart Barker

  With the benefit of slow-motion replays it was clear to see that the craft’s much smaller drogue chute had opened the very instant the steam was released and the rocket was thrust up the ramp. But the whole thing happened too fast to be caught by the naked eye in real time, and Knievel was already about 1,000 feet in the air before spectators realised something was wrong. As the full chute opened, the wind started blowing Knievel back into the nearside canyon wall, and Knievel, sensing the danger he was in, began struggling desperately to break free of his harness and helmet. The helmet might have helped if he was to crash into the canyon wall but it could prove lethal if he should fall into the Snake River itself.

  The X-2 and Evel disappeared from sight, down into the canyon, and the once-rowdy crowd was hushed as everyone waited for news. The television commentators feared the worst, as did Knievel’s family and friends and the majority of the gathered spectators. Perhaps only the Hell’s Angels were rubbing their tattooed hands with glee at the prospect of ridding themselves of one of their most outspoken critics.

  Two helicopters hovered low, churning up the 18-foot-deep waters of the Snake as several rescue boats honed in on the stricken daredevil. No one above the rim could yet see if he had struck the canyon wall and landed on a ledge or if he’d sunk straight into the river. Then suddenly, out of the underhang of the canyon wall, a white figure standing upright on a boat, waving up at the gathered thousands, told the story – Evel was alive and relatively unscathed. The crowd, which had been so hushed, erupted with approval at the sight.

  The Sky Cycle had drifted down into the canyon at around 15mph, bounced off a rocky ledge and continued down until it had come to rest on another ledge just 20 feet from the river itself. Had it bounced just 20 feet more, Evel Knievel would almost certainly have drowned, strapped into the cockpit as he was in a five-point fighter-pilot seatbelt. He was extremely lucky to be alive.

  The first man to reach Evel was an old personal friend called John Hood. He had scrambled down a rope from a helicopter onto the small canyon ledge into which Evel had crashed and helped the star into a boat, then he himself waited in turn to be retrieved. Knievel was lifted back up to the canyon rim by helicopter while the unfortunate Hood waited patiently to be rescued. By nightfall, help still hadn’t arrived and it seemed that Hood had been completely forgotten amid all the furore surrounding his more famous friend. Shamefully, he was forgotten about all the following night and was forced to wrap himself in the X-2’s parachute for warmth until morning, when, apparently still unmissed, he somehow managed to scale his way more than 500 feet unaided up the canyon wall to safety. Sometimes it helps to be famous.

  As Knievel was set down by the helicopter back up near the launch site he was completely swamped by reporters, spectators, fans and security men. He seemed genuinely dazed and his face was bloodied from the impact of the crash landing. David Frost, professional as ever, was the first to thrust a microphone in the star’s face to ask what had gone wrong. ‘I don’t know what happened. The machine, it turned sideways. I tried to steer and then I felt, like a brake. I didn’t know the chute was open…the jolt I got…I couldn’t get my seatbelt undone. Thank God I didn’t go into the river. Boy, I could have never gotten out of it. It hit the shelf of rocks and then bounced into another shelf of rocks. Shit, I don’t know what happened; it went sideways, it turned. Bob [Truax] told me if I saw the canyon wall and not the sky, for Christ’s sake to let it go. When it turned, I let her fly. It just about knocks you out. They came and got me out down there and put me in the boat…I couldn’t get my safety belt un-harnessed. If I’d a [sic] gone in the river I’d a [sic] never got out of it. Never.’ When another reporter asked Knievel if he was going to try to jump the canyon again, he replied, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I sat in it and gave it my best, and…I don’t know what to tell you.’

  Evel retired to the cool sanity of his air-conditioned trailer to greet his long-suffering family, who had clearly responded to the event in very different ways. His daughter Tracey said, ‘We were certain he was dead. He had prepared us for his death. When we discovered he was alive, it was more of a shock to get that news than any other.’ Robbie, on the other hand, seemed to believe his father was invincible. ‘I was so used to him surviving every jump that this event was no different for me. I think I would have been more shocked if he had failed.’ Linda was overwhelmingly relieved and cried for joy at her husband’s safe return.

  Dazed and confused as he undoubtedly was immediately after the jump, Knievel could have had no idea of the far-reaching consequences of his failure to leap the Snake River Canyon. It wasn’t the failure as such – after all, his audience had always thrilled to see him wipe out as much as seeing him make a perfect landing – it was the nature of the failure, in that many suspected foul play. When it became common knowledge, through pictures in the press and the television coverage which was eventually shown, that the Sky Cycle hadn’t even left the launch ramp before its drogue parachute blew out, many people thought Knievel had planned it all along; that he knew he’d never make the jump (after all, the first two test shots didn’t) and had decided to go along with the sham, make as much money as he could, and pull the chicken switch as soon as the rocket was fired.

  For the remainder of his life, Knievel seethed with rage when anyone dared to mention such a possibility. ‘I waited seven years and then had an engineering mistake made, a malfunction, and the parachute blew out on take-off because of an electrical malfunction. The engineer didn’t know what the hell he was doing.’

  Despite all his impressive qualifications, the blame was to fall on Bob Truax – at least as far as Knievel was concerned. He claims he himself hired parachute specialists in the early days of the project and that Truax replaced them with his own people. ‘That idiot fired my parachute team. He got his own parachute guy. It mal-functioned on blast-off, nearly cost me my life, cost me making it across. I should have made it a half-mile across that thing.’ He added that he would ‘never put my life in his [Truax’s] hands again’.

  It seems unfair to blame Truax, since his credentials were impeccable and Knievel had forced him to work on a shoestring budget which itself was not forthcoming. Further, Truax stood to gain a $100,000 bonus if Knievel made it across the canyon, so it seems certain that he did the very best job he could with the limited funds he was given. Even so, Knievel was so incensed about his reputation being under threat that he later appeared on a US television show called Lie Detector and took a lie-detector test in a bid to prove that the failed canyon attempt had not been his fault and that he hadn’t copped out. For what it was worth, he passed.

  Those who blame Knievel for a cop-out need to consider several issues, the first being that releasing the chute early was actually more dangerous than attempting to go all the way. A gentle 15mph landing on the opposite canyon rim – or even halfway across, down in the river – would have been much less dangerous than being blown back into the canyon wall where he could have been knocked unconscious before dropping down into the water, or even killed as the flimsy X-2 smashed into the wall. And if the chute had not opened so early, the X-2 would not have spun so dangerously as it left the ramp. It is debatable if Knievel even could have released the chute so instantaneously with the blast-off. Slow-motion footage shows the chute literally blowing out simultaneously with the blast of steam that sent the rocket on its way. Perhaps the tremendous force of the blast-off jolted the parachute release lever out of Evel’s hands. But the one overriding factor, which Evel’s critics seem to forget, is the man’s reputation for having a go at anything. After all, aborted attempt or not, it took a lot of courage to be strapped into an under-developed, prototype rocket, press the fire button and be launched 1,000 feet into the air above a deep, craggy and watery canyon.

  In a sense, Knievel couldn’t have won either way, as he often admitted. ‘If I had made it across that canyon, people would have said, “See, that was easy.” If I had died, the
y would’ve just said a daredevil died – Evel Knievel – it was his last big jump. But excuse me – I’m still alive.’

  If Evel had proved anything in his career it was that he wasn’t afraid of getting hurt and he wasn’t afraid to get back up and try again. There is no reason to think he did not also give the canyon jump his best shot. Knievel was the only man who ever knew if his courage left him at that crucial moment, and he certainly never admitted to it. More than 30 years after the event he still valued his reputation too much to damage it by admitting to any weakness. It seems that in the case of the canyon he must be given the benefit of the doubt. He did, after all, attempt to jump it, and that’s what he’d always promised he would do. That fact remains his proudest achievement – the fact that he had kept his word after seven years of promises.

  The Snake River attempt made worldwide headline news on 9 September, overshadowed only by the news that President Ford had pardoned former president Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Estimates as to how much money Knievel actually made from the attempt vary greatly. Certainly the $6 million cheque was proved to have been a mere publicity stunt, but he still claimed to have made between $2.5 and $3 million from the jump.

  The crowd on the day had been disappointing, and closed-circuit television sales had returned much less revenue than expected. The event was only broadcast in 250 venues, not the 400 that had originally been envisioned, and at least one showing had to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales. Even Bob Arum declared the response to Snake River very disappointing, and admitted that the overall gross was in the region of $4 million rather than the $32 million he and Knievel had been hoping to make.

  Whatever anyone’s personal opinion on whether or not Evel Knievel faithfully attempted to jump the Snake River Canyon, one fact remains: no one else has ever been mad enough to try the stunt, despite there being a wealth of Evel imitators out there, and it was a fact not lost on the man himself. ‘There’s all kinds of guys said they wanted to jump that canyon. And God hasn’t moved it one inch. Not one inch! And I don’t see no big long line of daredevils standing out there wanting to try it.’

  9

  London Calling

  ‘I was a mess after Wembley. I was hurt bad.’

  If notorious American gangster Bugsy Siegel had not had the vision to create Las Vegas in the mid-1940s, Evel Knievel would probably have done it for him. Never was a city more suited to an individual than Vegas was to Knievel. The glitz, the glamour, the gambling, the hustle, the shows, the bars, the girls, the sheer unashamed gaudiness of the city captivated Knievel more than any other place on earth.

  He had already been making regular trips to the Nevada oasis to watch world championship boxing matches before he turned himself into a star in Vegas by jumping over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace. As he made more money, so he made more and more trips to Vegas, often flying in a group of friends in his Learjet to party for days and weeks on end. Knievel considered himself the biggest gambler that Vegas had ever seen, not because of the amount of money he threw around the craps tables, but because he felt he had gambled his life there in 1967 when trying to jump the fountains.

  At the heart of his fascination with the city was his love of gambling. Throughout his adult life Knievel was a compulsive gambler who would bet on practically anything, the more bizarre the better. Legend has it he once bet the tip of his own finger on a single putt in a golf match, and having lost the stroke he chopped the end of the finger off with a shovel, it being the only sharp object at hand. The finger was later, according to the legend, sewn back on.

  On another occasion, while heavily under the influence of his favourite poison, Wild Turkey, Knievel bet his friend Wayne Newton $10,000 that the reclusive multi-billionaire Howard Hughes was dead because no one had seen him for so long. The bet stuck for several months until, according to Knievel, Hughes chartered Knievel’s Learjet to fly to Houston, Texas and was found dead on arrival, proving that he had actually been alive at the time the bet was placed. Knievel found the circumstances so incredible and darkly amusing that he happily coughed up the ten grand, which was easily covered by his charter fee anyway.

  Knievel had even bet the famous tennis hustler Bobby Riggs that Riggs could not set out from Las Vegas on a Harley-Davidson under 200cc (Riggs had never ridden a bike before) and arrive at the Snake River Canyon, which was 616 miles away, within 72 hours and in time for Knievel’s jump attempt. Riggs immediately took, and passed, his motorcycle test and turned up at the Snake River jump site a day early. Knievel was forced to stump up $25,000, which Riggs later donated to charity.

  Playing golf offered Knievel almost endless opportunities to bet and he took every one of them. Rules would be set before the start of every round: if your ball went in the water you paid all the other players $100; if you landed in a bunker it cost $250; if your ball landed in the rough it cost you another $250, and so on. But there were ways to win back lost money too – if any player managed to hit a duck or bird and kill it, for example, he could expect to receive $1,000 from each player.

  The tales of Evel’s gambling have become part of the myth that surrounds him and only he knows for sure how many of them are true, how many are exaggerated and how many are complete figments of his talent for spinning tall tales: ‘I once won $50,000 on a round of golf, beat this guy one up.’ ‘I lost $250,000 at blackjack once. Didn’t hurt though, cos I had $3 million in the bank at the time.’ ‘I won $100,000 betting on football in one year alone.’

  But the stakes weren’t quite so high when one particular journalist joined Knievel and his friend Chuck Cosgriff for a round of golf shortly before the Snake River jump. Having heard all the tall tales surrounding Knievel’s gambling, the journalist was extremely disappointed to report that Evel only ‘won $5 from Cosgriff on the afternoon, an afternoon in which the betting ran to hundreds of dollars but finally cancelled out nearly even. So much for those $1,000-a-hole golf matches that have entered the legend.’

  While he always maintained he was a man of his word, Knievel was never averse to stacking the odds in his favour when it came to gambling. For years he carried a silver dollar with heads on both sides. Not surprisingly, he claims to have never lost a coin toss in his life. Yet despite his apparent recklessness, Knievel believed he was a ‘sensible’ gambler, if there can be such a thing. ‘I like to gamble and I am good, but I am no maniac. If I had just a dollar left I would bet 50 cents but not the whole dollar. That kind of gambling is for snivelling failures.’

  It is no surprise that Knievel was so fond of gambling, given the nature of his chosen profession. No matter how many safety measures he took before a jump (and they were few), when he twisted the throttle of his motorcycle and aimed for a take-off ramp or the edge of a canyon, the end result was always a gamble. If he landed his bike safely it was counted as a win and he was suitably rewarded financially. If he wiped out he still got paid, but his penalty for ‘losing’ was a whole lot of pain and weeks or months spent recuperating. Almost everything Evel Knievel ever did was a gamble to a certain extent, and in 1975 he took a new gamble with his career in deciding it was time to try a new market: Knievel flew to the UK for his first-ever performance outside the United States.

  While he was still massively popular with the kids in America, his Snake River failure had taken its toll on Knievel’s reputation with his older and more cynical followers. The UK promised a fresh, new market where he figured he might possibly meet with less cynicism. It also promised to be a lucrative visit as his planned eight-venue tour was set to net him $250,000. But there were reasons other than money that tempted him across the Atlantic, as he explained: ‘I’d never been to England and wanted to go. In Europe, I’d only been to France, with Jackie Stewart and Princess Grace’s brother for the French Grand Prix. I wanted to tour all of Europe because my great-grandparents were from Germany and I wanted to jump the Berlin Wall. I also wanted to jump the River Thames but political bullshit put an end to that.�
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  The original plan had indeed been to restore the Sky Cycle and launch it over the Thames from Battersea Park with the aim of landing in the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, an idea which now sounds quite absurd. If Knievel had organisational headaches in such an isolated spot as the Snake River Canyon they were going to be multiplied a thousand-fold in central London, and so it proved. Instead of simply being able to lease a stretch of land on both sides of a canyon, to jump the Thames Knievel would have needed permission from various authorities including the Port Authority, the Water Authority, the Department of the Environment, the Pollution Authority and the Metropolitan Police. It clearly wasn’t going to happen in bureaucratic Britain but happily there were other obstacles that could be jumped and in more convenient places too.

  Working with British television stalwart David Frost on the canyon jump had clearly paid dividends for Knievel as the relationship indirectly led to his UK trip. Frost owned a promotional company that was handled by British promoter John Daly, and, having commentated on the canyon coverage, Frost suspected the brash American could be a hit in the UK – if only the team could decide on a suitable spectacle.

  Aside from the River Thames and the Berlin Wall, Knievel ludicrously talked of jumping the English Channel, having presumably never seen it and thus not realised that the only way he could ‘jump’ it would be in his Learjet. It was finally decided that a standard motorcycle jump in a controlled environment would be the only realistic option in the centre of Britain’s capital, and where better to stage it than the then-home of English football, Wembley Stadium.

  With the venue having been decided on, Knievel then announced in a superb promotional flourish that he would not be jumping cars, vans or Mack trucks in the capital’s stadium, but 13 traditional red London buses, before moving on to perform in Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Bristol, Portsmouth and Southend, then winding up the tour, very appropriately, in Blackpool – England’s seedier seaside version of Las Vegas.