‘It is a bitch,’ he admitted, ‘but I am not scared of it – nothing much scares me – but I just don’t want to die. Hepatitis C is worse than AIDS. There is no cure. If I do get a liver the disease will start attacking the new one as soon as it is put in. It is a damn rattlesnake this thing.’
Knievel was issued a pager to carry at all times, which would alert him if and when a suitable liver was found. He was one of 10,000 patients in the US holding on for the news that might save their lives and was acutely aware that a quarter of those patients die before their pagers ever go off. The sickest patients are pushed to the top of the list, and at one point Knievel was nearing the top after twice coming extremely close to death. On both occasions his body’s near-superhuman ability to fight off pain and injury, coupled with the steely determination that had allowed him to become Evel Knievel in the first place, allowed him to recover sufficiently well to embark upon what looked like being his last-ever road trip. Evel’s doctors advised him to visit his family and friends while he still could, as it might be his last chance.
By this time, Evel had not only his own four children to think about but eight grandchildren too. Sadly, he could not see his beloved grandmother Emma who had raised him as a child; she had passed away the previous year aged 103.
Evel set out on a heart-breaking trip to Montana to visit as many friends and relations as possible, knowing full well he might never see them again. He might not have been an ideal father to his own children but as he grew older he doted on his grandchildren, five of whom were Tracey’s children, two Robbie’s and one Alicia’s. It was a trying time for all involved with so many uncertainties hanging over Evel, but he retained his optimistic outlook, despite hearing of his youngest grandson (Tracey’s son) Jesse’s ambitions. ‘He’s just seven and [he] came up to me and said, “Granddad, you know it’s going to be up to me and my brother Josiah to keep the family name going.” He was wearing his bicycle helmet and sitting on an Evel Knievel bike. I just rolled my eyes and said “Jesus.”’
Upon returning from his ‘last trip’, Evel continued making personal appearances when he felt well enough and he also gave interviews and played golf, even though his arthritis meant he had to run his wrists under a hot shower for twenty minutes before he could even think about holding a golf club. ‘I have bad arthritis,’ Evel admitted, ‘and it hurts me to get up in the morning. I have to be very careful in the mornings because of the injuries I have; I’m a slow starter.’ When the pain was too great he even took to rubbing horse liniment into his body to try and ease the pain in his muscles and joints.
Helped along by widespread and remorseful reports of his deteriorating health (the public often forgets how much they admire celebrities until these celebrities are dead or in danger of dying), the Evel revival continued to gather momentum. The Playing Mantis toy company announced that the famous Knievel toys would be re-released in time for Christmas and his new official website was selling a whole new range of Knievel-labelled merchandise, from which Evel naturally got a cut. Replica leather jackets, Evel Knievel cigars and aftershave, commemorative coins, T-shirts, caps, posters and signed photographs were all available at a price. If Evel Knievel merchandising had been a phenomenon in its own right back in the 1970s, it was well on its way to being so again.
Evel relished the fact that he was now finally able to make money without having to risk life and limb to do so; it was a scenario he had dreamed of since his career started going downhill back in 1976. Of the multitude of businesses offering him appearance money he said, ‘They don’t ask me to jump; I just turn up, smile, pose for the cameras and they give me the money. It is quite a career. In the old days, the promoters wanted more and more from me. They wanted me to jump or spill my blood and break my bones. Every time they wanted me to jump farther and farther and farther. Hell, they thought my bike had wings.’
The endorsement deals kept flooding in. In 1998 Evel linked up with world BMX champion Matt Hoffman to produce an Evel Knievel BMX bike. Hoffman had long idolised Knievel and was one of the many Extreme-sports fans to view him as the granddaddy of the movement. HoffmanBikes was recognised as being at the forefront in producing stunt bikes and the Knievel signature-series model was, naturally, designed primarily for long jumps rather than more intricate stunts. Hoffman himself often jumped over lines of cars on his BMX by being towed at speed behind a car then letting go of the rope as he reached the ramp. The bikes sold for $800 and Knievel seemed delighted, not only with his cut in the franchise (by 1998 he was making around $300,000 a year) but in being recognised by current world champions like Hoffman. At the time, Hoffman was a nine-time world champion and Evel described him as ‘One of the finest young men I have ever met – a true competitor.’ Hoffman himself penned a poem in honour of Evel, which ended with the lines ‘On behalf of the past and future generation, thanks for the inspiration.’ It summed up Evel’s contribution to the Extreme movement perfectly.
But the product endorsement didn’t stop with BMX bikes; for the first time ever, motorcycle riders could now buy a genuine Evel Knievel signature-series motorcycle. The California Motorcycle Company (CMC) announced in 1998 that it would be building a limited-edition run of 1,000 bikes, each painted up in the familiar red, white and blue starry logos Knievel made so famous, and different models would be made in honour of Evel’s most famous jumps: Caesar’s Palace, the Snake River and Wembley. They were certainly not intended as stunt bikes, however, but rather as Harley-Davidson-style cruisers. The 1440cc S&S engines pumped out a relatively puny 75 brake horsepower, but the bikes were not designed for performance but rather for show, as the gold-coloured trimmings and acres of chrome testified. The bikes went on sale for $25,000 and in November of 1998 CMC merged with Indian Motorcycles and seven other companies in a $30 million deal to form the Indian Motorcycle Company Incorporated. Unfortunately, failure to produce targeted numbers of bikes resulted in the company finally closing its doors in 2003.
Knievel must have been extremely frustrated throughout 1998. His name had never been hotter since his heyday and he was boldly predicting that he would make more money in the next 10 years than he ever made in the Seventies. But his new-found success was continually tainted by his illness and the nagging, depressing thought that he might not be around to enjoy the rewards of his comeback. His condition meant he often couldn’t even enjoy the present. ‘This disease is a bitch,’ he admitted. ‘Some days I just can’t get out of bed. It saps your energy. Some days are good, some are bad.’
Yet still the recognition kept rolling in. Knievel was awarded the prestigious Motor Cycle News Dave Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award in September 1998. Taylor had been a stunt rider of some repute himself and had campaigned endlessly on safety issues before sadly dying from cancer. MCN, established in 1956, is the biggest-selling motorcycle weekly in the world and had chronicled Knievel’s career from the moment he became famous. It was also significant that Knievel was being recognised by an enthusiasts’ motorcycle title rather than as a mainstream celebrity, a fact that was not lost on Evel and one he was particularly proud of.
Knievel was too frail to fly to the UK for the awards ceremony but spoke to the audience via a pre-recorded video tape. Speaking of the cancer that killed Taylor and the liver disease that was well on its way to killing him, Knievel said, ‘I know how painful cancer can be. I’m sick myself, not from cancer but from liver disease. I have hepatitis C and it’s…everything that ails us is tough for a human being to get along with. God put you here on earth to do the best and be the best and live the best that you can, and when he’s ready he’s gonna take you and I don’t think that a human being can ask for anything better than that.’
Fully expecting that Knievel was on his last legs, there were few in the audience – made up of the cream of the British motorcycle industry – with dry eyes. Knievel came across as being humble and in full acceptance of his condition. His speech was as far removed from his usual bravado and gung-h
o rhetoric as it was possible to be, and the fact was not lost on his audience, many of whom had grown up marvelling at the crazy stuntman from across the Atlantic. Some of them had even been present at Wembley way back in 1975.
The UK was caught up in a Seventies revival just as much as the US, and in November of 1998 BBC2 honoured Evel with a special Evel Knievel Night – a whole night of programmes dedicated to the Seventies icon. A new documentary, A Touch of Evel, was aired along with the 1977 movie Viva Knievel!, an episode of The Simpsons which featured a Knievel-type character called Captain Lance Murdock, and some short documentaries on other famous stuntmen and women including Britain’s own answer to Knievel, Eddie Kidd, who sadly suffered brain damage in a jump in 1996 and is now confined to a wheelchair. Having a whole evening’s programmes dedicated to one man on a channel as respected as the BBC was a true measure of how much Knievel still meant in the UK, almost a quarter of a century after his only performance here.
He continued to be celebrated in the US too, as the world-famous Smithsonian Museum in Washington opened a permanent Evel Knievel museum in December. In what is one of the largest exhibits in the museum dedicated to just one person, Evel donated many of his personal belongings including the Harley-Davidson XR-750 that he used to make his longest successful jump at Kings Island in 1975 and one of his famous white jumpsuits.
But, as always, Evel Knievel and trouble were never very far apart, and in December Evel attracted further bad press when he was reported to the police for making threatening phone calls to a Cleveland-based motorcycle collector. Knievel had apparently not learned his lesson after being jailed for breaking Sheldon Saltman’s arms back in 1977 and was now threatening the same punishment to a man whose name was not revealed. A business associate of Knievel’s called Carl Forbes told the press that the man in question had been ‘manufacturing jump bikes and using Knievel’s name to advertise them’. Cleveland police-chief Kurt Laderer said, ‘Since this happened over the phone, we have no way of truly knowing what happened. All we can do is put the man’s residence under house watch.’
Given Knievel’s state of health it is unlikely he could have broken anyone’s arms; he was now gaunt and frail, a shadow of his former overweight self in the 1980s, and his skin tone was a sickly yellow. He had also become increasingly depressed by the prospect that he might die relatively young – if he didn’t get a liver transplant in the first few weeks of 1999 he was a dead man and he knew it. Knievel had by now fallen so ill that he was taken into Tampa General Hospital to be cared for round the clock as he waited and prayed for news of a suitable donor.
Finally, on 27 January, Evel was told his body was shutting down and he was given just 48 hours to live. He decided he would prefer to spend his last hours at home with Krystal and die peacefully there rather than in hospital. After a lifetime of defying death, Knievel was finally forced to accept that he was going to lose, and for the first time in his life he practically gave up the fight. He had been repeatedly warned by doctors that this battle would be the biggest and most serious thing he would face in his life and it now looked like the defiant Knievel was finally beaten. At least he had put up one hell of a fight.
Clearwater, Florida, where Krystal and Evel had their condo, is linked to the city of Tampa by a 12-mile-long land bridge. Krystal helped Evel from the hospital into his car to drive across it on what he knew was his last journey, his last sight of the outside world and the Florida sunshine. He was going home to die. In the end it wasn’t to be a ‘glorious death’ as George Hamilton had predicted in his 1971 movie; it was to be a slow, painful degeneration, sinking into nothingness, that was finally to fell Evel Knievel. The obituaries were sure to note the irony in a few days’ time, if they didn’t already have them written up.
Then, when everything appeared to be lost, it happened. It wasn’t Evel’s pager that went off, it was his mobile phone. ‘As she [Krystal] was driving across the bridge I got that call on the phone from a nurse named Debby, and she said, “Evel, where are you at?” and I said, “I’m on the bridge back to Clearwater.” She said, “There’s been a car wreck in Miami. There’s been a young man killed who has your exact blood-type. We think his liver’s perfect and he is a donor. He was 23 or 24. Can you turn around? Your transplant surgeon is on his way to Miami on a Learjet. He’s gonna get the liver, put it in a solution and come right back.”’
Knievel wasn’t out of the woods by any means but his journey home to die had suddenly turned into a race for life. He now at least had a chance, and when Evel Knievel had a fighting chance he usually came out the winner. Krystal floored the accelerator and screeched the car over to the other side of the bridge, ignoring a ‘Do Not Cross’ sign. Within minutes the pair were back at Tampa General and Knievel was readied for the life-saving operation he’d been waiting on for so long. He had been on the waiting list for a whole year, and now Knievel had a chance to defy death one more time he wasn’t about to waste it. ‘They wanted to open me up right away,’ he later explained. ‘I said, “Well, if you open me up and you take my liver out and throw it in the garbage and this [new liver] doesn’t work, I’m a dead man.” The surgeon said, “Well, you’re the daredevil, what do you want to do?” I said, “Take it out.”’
Dr Hector Ramos (MD) of the LifeLink Transplantation Institute went to work on what was Knievel’s sixteenth major operation. Krystal paced the hospital corridors praying her frail but determined partner could stand up to the surgeon’s knife just one more time; praying that he wasn’t too weakened by the disease to take the anaesthetic, that he would have enough strength to pull round and come through. Most importantly, she prayed that Evel’s body would accept the new liver. If it didn’t, it was too late to find another. The operation simply had to work. It did.
Evel awoke some hours later to the news that the operation had been a complete success and that his body was accepting the liver of the unfortunate donor, who had lost his life to give Evel Knievel a new one. The sadness was not lost on Evel when talking about the youngster. ‘He gave me a gift of life through his liver so that I could go on living. He gave me life and I don’t even know him. And I do love him…In the near future I hope to know his family. Not many of us ever have the chance at another go in life.’
Showing his legendary ability to recover from injury and illness, Evel walked out of hospital just five days after his transplant, despite saying that ‘…when they take your liver out of ya and put another one in, it’s like replacing a football in your stomach’. He would need to take a weekly injection of Interferon and three Ribavirin tablets (both medicines help boost the body’s immune system) every week for the rest of his life, but at least he had a life to live again after coming closer to death than even he had managed before. Some weeks later it was discovered that Knievel’s hepatitis C was attacking the new liver, but since the liver itself was functioning perfectly there was a good chance the organ would last for many years.
The operation transformed Knievel’s appearance: he regained weight and a much healthier pallor and found he had more energy than he’d enjoyed for years. It was time to get back to business with a new vigour and taste for life. Knievel fans the world over breathed a sigh of relief as the old gladiator once again showed them that they should never give up hope and never give up trying. Death had tried a new, stealthier, underhand tactic on him, and had been defeated again. He really was beginning to appear superhuman.
On 2 April 1999, in his first major post-operation public appearance, Evel returned to Caesar’s Palace, the venue that had made him famous 32 years before, to launch the CMC Evel Knievel signature-series motorcycle. The massive billboard outside the complex bore the legend ‘Evel Rides Again’ and Knievel posed for pictures with the bike as well as riding it round the fountains, up the steps and into the casino itself, all without a helmet. This time Caesar’s was more forgiving – he didn’t crash.
Having apparently forgiven Las Vegas for all its sins against him, Knievel
again returned to Caesar’s on 19 November, but this time with an altogether different purpose: he had decided to marry Krystal. The couple had been together for nine years but ill health had prevented Evel from marrying over the last year and prior to that he’d seemed in no great rush to re-tie the knot. So now, with a relatively clean bill of health, he had decided to tie the knot for the second time in his life. The ceremony itself was pure Las Vegas kitsch, with scores of beautiful people dressed as Romans and gladiators, and Cleopatra flanking Knievel and his 30-year-old bride. Now 61, Knievel proudly rode his CMC bike to the ceremony and was pictured, unusually, wearing a suit in front of a decorative arch that featured several jumping motorcycles spanning its length. ‘I feel like I got a chance at a new life,’ Knievel told the press, ‘so Krystal and I decided to start a new life right here where it all began.’ Evel’s son Kelly acted as best man (even though he was nine years older than his new stepmother) and, as the ceremony was open to the public, several hundred people watched on.
With a new liver, a new wife, and his name providing a licence to print cash again, life looked good for Evel once more. The dark, drink-saturated days of the Eighties were well and truly behind him. Once more, Hollywood came knocking with the intention of making a much more realistic and grittier film of Knievel’s life story than the sugary George Hamilton vehicle had been. Producer Marco Brambilla had sold the idea to Universal Studios and had chosen Betty Thomas to direct. Thomas had already directed the movie Private Parts, based on the life of shock American DJ Howard Stern, as well as directing the Brady Bunch movie. Heartthrob Mathew McConaughey was selected to play Knievel after True Romance star Christian Slater had been briefly considered. It was inspired casting as U-571 and Reign of Fire star McConaughey bears an uncanny resemblance to the younger Knievel and looks even more like Evel’s son Kelly. In fact, the two look so alike that Knievel told McConaughey they could be twins.
Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Page 23