Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (5 page)

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.

Knievel twisted the throttle on his Honda and kicked his way up through the gearbox, gaining crucial speed before shooting up the ramp that would launch him into the void. As he left the end of the ramp, the Honda’s revs dropped away as the rear wheel continued to spin, seeking a purchase on anything solid. Knievel tried to hold the handlebars up high, sensing he must bring the motorcycle down rear wheel first for a stable landing. He was now little more than a passenger; while he could control the angle the bike would descend at, he could no longer increase or decrease his speed, and it looked, even to his inexperienced eyes, that he was not going to clear the gap. He needed just a few more miles per hour to bridge the last few feet clearly. With a resounding ‘thud’ the Honda smashed back down to earth amid the noise of splintering wood. Knievel had in fact come down short and smashed open the far end of the wooden box containing the rattlesnakes. But he had made it. He had landed his bike safely and was still in one piece.

The crowd, having never seen anything like it in their lives, yelled and cheered their approval. They had looked at the 40-foot gap and thought Knievel would never make it, but he had. And as he hauled on the brakes and scrubbed off speed, the crowd started to notice that the rattlesnakes were making a break for freedom – right in the crowd’s direction. ‘This guy started running around trying to catch them,’ laughed Knievel, ‘and I rode back by those mountain lions because I was so excited I didn’t know what I was doing. There wasn’t any grandstands and these snakes started crawling up there in the crowd. It was funnier than hell. I just buzzed on out and watched it from up on a hill somewhere. People were runnin’ every which way. It was a real crowd-pleaser you might say.’

Despite the success and novelty of his first ever motorcycle jump, Knievel’s business did not benefit enough from after-show publicity to make it worthwhile persevering. He sold the store and relocated to Orange County in Southern California where he continued racing bikes as the only means of getting a thrill in an otherwise bleak existence. But it wasn’t long before he started thinking about trying to make a career out of motorcycle stunt-shows. His first attempt had been a fantastic success and he had totally loved the adrenalin rush that jumping had provided. He was beginning to think that people all over the US might just pay to see him jump on a regular basis. ‘I thought that if the auto industry could support an auto-daredevil show like Joey Chitwood or Daredevil Lynch, maybe the time had come that the motorcycle industry could also support a stunt thing.’ It wasn’t a sure-fire bet by any means but, optimistic as ever, Knievel decided to give it a go. After all, what did he have to lose? If he didn’t make any money he’d still get a rush.

But rather than perform alone again, Knievel decided he needed to model his new act on Joey Chitwood’s well-established set-up. To put on a whole show he would have to keep a crowd entertained for more than a few minutes and that would require a whole troupe of stunt riders. Bobby found no shortage of talented riders among his racing buddies, who were prepared to try their hand at stunt riding even if it wasn’t going to pay much money; there were still bound to be a few laughs in it. By late 1965, Knievel had convinced five other riders that it was worth a shot: Eddie Mulder, Swede Savage, Rod Pack, Skip VanLuwenn and Butch Wilhelm, the midget who stood only four-feet four-inches high and was billed as the ‘midget daredevil’. Many of the gang would remain friends with Knievel after he shot to fame and they dropped by the wayside. Mulder would act as Knievel’s stunt double in his future movies, Savage would become a golfing partner, and Van-Luwenn remained close to Knievel as well as managing to set up one of the largest motorcycle and helmet distribution companies in the world.

Having secured a fleet of British-built Norton scramblers from the Berliner Motor Corporation (the official distributors of Norton motorcycles in the US), the self-styled daredevils planned and rehearsed their act until they felt they were ready to make their debut in front of a live audience. The only thing the team lacked was a name. It was made clear from the start that Knievel was to be the main attraction; after all, it was his show and he was the only member who had any experience of jumping in front of an audience. But ‘Bobby Knievel and his Motorcycle Daredevils’ just didn’t have any ring of glamour to it, and since the group was billing itself as being ‘from Hollywood’, a touch of showbiz glitz was essential. In solving the problem, Bobby created one of the best stage names of the twentieth century and one that would eventually become known throughout the world. With only a slight alteration to the spelling, he decided to use his old nickname: from now on he would be Evel Knievel.

Very few people become so famous that they are identifiable to the mainstream public by a single name. The vast majority of people in the Western world would know exactly who Sinatra, Ali or Hitler were, but these are all surnames and the Recognisable-by-a-single-name Club becomes much more exclusive when only first names are permitted. Elvis can certainly claim membership, but so can another white-jumpsuited icon: Evel.

Perhaps it is because both names are unusual, although Elvis is genuine while Evel is merely a nickname-cum-stage name; or it may be that both men were the single-handed creators of the phenomenon they respectively gave rise to. Whatever the case, Evel could rightly lay claim to being one of the few celebrities of the late twentieth century who was recognisable by his first name without any need for further expansion or explanation. Yet how he came to have one of the most recognised stage names in showbiz is not quite so simple, and it is quite possible that the origins of it were hazy even to the man himself, given, as he was, to repeating tales with such frequency that, true or false, he certainly seemed to believe in them himself.

The most commonly repeated anecdote of how Bobby Knievel became Evel Knievel is the jail-cell theory, which holds that Bobby was being held in a Butte police cell overnight along with a man called William Knoffel. According to the legend, a police officer quipped that he had better double the guard because he was housing both ‘Awful’ Knoffel and ‘Evil’ Knievel on the same night. Contemporary newspaper reports prove that a William Knoffel did exist, and Butte police officer Morris Mulchahy has actually testified to this version of events in the documentary
Evel Knievel: The Last of the Gladiators.

The problem with this theory is that Evel himself later claimed he was nicknamed ‘Evil’ at a much younger age. In
Evel Ways: The Attitude of Evel Knievel,
he is quoted as saying, ‘The first one to call me Evil Knievel was Nig McGrath, a friend of the family. My brother Nick and I stole his hubcaps and he hollered “You’re just a little evil Knievel.” It sort of stuck…even though I was somewhat ashamed of the name.’ (Although later in the very same book there are claims that the nickname was started by a neighbour and/or the local police due to Knievel’s bike-riding antics.) The name McGrath turned up again in
Penthouse
magazine but under different circumstances when Evel explained, ‘The guy that actually named me “Evil” was
Nick
McGrath, a baseball umpire. Every time I’d come up, even in Little League, he’d call me “Evil Knievel”.’ Whether this Nig McGrath and Nick McGrath are one and the same person (their names are repeated here as they were spelled in the respective publications) is open to debate, but the salient point is that Knievel was claiming to have been nicknamed ‘Evil’ from a young age.

One aspect of the famous name which Knievel did not contradict in his explanations was the changing of the spelling from ‘Evil’ to the less demonic ‘Evel’. He always claimed that he didn’t want any young fans to think he was a truly bad man or an evil man, or, as he once wittily suggested, ‘I didn’t like it [the spelling] the other way. It was an unnecessary evil.’ Although the change in spelling does not affect the sound of the word, it does neatly mimic the spelling of his surname, adding to the sense of alliteration, and there’s never been any harm in a self-publicist having his very own unique name to market – and eventually copyright.

However long he may have had the nickname of ‘Evil’, Bobby was never actually officially billed as ‘Evel’ in any of his shows until 1966, the year after he started performing motorcycle stunts and several years after he’d started dirt-track racing, where the name, one presumes, would have been equally beneficial in attracting attention. Indeed, another version of how he got his name relates to his time as a bike racer, as Knievel explained in the BBC documentary
Touch of Evel
: ‘I put together a stunt group called Bob Knievel and his Motorcycle Daredevils, Hollywood, California. My sponsor [Bob Blair of the Berliner Motor Co. who supplied Knievel’s team with bikes] said, “The nickname you have at the racetracks is Evil Knievel, why don’t you use it? It’s a better name.” So anyway, I did. I wasn’t too sure about it because I was ashamed of being called Evil.’

So it was that on 23 January 1966 the newly christened Evel Knievel and his Motorcycle Daredevils made their public debut in the grounds of Indio’s National Date Festival, where the team performed a selection of stunts, some original and some borrowed and adapted from car stunt-shows. It would presumably not have been known to Knievel that there had been a troupe of riders performing similar stunts in Britain for years. The Royal Signals Display Team – The White Helmets – was formed in 1927 as a means of demonstrating the skills of its Army dispatch riders, and their repertoire included jumping through hoops of fire, fast crossovers (where two riders race towards each other narrowly avoiding a collision) and six-bike pyramids. But while Knievel’s daredevils were not an entirely new conception, they were new to American audiences and their presentation was certainly a far cry from the officious military performances of The White Helmets.

Knievel often claims to have used 750cc Norton Commandos in these early jumps, but this must be the result of an inaccurate memory. The first Commando was not released until 1967, and since Knievel started jumping a Norton in 1966 he obviously could not have been mounted on a Commando. Early pictures of Evel’s stunt-shows clearly demonstrate him riding a Norton Scrambler with ‘knobbly’ off-road tyres, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly which model due to the grainy nature of the photographs. The most accurate description he could offer in later years when asked which model it was, was ‘It was similar to the Triumph [Triumph Bonneville, which he would later ride]. It had two cylinders; I think it was a 750.’ He may have been a great stunt rider but Knievel’s knowledge and memory for makes and models of motorcycles is questionable.

The team’s first stunt show lasted for approximately two hours during which Knievel and his motley crew smashed through burning wooden boards, performed wheelies and even jumped over small ramps which were being held up by other members of the team as they lay underneath them. At one point Knievel even parasailed behind a racing car at speed, though claims that he reached speeds of 200mph are clearly ridiculous. The show’s grand finale was to feature Evel leaping over two pick-up trucks parked tail-to-tail, a distance of about 45 feet. It was a short distance compared to what he would later achieve, but since few had seen this sort of stunt attempted before it proved a genuine crowd-pleaser.

Knievel was paid $500 for putting on his show, which didn’t go far between his team members. But even in those early days he must have realised what would become one of the biggest downfalls of his newfound career: once he’d cleared any given distance he would be forced to better it next time. No one wanted to see Knievel churning out the same old stunts in the knowledge that he was operating well within his limits. Over the next ten years Evel would have to continue pushing the envelope by jumping further and further until those two small pick-up trucks would be replaced by 14 full-size Mack trucks – and even a canyon.

Entertaining it may have been, but at this stage Knievel’s show was exactly where it belonged: in a small-town festival. It was a county-fair attraction, much as Elvis Presley’s music had been at the outset, and both men vied with coconut stalls and other fairground novelties to gain the attention of the gathered crowds. There was certainly nothing to suggest that the rough-and-ready motorcycle stuntman jumping battered old pick-up trucks would eventually capture the world’s imagination to such an extent that he would be able to single-handedly sell out the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium.

Significantly, Knievel had still not yet hit upon one of the most memorable aspects of his shows: his famous white jumpsuit. For his early performances he wore a much duller black leather suit with golden stars down the legs, a suit much more typical of motorcycle racers at the time. Like any entertainment act, Knievel’s would need time to become fully polished and presentable, but for the first time in his life he had finally found something he enjoyed enough to persevere with, and with each performance he would introduce new levels of showmanship and professionalism.

Television cameras were present to record what was only the Daredevils’ second-ever performance on 10 February in Barstow, California. It’s a date Knievel was unlikely to forget, it being the first time he was injured in his stunt career. It was also the one and only time he attempted the insane stunt which led to his injury.

Knievel stood facing an oncoming motorcycle being ridden at speed by one of his colleagues. With timing being the critical factor, Evel would leap up into a star-jump position, allowing the bike and rider (who was tucked down flat on the tank) to pass through safely. At least, that was the theory, and it had worked in practice every time, but on show day it all went wrong. Knievel got his timing wrong by a split second as the speeding motorcycle approached and the bike smashed into his groin, flipping him over 360 degrees and leaving him writhing on the ground. ‘The motorcycle hit me right in the balls,’ he cringed. ‘I was thrown 15 feet into the air and my body turned a couple of flips. I landed on my back on the ground. I was in no pain, but felt paralysed. Most of my ribs were cracked or broken. Someone covered me with a blanket. That was the last time I ever tried that particular stunt.’

He perhaps didn’t realise it at the time but Knievel had just added another very attractive, however morbid, addition to his show – the very real possibility that he could get a stunt wrong and suffer a spectacular injury. Getting it wrong would ensure crowds kept flocking back for more in numbers, which surely would not have been possible had Knievel always successfully pulled off his stunts. If there was no danger there would be no sustained interest. Knievel may have suffered serious injuries after being smashed in the groin, but if he was going to get paid for it he wasn’t complaining. And when pictures of his ugly mishap made it into several West Coast newspapers the following day, Evel knew he was on to something.

But the money he earned in those early outings was pitiful, and if Knievel imagined he would one day make millions from his carnival act he was more of a visionary than he has been given credit for. The $500 the team was typically paid for a show had to be split up to six ways on occasion, and each man’s share was reduced further by the expenses incurred by travelling to and setting up each show. As Evel had already proved, the risks were extremely high for such scant rewards, but since he had no other obvious means of making cash he got straight back to stunting after being released from hospital. Knievel simply couldn’t allow the momentum to be halted; if he was going to make anything of this bizarre business he couldn’t let an inconvenience like pain stand in his way.

In his fourth appearance with the Daredevils, Knievel suffered even more serious injuries. At Missoula in Montana he attempted to leap over 13 cars, having already realised that two pick-up trucks was old news. He came up short and ploughed into a van parked at the end of the line of cars. Apart from being knocked unconscious, Knievel broke his left arm and several ribs – again. He was in bad shape and wouldn’t be up to working again for at least five months. And when Evel wasn’t working his show had lost its main attraction; gigs had to be cancelled and all of a sudden the other riders weren’t getting paid. While some performances went ahead, such as the one at Montana’s Great Falls Speedway on 21 August where Evel acted as host but could not perform, others were cancelled and Knievel’s co-riders began seeking out more consistent forms of employment. They simply couldn’t afford to hang around for months waiting for Evel to recover from injury. During those months of recuperation it must have appeared to Evel that his new career was over before it had really got started. It seemed that everything he turned his hand to would be doomed to failure.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, the disbanding of the Daredevils proved to be the best thing that could have happened as far as Evel was concerned. He had never been a team player and, since he was the main attraction anyway, he began to realise he could now perform on his own and keep all the money to himself. The shows would have to be shorter and more spectacular, even more risky, in order to keep audiences’ attention, but Evel Knievel the solo artist had finally arrived.

Wasting no time, Knievel started calling up racetrack promoters touting for gigs. He’d ask them what size crowd they usually drew then boldly promise he’d double it for them. The promoter would profit from sales of popcorn, peanuts, beer and car-parking, as well as half the gate money, while Knievel would settle for the other half of the gate money. He invariably instructed the promoters to ‘jack up your tickets by a buck or two’, and so, with minimal outlay and a percentage of the gates guaranteed, Evel Knievel hit the road.

Being a solo artist may have entailed a lot more work for Knievel but he didn’t seem to mind: it was, after all, in his own interest. So as well as performing he built all his own ramps, promoted and emceed his shows, and drove all over the western United States to whichever venue would have him.

Evel Knievel’s first-ever solo performance took place at the Naranche Memorial Drag Strip near his hometown of Butte on 30 October 1966. Undeterred by his failure to clear 13 cars in Missoula, Knievel attempted, and cleared, 14 cars on his solo debut. To the crowd present it seemed an impossible number and, given his previous failure, many were expecting blood. Knievel may have denied the more ghoulish members of the audience their kicks but he thrilled the rest of his home crowd with a feat they thought impossible. Montana had a new home-grown hero.