October 17 - Evel Knievel

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On this day, in 1938, Robert “Evel” Knievel was born in Butte, Montana. Robert’s parents divorced before he was even two years old and both of them moved out of Butte, leaving Robert and his new brother, Nicolas, with his paternal grandparents. He liked to say that his later choice of career was due to those grandparents bringing him to a Joie Chitwood Thrill Show when he was eight, but he had a rebellious, daredevil streak in him from the beginning. He dropped out of high school halfway through to get a job in the nearby copper mines. He was fired from that job after he popped a wheelie with one of the mine’s earth movers and severed the city’s main power line. His unemployment status only exacerbated his recklessness. He crashed his motorcycle after a highspeed police chase in 1956 and ended up in jail on charges of reckless driving. It was then that he gained the nickname Evel. In the next cell over that night was another chronic troublemaker who already had a nickname, William “Awful” Knofel. The police started calling him “Evil” Knievel by association. Robert leaned into the name but deliberately changed the spelling because he didn’t want people to think he was the bad guy, something that would have an ironic bent to it for at least the next several years.

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Following his stint in jail, Evel began channeling his need for thrills into more productive areas. He began participating in rodeos and ski jumping competitions, going so far as to win the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men’s championship in 1959. He then joined the army and learned to pole vault. After his discharge, he got married and started a semi-pro hockey team called the Butte Bombers. To promote the team, Evel convinced the Czechoslovakian Olympic team to play an exhibition game against them just prior to the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. Evel was ejected from the game in the third quarter and left the stadium. When the game finished, the Czechs went to the box office to collect their share of the proceeds only to discover that all the money had disappeared. It couldn’t be proven what had happened to it and the US Olympic Committee ended up covering the expenses to avoid international embarrassment. Since his hockey dreams obviously weren’t playing out, Evel then started the Sur-Kill Guide Service, guaranteeing hunters that they would bag their big game or their money back. His business was highly successful, but only because he was poaching animals from Yellowstone National Park.

Evel decided that he needed to stop committing crimes after his latest run in with the law and began racing on the motocross circuit. He did reasonably well but couldn’t make enough money to support his family. After breaking his collarbone and shoulder in an accident, he did what anyone addicted to reckless behavior would do: he began selling insurance. He was good at it but didn’t feel like the company was willing to promote him fast enough, so he quit. The Kneivels moved to Washington and opened a Honda dealership. At a time when Japanese imports just couldn’t compete in the market. The business folded and Evel began working at a motorcycle shop in Sunnyside. It was there that the owner’s son, future World Motocross Champion Jim Pomeroy, taught him how to do stunts on a bike. You can guess where Evel’s plans went after that.

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Remembering the stunt show he saw as a child, Evel thought that could be his ticket to prosperity. Singlehandedly putting together his first gig, he jumped a 20 foot long box of snakes (with two mountain lions thrown in for good measure). He barely made it over the snakes with his back wheel hitting the far edge of the box, but he survived the stunt, a statement that would basically describe everything he did for the rest of his career. He also realized that the only way to make good money was to hire a crew to do all the planning and publicity so he could concentrate on the stunt. He found a sponsor, put together a group of mostly reliable people and got ready to take the stunt entertainment world by storm.

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Evil Knievel and His Motorcycle Daredevils debuted on January 3, 1966 in Indio, California and was an instant hit. The second show in Hemet was rained out but the third in Barstow was a go. Right up to when Evel jumped too late during a new stunt, was hit in the groin by a speeding motorcycle and flipped fifteen feet in the air. His injuries landed him in the hospital and broke up the group but they did not stop him from performing (or continuing to injure himself). While other stunt performers were jumping over water or animals, Evel began jumping over cars. And he would add more cars to the line each time he revisited a venue in order to get people to come back out and see him. Eventually his misses became even more legendary than his successes, most likely because he kept surviving incredible crashes. Evel finally gained some national attention when Joey Bishop had him as a guest on The Joey Bishop Show in March 1968. That appearance led to more fans and bigger paychecks for each stunt.

 

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With an eye towards publicity, Evel was willing to jump just about anything with a motorcycle. He attempted jumping the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas (a crash that landed him in the hospital for several weeks). He planned to jump the Grand Canyon but was denied access by the federal government so switched to jumping the Snake River in Idaho using private properties (his rocket, it wasn't a motorcycle this time, technically made it across that canyon but was blown back in by the wind; Evel only sustained minor injuries in spite of being strapped to a lead weight that hit the bottom of the gorge). In 1971 he set a world record that stood for 27 years by jumping 19 cars. He set another record that stood for 35 years when he jumped 50 stacked cars in November 1973. A third record was made in October 1975 when he jumped 14 buses at King’s Island Amusement Park. That record stood for 24 years and was one of the highest rated episodes of ABC’s Wide World of Sports ever.

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The King’s Island jump was also Evel’s final major jump. He planned to jump a tank of live sharks in 1977 (a stunt that may or may not have inspired Arthur Fonzerelli later that same year) but called it off when a crash during rehearsal injured a cameraman.  For the last few years of his career, he was content to play announcer while his son, Robbie, launched his own career in the family business. Of course his retirement may have had something to do with his assault conviction as well. A former promoter of his was publishing an unflattering book about him, accusing him, among other things, of being a batterer. Evel, his arms still in casts from the shark accident, tracked the man down at the movie studio he was currently working at and beat him unconscious with a baseball bat. The subsequent lawsuit and jail time caused Evel to rightly lose every endorsement deal he’d worked so hard for so long to obtain. With no one willing to partner with him anymore, he was bankrupt by 1981.

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It’s hard to say how much Evel learned from suffering the consequences of his bad behavior. He remained largely unapologetic about his actions for the majority of his life even as his health declined throughout the Nineties. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, most likely contracted from one of the dozens of blood transfusions he’d received during his career. A last minute liver transplant in 1999 saved his immediate life but it was already too late for the long term. He would be diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease, a few years later and that, along with diabetes, is what would ultimately end his life. In April of 2007, Evel appeared on Hour of Power with televangelist Robert Schuller to announce his newfound belief in Jesus Christ. Whether that signaled an actual change in his life or was just a man hedging his bets against imminent death, we’ll never really know. Just over six months later, Evel would pass away on November 30, 2007 in Clearwater, Florida at the age of 69.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Jack Wagner