Life of Evel: Evel Knievel

by Stuart Barker

  The drive, desire and determination required to put oneself in great physical danger so soon after recovering from serious injury is not an easy thing to understand for most people but it is undoubtedly the key to Knievel’s success. While he could (and has been) criticised for many things, no one can ever doubt the courage he displayed every time he mounted a motorcycle and sped down a ramp. He may have been partly, or even largely, motivated by money, but that does not detract from his courage. Most people would not attempt a 140-foot leap on a motorcycle for any amount of money if they could expect to be in a coma or suffering from multiple fractures just seconds afterwards. Knievel himself insists he always went through with his jumps for no other reason than to keep his word. ‘I was on a schedule and I had an obligation to meet as a performer to the public and the promoter of the jump. I made a commitment and always kept my word. Hell, what was I supposed to do – give them their money back?’

  Once a deal had been made it was perhaps understandable that Knievel would want to honour his commitment, but that doesn’t explain why he never retired after one of his big crashes when he had already proved his honour by going ahead with the jump. The grim reality is that he had been given a taste of fame and fortune and he wanted more. As he said, ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor – rich is a lot better.’ The only way he could maintain those riches was to jump. It was all he could do. And the thought of slipping back into obscurity and poverty scared Knievel much more than broken bones ever did. It was a simple trade-off: Evel Knievel was quite happy to take the pain of repeatedly smashing his body up if his public were willing to pay to see him do it. Seldom have the sacrifices required in the pursuit of fame and fortune been so simply yet graphically illustrated than in the case of Evel Knievel.

  For his own part, Knievel attempted to answer the question of why he continued risking his life in a self-penned poem simply called ‘Why?’, which he first read out on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and which formed part of his spoken-word LP Evel Knievel, which was released on the Amherst label in 1974. The poem finishes with the words:

  For you, what I do is not right –

  But for me, it’s not wrong.

  What I have been trying to tell you all along is that it’s got to be.

  You ask why?

  Well, just like you, I’ve gotta be me.

  But sometimes even the great physical sacrifices Knievel made were not enough. His public were by now taking his ability to withstand pain for granted and felt cheated if he had to miss a show due to injury. To give Knievel full credit it must be stated that if there was even the slightest chance of being able to make a jump no matter how badly hurt he was, then he would try it. Unlike pampered football players who roll around in feigned agony after a mere tap on the shin, Knievel never used his injuries as an excuse; and, in any case, if he didn’t jump he didn’t get paid and that would have hurt Knievel’s sensibilities even more.

  At the Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta on 11 June 1972, Knievel’s audience shamed themselves. Having crashed during a rare practice jump the night before he was scheduled to appear in public, Evel suffered a broken lumbar vertebra and extensively damaged both hands. He was taken to hospital and told to rest as damaging his back further could cause paralysis. Knowing he was due to perform the following evening, anxious doctors had Knievel sign papers swearing to stay in hospital, but Evel told his friends to sneak him out the following day and take him back to the Lakewood Speedway in time for the show. Knievel’s friend, Joe Delaney, explained, ‘The motorcycle crowd back in those days was, I mean, a rough crowd. So we roll him [Knievel] out of the ambulance…Well, they think he’s a chicken. They think he’s scared to jump. They start hootin’ and hollerin’ at him, booin’.

  There’s about 5,000 people there. So he got pissed off and called for his motorcycle. He did a wheelie in front of the grandstand at 80 or 90 miles per hour with a broken back – standing up! I mean, crazy. You could see tears in his eyes. We put him back in the ambulance and took off. But that saved the promoter. And that told me the sonovabitch Knievel ain’t got no sense.’

  Knievel had become a victim of his own success. Having defied doctors so many times and having come back from so many horrific injuries, his public now thought of him as nothing less than a real-life superhero, immune to pain and the shortcomings of the fragile human body. Every jump he made had to be bigger and further to keep his audience amused, and he was expected to jump no matter what kind of pain he was in, because he was Evel Knievel and Evel Knievel didn’t care about pain. In essence, he had set himself an impossible task, and even he was aware of the ghoulish element growing in his audiences. Early in his career, Evel believed his spectators were all rooting for him. He once said, ‘These people are my friends. They don’t want to see me miss a jump, they want to see me make it.’ That sentiment changed as Knievel began to realise that at least some of his audience were not so supportive and he modified his earlier statement. ‘I feel that five per cent of the people want me to die, 45 per cent want me to make it, but want to be there in case I don’t, and 50 per cent are behind me all the way.’

  Just one week after his crash in Atlanta, Evel set out for Oklahoma City to defy the pain and danger again, this time wearing a back brace to help him jump five cars and two vans before clearing ten cars the week after that in Illinois. He may have set himself near-impossible standards but he was determined to keep meeting them or die trying.

  6

  Sins of the Flesh

  ‘I didn’t sleep with seven women in 24 hours for a bet – I slept with eight.’

  ‘Women wanted me for my fame or my looks, or because of the danger thing, but mostly they just wanted to do it. I just had a sexual appetite for many women and I couldn’t help it. I mean, you don’t think when you’re born that you’re gonna be oversexed or that you’re gonna have many women or that you’re gonna be gay. You just don’t do that. You are what you are.’

  Evel Knievel claims to have slept with over 2,000 women, even though he was married for 38 years of that time. Born with rugged good looks and a flair for self-promotion, Knievel already had the makings of a serial seducer before he became famous, but the fame and fortune he found through jumping motorcycles cemented his status as a womaniser with few peers.

  Knievel fulfilled his need for women at every given opportunity – and there were plenty of them – even though he knew word would often get back to his long-suffering wife, many times through pictures and stories published in newspapers. Despite the fact that he also had three children to think about, Evel had his own bizarre way of justifying his infidelity to himself and anyone else who would listen. ‘I think if a guy’s married and he has a little sex with another woman he can kinda compare her with his wife, and I’ve done that…and I still got the same wife. That means she’s pretty goddamn good.’

  But Evel’s liberal attitude to marriage did not work both ways. Asked how he would feel if Linda had an extra-marital affair, he said, ‘I wouldn’t like it. I think if a man is a good-enough man, his wife wouldn’t want to do that.’

  Everywhere Knievel went he was hounded by women, and the stories which sprang up about his sex life have become the stuff of legend. Perhaps the most famous is Knievel’s claim to have slept with eight women over a 24-hour period in Puerto Rico for a $1,000 bet. The legend has it that he got his thousand bucks.

  At the height of his fame, Evel said he was forced to hire bodyguards just to keep over-keen women at bay. ‘I was very promiscuous in those days. Hell, I had to hire guards to stand outside my hotel room just to keep women away. I mean, everywhere I went I had to hire guards to fend them off. I even had two women fighting over me in a bar once, pulling each other’s hair and everything. I thought it was funny as hell so I ordered a beer and just watched them. I took the winner to my room but I had to kick her out because she scratched my back too much – and that’s not easy to explain to your wife.’

  Knievel was such
an icon to men and women alike in the 1970s that some men, quite incredibly, would send their wives or girlfriends to sleep with Evel just to be able to say they had done it. And the sexual daredevil was powerless to help himself, believing as he did that ‘If God made anything more beautiful than a woman, He kept it to himself.’

  That compliment to the fairer sex did not, however, extend to what Knievel saw as the scourge of Seventies society – women’s liberation groups. He positively hated them, representing as they did everything Knievel thought a woman should not be. The Butte that Knievel was brought up in had been a man’s town, somewhat lacking in any form of feminist movement and a place where women were the homemakers (or prostitutes) and men were the breadwinners. Knievel’s views seem terribly sexist in today’s liberal climate but he was very much a man of his time – and place – when it came to his outlook on feminist groups. ‘I treat women the way I always did, except I treat the women’s libbers different: if I catch one, I try and screw her a little harder. A woman’s place is in the bedroom and in the kitchen and taking care of her kids. I think the ones making all the noise are the ones who’ve had problems with men.’

  Even in the late 1990s Evel still felt a deep dislike for feminists and could be easily encouraged into a verbal tirade against them. ‘Women’s lib groups are a pain in the ass. I just don’t like ’em. Most of them are gay and they’re ugly. They look like truck drivers – like tacklers in a football team.’

  Presumably the six erotic dancers (three for the afternoon and three for the evening) once supplied by the owners of a strip club for Knievel’s pleasure did not count themselves part of the feminist movement; nor did the six ladies dressed only in red, white and blue Harley-Davidson T-shirts who were strategically positioned on the bed in Evel’s boat on one occasion when he entered his cabin. Nor were the strings of nurses he says he conquered during his three years in hospital. ‘I was pleasured by nurses more than once,’ he confessed. ‘We would get real friendly and one thing would lead to another, especially with the ones who gave me a bath.’

  Perhaps such easy access to women affected his attitude towards them; an attitude which at times could border on paranoia. ‘You know, women are the root of all evil, and I know – I am Evel. Look at Adam and Eve; it wasn’t Adam who picked up the apple, was it? Genghis Khan – brought down by a woman. That ain’t going to happen to me.’

  Evel claims his sexual appetite eventually became so uncontrollable that he had to seek professional help, and while consulting a therapist he took time out to massage his own ego by asking why women found him so attractive. ‘It got to be a real problem. I had to see a psychiatrist. I asked him why it was that women kept throwing themselves at me and he explained it like this. He said, “Look, to start with you are not a bad-looking guy. Secondly, your identity is danger; women, their chemistry, are attracted to danger. Then, you are Evel by name but not by nature, so you won’t harm them. Women unhappy at home looking for an affair are just drawn to you like a magnet. You stick out like a sore thumb.” I guess he was right; I’m not bragging, it was true.’

  While Knievel was happy to boast that he’d slept with more than 2,000 women, he took great offence at anyone who claimed to have bettered his tally. When a reporter reminded him that Harlem Globetrotter basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have slept with 20,000 women, Evel snarled, ‘Use the mathematics. How do you get to 20,000? He’s full of shit. He’s a liar. Wilt Chamberlain is a fucking liar.’

  Through all his womanising, Evel’s wife Linda remained loyal and continued to bring up their children back home in Butte, however humiliated she must have felt about her husband’s infidelities. Although Linda made a habit of shying away from any media attention, she did occasionally explain her feelings about her relationship with Evel. ‘I used to be bitter and resentful…I always had a smile on my face, but inside I was really hurting so I came to a low point in my life. I had not a good self-image of myself – I felt like I couldn’t do anything right. I used to pray “Oh God, please change my husband”, and He says, “No, Linda, you change.’”

  For his part, Evel always sang Linda’s praises in public, making it more difficult to understand why he continued to humiliate her with his actions. ‘I was always very proud to enter any place with my wife on my arm,’ he would say. ‘I always thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.’ Yet clearly she was not beautiful enough to command his loyalty.

  Knievel also loved to boast about how domesticated Linda was and how well she looked after him and would often come out with comments like, ‘She says she has only one job in life – to serve me.’ Today, such a comment would produce guffaws of laughter – not to mention outrage in our climate of sexual equality – but Evel’s attitude was quite typical of the time, a fact which he himself realises. Looking back on his infidelities and chauvinistic attitude, he shows no remorse, only admitting that ‘That’s the way it was back then. What’s done is done.’

  Sadly for Linda, she had more to worry about than her errant husband as 1972 drew to a close. Having done all within his powers to stop her marrying Knievel, Linda’s father, John Bork, had grudgingly grown to like the daredevil to the point where the pair enjoyed hunting and fishing trips whenever Evel’s hectic schedule permitted. It was on such a trip in Montana on 18 November that tragedy struck. Evel had taken Kelly and Robbie along with the 63-year-old Bork to the Madison River in Ennis, Montana to hunt duck. As the water turned rough, Bork instructed Knievel to head for shore, but before they could make it the raging river capsized their boat, spilling the party into the water. While Knievel desperately held on to his youngest son Robbie, Bork bravely managed to haul Kelly to safety but was then immediately carried away by the raging river and drowned. ‘It’s the most helpless feeling in the world,’ Knievel later confessed, ‘to see somebody that you love floating away from you in the river and there’s nothing you can do.’

  Bork’s drowning must have been particularly heartbreaking for Knievel. Here was a man prepared to risk his own life on so many occasions, but in this instance nature took over and there was simply nothing he could do but watch helplessly and save his own sons. It is safe to assume that Knievel would not have thought twice about risking life and limb to save his father-in-law but that would have meant putting his sons at too great a risk. It must have been an agonising situation and one that played on his mind for many years to come. With Evel also having lost the grandfather who raised him earlier in the year, there were no celebrations in the Knievel household that Christmas.

  Prior to the boating tragedy, Knievel had enjoyed a particularly successful run in the latter half of 1972. His last jump of the year was an attempt to break his own outright record by clearing 22 cars. While a lack of speed forced him to land on the safety deck on top of the last car, the 21 vehicles that he did manage to clear was to be the most he ever would – at least with the cars being placed end-to-end. For his first big jump of 1973, Evel announced he was going to leap over 50 cars at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, but there was a catch – the cars would be crushed together two- and three-high and not laid out in a consecutive line, so the total distance equated to no more than that of about 18 cars placed end-to-end.

  More than 23,000 people turned out to witness the event after Knievel spent a good deal of time in Los Angeles promoting his jump on television and radio. While there he had also agreed to help promote the wearing of crash helmets by filming a short piece with Easy Rider star Peter Fonda, which featured the two men riding around road cones in the Coliseum. Evel was not, however, overly concerned with his own safety if reports of him speeding down the Hollywood Freeway at well over 100mph were to be believed. But to his credit, Knievel was always willing to help promote the ‘ride safe’ message, for the benefit of both kids on push-bikes and older fans on their motorcycles.

  What proved to be more dramatic than the distance covered at the Coliseum were the ramps Knievel employed to reach the necessar
y speed. As he had done at the Cow Palace, Evel built a huge 200-foot ski-jump-style ramp down from the uppermost reaches of the stadium’s seating area, but unlike the set-up at the Palace he also employed another ski ramp at the other end of the stadium to allow him to slow down – or at least that was the plan. In the event, Knievel was travelling so fast that, despite deploying his drogue parachute from the rear of the bike on landing, he flew right up the landing ramp and over the top of it, effectively making a second jump before coming to rest against a barrier, unhurt.

  For anyone who has ever ridden a motorcycle, the prospect of riding one up or down either of those narrow ramps would be terrifying enough, not to mention doing so at the speeds required to make the jump successfully. Riding up it in the rain would be an even more daunting task and it was one that caught Knievel out too. While testing the ramp before his big jump, Evel’s bike slipped near the top before his helpers ‘Big Bob’ and Mike Draper could catch the handlebars. Evel and his Harley toppled backwards over five rows of seats, and when he came to rest Knievel found he had broken a finger. He remained undaunted as usual and the show went ahead as planned.

  Overall, the jump was a runaway success and, somewhat amazingly, 1973 remained almost injury-free with Knievel’s only real damage being a fractured hand, bruised back and bruised kidneys, which were all sustained in a crash at the Wisconsin International Raceway in Kaukauna on 7 October. He successfully cleared all of his other jumps in some 14 events during the year.