Campaign 2008

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obit: Bringing out the dead.

Evel KnievelThe daredevil who jumped and bragged his way to stardom.

By Steve Mandich
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007, at 4:01 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

My Evel-mania peaked in 1976, when my dad took me to see him jump at the Seattle Kingdome. After Snake River, he had rebroken his pelvis trying to jump 13 buses at London's Wembley Stadium. In Seattle, he would jump only seven Greyhounds, having stated that he would no longer push himself to set new records. Public interest had abruptly cooled—the 64,000-seat Kingdome was maybe a quarter full. The jump itself was tame by Knievel standards, but I was thrilled. It was perhaps the greatest moment of my young life.

Three months later, my parents let me stay up late to watch Evel's final nationally televised performance, a live prime-time special from Chicago in which the star was scheduled to jump a shark-infested pool. Unfortunately, during an unscheduled practice jump that afternoon, he skidded off the landing ramp and crashed into a cameraman. Evel broke a collarbone and an arm, and claimed the cameraman lost an eye. (Not so. In researching my book, I found the guy had suffered only minor injuries.) At the end of the broadcast, when it came time for Evel's big jump, the program cut away to taped footage of his crash, and I went to bed in tears. Star Wars soon replaced Evel as my chief obsession, and my Knievel toys wound up at the local St. Vincent de Paul. Like the rest of America, I forgot about Evel Knievel and moved on.

Years later, in my 20s, I started up my own pop-culture fanzine, in which I reflected on my earlier adoration of Evel and re-examined him with an adult perspective. The project later evolved into a full-blown biography, and now an ongoing fan site. Along the way, I found that the superhero of my youth—the patriotic role model, the clean-and-sober family man—had a sordid side. He served time for beating up his press agent with a baseball bat. He was a raging alcoholic. He was an unrepentant philanderer. He was estranged from his wife and kids. He gambled heavily and evaded taxes. He was a con artist and a thief. He peddled paintings that he signed as his own creations, though they were actually frauds. He was arrested on suspicion of beating up his girlfriend, whom he later married.

As a kid, I was fascinated by Evel's stunts. As an adult, I've been fascinated by his attempts to court and prolong fame. At the height of his daredevilry, Knievel promoted himself to make his name grow and to make more money. As the crowds began to thin, he told tall tales to make the spotlight stay a little longer. As he began to fade in his last years, he continued to brag, embellish, and perpetuate myths about himself and his accomplishments—the distances he jumped, the number of bones he broke, the women he bedded, the heaps of money he made, his countless celebrity friends.

Evel's relentless self-promotion worked: He will be remembered for as long as prepubescent boys think it's cool to jump over stuff on a bike. I think, though, he would've preferred to make a flashier exit—a flaming wreck in front of a Vegas casino or a mushroom cloud at the bottom of a canyon. But Evel's end was more mundane. After suffering countless injuries during his career, wounds he sustained thanks to an unending compulsion to impress, he died at his home, of lung disease.