Death finally caught up with Evel Knievel

Death of a Daredevil: Evel Knievel, RIP
by Joal Ryan


In a decade largely absent of heroes, Evel Knievel was a real-life superhero.

Knievel, the caped 1970s showman who, thanks to a trusty chopper and sheer abandon, jumped land and water masses with a single bound (and sometimes a few bounces), and landed among the Watergate era's pop-culture elite, died Friday.

Knievel was 69—not ancient, but not bad for a man who bragged about making the Guinness Book of World Records on the strength, as it were, of 35 broken bones.

"Every time I make a jump, I thank God when it comes down, no matter how far I went," Knievel told ABC Sports in 1973.

From his roots as a high-school ski jumper in his native Montana to his rise on Wide World of Sports, the premiere TV sports showcase of its day, Robert Craig Knievel went a very long way.

If one could judge the folk heroes of the 1970s by walking a toy aisle, one would conclude that Knievel ranked among the giants: Muhammad Ali, the Six Million Dollar Man and Fonzie.

So big was the Knievel toy line—by the daredevil's own estimate it sold more than $300 million worth of action figures, model kits, Super Jet Cycles, and more—that the New York Times once reported its namesake superstar reputedly made as much money from its royalties as he did from his motorcycle stunts.

And, rest assured, Knievel made a lot of money from his motorcycle stunts: $1 million to clear 13 double-decker buses at London's Wembley Stadium in 1975; $6 million to rocket across Idaho's Snake River Canyon in a self-styled "Skycycle."

Knievel didn't always land cleanly—in London, he broke his pelvis; at Snake River Canyon, he was victimized by premature parachute ejaculation. Truth was, landing cleanly wasn't the point. The spectacle was.

Clad in a white-spangled jumpsuit, Knievel would enter an arena with a cape and walking stick. When the Rocky routine was over, the superhero donned his cowl—a matching white-spangled helmet—and went up, up and away. The show was so good that, according to Knievel's official biography, a 1975 leap over 14 buses at Ohio's Kings Island amusement park captivated more than half of all TV viewers that day.

The ride began on New Year's Day 1968 when Knievel, three years into his career as a professional death-defier, came into prominence by jumping the fountains at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas—and landing in a coma for 30 days.

By 1974, his Montana-man-made-good story was fodder for a Hollywood movie, Evel Knievel, starring George Hamilton. (CSI's George Eads starred in a 2004 TV-movie version with the same name.)

Since nobody could really be Knievel but Knievel, he played a fictionalized version of himself in the action movie, Viva Knievel!