Of course, Evel Knievel did not always crash. He sailed over 19 side-by-side cars in Ontario, California, and a pile of 52 wrecked motors at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In Canada in 1974 he cleared 13 Mack trucks, and in Kings Island, Ohio, in 1975 he soared over 14 Greyhound buses. Statistically, most of his 300-odd jumps were successes. But he was famous for the number of times he miscalculated the distance, or his speed, or mistimed things, thereby meeting the asphalt with more than enough force to kill himself.[/qoute]
He laughs at the face of death!
His two most-watched jumps were both disasters. In 1967 he smashed a hip, femur, wrist and both ankles attempting to clear the fountains at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas. Seven years later he almost drowned while failing to jump the Snake River Canyon, a quarter-of-a-mile wide, in Idaho. On that occasion he had strapped two rocket engines onto the sides of his Harley Davidson. Over his career, his 35 broken bones made the Guinness Book of Records; his body rattled with pins and plates, and it seemed preposterous that he should have died in his bed, of pulmonary fibrosis. Each catastrophe increased the likelihood that he would give up his weird stunts; but as soon as he could he would limp back and try again.
Talk about the guy who falls off the horse and gets back on.
Sheer heroism, his fans said. Heroism and American grit, born out of Butte, Montana, where men were men. But there was always something a bit fey about Mr Knievel, even in the 1970s, when long hair and tight crotches made every young man look like a member of a corps de ballet. In the black-clad Hells Angels world of motorbike racing, he sported white leathers inspired by Liberace and sprinkled with glittering stars; a short shoulder-cape, looking vaguely like a pair of wings; and a gold-topped cane. Mr Knievel didn't jump for America or for Jesus. He rode bikes, he said, because life was boring otherwise.
Because-
Ok, I admit it. As a kid of LOVED this shit.
Perhaps that typically spare remark was true. Certainly in Butte the best free fun you could have on your own was to make a bike do wild things over the mine-riddled hills. Or you could visit Joie Chitwood's Auto Daredevil Show when it came through, watching cars being spun round in the dust or driven on two wheels for half a mile. Later on Mr Knievel, working as a miner, tried to do similar stunt-stuff with an earth-mover; he cut through the power supply and blacked out the town. And in 1965, selling motorbikes for a spell in Moses Lake, Washington, business became a lot more interesting when, fired up with a Wild Turkey or two, he did tricks to draw in the customers: jumping a car, then a car and a 20-foot box of rattlesnakes, then two cars, rattlers and a mountain lion, until a crowd came to watch him.
The guy jumps over rattlesnakes and lions because otherwise he's be bored.
You know that great scene in the Great Escape where Steve McQueen jumps over the barbed wire? That was nothing.
Below- you can see him jumping the buses.
Closer-
@Suaside- Yes, its irrational, but its freakin cool.
Into a haystack
There was money there somewhere. And regular money was something Mr Knievel found hard to get. He had tried newspaper-selling, hubcap-stealing and burglary. (The name “Evil”, later softened by a different spelling, had been bestowed on him by the Butte police.) He had been—so he said—a card-sharp and a safe-cracker, had sold insurance and had run a hockey team, the Butte Bombers, before apparently absconding with the money from their biggest game. A detour into hunt-guiding ended when he was found to be taking his clients to shoot elk in Yellowstone National Park. But now, it seemed, people would pay $500 just to see him jump bikes over cars. They would pay even if he failed; in fact, they would part with more. Determinedly, he set out to sell himself as a daredevil rider.
By 1968 he was earning $25,000 per jump. Some events pulled in extraordinary money: $1m for crashing over 13 single-deckers in London, $6m for the Snake River plunge. Mr Knievel bought a fleet of yachts and bragged—though he had been married for years to his childhood sweetheart—of many women. He said he made $60m, but gambled prodigally. The liquor flowed, and the bones kept breaking.
It was all bound to end in tears, bankruptcy, divorce and the serious battery of his press officer with an aluminium baseball bat. But it lasted as long as it did, until 1981, because Mr Knievel's true talent was to spin crazy dreams. He might jump 13 cars today, but tomorrow he would jump 20. He might clear the Snake River now, but his real aim was to leap the Grand Canyon. And after that he would jump 40,000 feet from a plane, without a parachute, and land in a haystack; just pick the haystack.
It was all hokum, but the public loved the dare. So too did the toymakers, earning $350m from the selling of Evel Knievel figures who, on their little bikes, would crash through simulated rings of fire and 16-piece brick walls. And so too did a huge number of the small boys of the world, for whom mounds and ponds and ramps and planks now became the springboard to wild, free flight—or, just as probably, though they wouldn't much care, a mudbath and a broken arm.
And who doesn't remember jumping bricks with their bike when they were kids?
Why- because Knieval jumps cars, buses, canyons and once even
sharks.
The dude was awesome-
