Make It or Break It
Right now it is difficult to gain a perspective. Horses and beef cattle graze vacantly among the thistles, looking up occasionally with that innocent hauteur of the ungulate to stare at the heavy trucks rumbling back and forth from the jump site. A red-tailed hawk turns lazily over the potato fields in the middle distance. Butterflies bounce on the hot, dry breeze—swallowtails and sulphurs and big bright monarchs. A mounted cowboy trots past, fat and bespectacled under his Stetson, with a shovel lashed to his saddle instead of the traditional rifle. The workmen on the ramp sweat and curse with the easy fluency of carnival roustabouts, and indeed there is a carny air to the whole proceeding. Even the rocket—the Sky-Cycle X-2, as it is styled in the promotional literature—looks like a kiddy ride at an amusement park. It seems tinny and tiny, but perhaps we have been conditioned to gigantism by too many moonshots. After all, this is only a canyon shot.
Staring down from the lip of the Snake River Canyon into the boiling green water below, one suddenly grasps the enormity of the whole operation—the absurdity, the arrogance, the awful, febrile, frightening, heroic lunacy of it. Very soon now he is actually going to climb into that thing and they are going to shoot him out over this great gash in the earth, and he is either going to live or he is going to die.
There will be some 50,000 people right here watching him do it, and millions more watching on hundreds of closed-circuit television screens. They will stare with about the same comprehension as those cows and horses watching the trucks go by. The hoopla artists from tee-vee will be babbling throatily about valor and danger and the six million bucks he has already pocketed—the usual dry-cleaned obscenities of this age of excess—and for a long, loud moment our hearts will seize up and we will watch the high, arching trajectory, the trail of steam and chutzpah, and wish that we could close our eyes.
"I've created a monster," says Evel Knievel, "and I don't know how to control it."
Well, if he doesn't, there are plenty of smart-money guys who do.
The whole notion of a canyon jump came to Robert Craig Knievel more than eight years ago. He had already invented the unlikely art of motorcycle jumping, leaping a bike across ever-widening rows of cars and trucks parked side by side between two ramps, an act accompanied by an ever-growing cacophony of applause and snapping bones. (Today, with more than 300 jumps under his pegs, he has crashed 11 times to the tune of 50 separate fractures, by his count—statistics that become more painfully credible when you watch his walk: the crabbed, hip-stiff hobble of a land-mine victim.) Along the way, nurturing a talent for showmanship unequaled in the realm of American folk art since the days of Barnum and Buffalo Bill, he wrapped himself, as they say, in legend. Here he comes—onetime hubcap thief and bank robber, a hard-drinking, heartbreaking bar fighter, Montana mountain man, big spender, friend to the poor and downtrodden, Jesse James on two wheels; says the first thing that comes to his haid and it's always right, takes no guff off no one; star-spangled leathers, kidnapped his wife in order to marry her, to hell with the fat cats, $1,000-a-hole golf bets, blows $5,000 on free drinks for everyone in New Orleens, don't give a dang what you say so long as you spell my name right—that's Evel, with two e's.
In 20 minutes, it is said, Evel Knievel can tell enough anecdotes about his early life to keep a reporter busy for 20 years just checking them out.
But fame, the real fame that transcends fact and generates fantasy in entire populations, does not accrue merely by means of broken bones and baloney. Real fame, which includes real wealth but eventually leaps beyond it, requires a darker component. It requires blood. It requires death. Suicide or murder. A bullet in the back fixed Jesse James forever in our consciousness; Frank James died old and remains a footnote. General George Armstrong Custer with his boots on, JohnDillinger with his Lady in Red, Hemingway with his shotgun, Mama Cass with her ham sandwich—like that.
And Evel with his canyon.
The trick is to combine the awesome grotesquerie of death with the attention of millions, and if possible to tuck in a little grace along the way. Thoughts of that sort must have lain latent in the alcohol-clouded brain of Evel Knievel as he sat drinking one evening in 1966 at Moose's Place, a saloon in Kalispell, Mont. Evel was drinking the notorious Montana Mary, a sneaky concoction of beer and tomato juice favored by the vitamin-conscious miners, cowpokes and sod-busters of those climes. Unlike its vodka-based cousin, the Bloody Mary, the Montana variant works slowly but insidiously on the imagination of the imbiber, aided in its devilish work by the high altitude that normally accompanies its consumption. Some time that evening between boasts and belches, Evel's attention was caught by a calendar on the wall. It depicted the Grand Canyon.
"The more I studied on it, and the more Montana Marys I put back, the narrower that durned hole in the ground seemed to get," Evel recalls. "People talk about the Generation Gap and the Missile Gap and the Education Gap, but I suddenly saw that the real gap was right out there in the heart of the Golden West. And I knew I could bridge the bastard."
It was then and there that the monster was born.
Later, when theU.S. Department of Interior denied him airspace over the Grand Canyon—on the grounds, apparently, that national parks are not meant for the suicidal self-aggrandizement of the citizenry—Evel shifted his sights to Idaho's Snake River Canyon. It is not the same thing, of course, either symbolically or in terms of size. Where the Grand Canyon measures from four to 18 miles from rim to rim, and up to 5,700 feet in depth, the Snake River Canyon, at the point where Evel will jump, is less than a mile wide and 600 feet from the crumbling lava of its lip to the turbulent water below. Nonetheless, it's a long way over and a long way down—potentially fatal distances any way you look at them.
The plan, as it first exploded in Evel's fecund imagination, was-to jump with a real motorcycle to which some form of additional propulsion would be attached, maybe JATO bottles, maybe a steam-powered booster rocket. Evel imagined himself roaring up a long approach road toward a ramp much like the ones he uses in his automobile and truck leaps. Millions would line the road, their cheers drowned out by the bellow of the big hawg. At the last moment the booster would ignite, kicking Evel and bike into a long, high trajectory. On the far side, if he could hold it, he would touch down on a landing ramp.
It didn't take long to realize the impossibility of that dream. It would have to be a modified rocket shot if it was to work at all. "I started hunting for a rocket guy," Evel says, "the best one that money could buy. Finally JimLovell, the astronaut, told me about a fellow named Robert C. Truax who was one of the founders of Nassau "—that's NASA to non-Montanans—" and who'd worked on the big space stuff right from the start. He was so excited by the idea that he dropped everything and came to work for me."
Truax had worked on a lot of the big space stuff, all right, but not for NASA as Knievel says; the engineer was once president of the American Rocket Society and conducted studies that led to the Polaris missile. In any event, Truax proved to be invaluable to the scheme: his down-to-earth aerospace sense perfectly counterpoints Evel's soaring imagination. A short, taciturn man of 56 with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, he has done his best to ensure that the safest possible vehicle would be built for the price Evel was willing to pay. Still, it might not be enough. Evel claims to have spent $1 million on the Sky-Cycle and the launch site, including $37,500 to lease the land surrounding the takeoff ramp and thus preclude any further governmental interference. For all that, one wonders if enough has been spent to ensure a successful jump.
If it has, then Bob Truax is in for a nice bonus. Evel carries a check for $100,000 made out in Truax' name. Significantly, it is dated Sept. 9—the day after the jump. "That way if I don't make it," Evel says, "Bob doesn't either. Heh, heh."
The way it now looks, Evel will take off from a standing start at the bottom of a 108-foot-long steel ramp angled at 56 degrees above the horizontal. The Sky-Cycle's steam jet, which should be "safer" because it uses nonvolatile fuel, will generate 5,000 pounds of thrust, enough to fling Evel at the speed of 400 mph to an apogee 2,000 feet above the takeoff point. During the liftoff he will pull in excess of five Gs—not enough to cause a blackout but maybe enough to give him a bloody nose and render him non compos for four seconds, according to Truax. He will not wear a G suit, not even one of the sort worn by test pilots as long ago as World War II. Instead he will don a special star-spangled red, white and blue knit jump suit complete with crash helmet. The cockpit itself is open and makes the Sky-Cycle seem more like a motorcycle, which it is not by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't even have a steering system, for that matter, though there is a sort of fixed handlebar for Knievel to cling to. This will be, plain and simple, a ballistic trip, with Evel along as the passenger.
To ensure that involuntary movements of the rider do not throw the vehicle out of whack and send it tumbling during its trajectory, and to keep him from being thrown forward, Evel will be strapped in with lap and shoulder harnesses. There is no ejection system in the craft; if Evel has to hit the silk, he will have to scramble out and over the side and unleash his parachute. "If he gets warning soon enough that the vehicle chute isn't working—and if he works fast enough—he can get out with the reserve chute," says Truax. At the low altitudes involved in the shot, such action calls for a lot of luck.
Toward the end of the trajectory, which is computed to cover 4,781 feet horizontally, Evel will pull a lever at the right front of the cockpit that will deploy a drag chute from the rear of the Sky-Cycle. That will drop the vehicle nose first into the sagebrush where shock absorbers will dampen the impact. (One envisions the Sky-Cycle bouncing across the desert at the end of the ride like some fat, finned and star-spangled pogo stick.)
On the face of it Evel is blasé about the dangers. "If the heater doesn't blow up and scald me to death on the launch ramp," he says, "if the countdown goes right, if the Sky-Cycle goes straight up and not backward, if it actually reaches 2,000 feet, if the chute works, if I don't hit the wall at 400 mph and if I can get out of it when it lands—I win. If it doesn't work, I'll spit the canyon wall in the eye just before I hit. Then again, I've got five backup systems.The fifth one is called the Lord's Prayer."
But that is the public Evel talking. In private he is less cocksure.
"Right now I don't think I've got better than a 50-50 chance of making it," he says."It's an awful feeling. I can't sleep nights. I toss and turn, and all I can see is that big ugly hole in the ground grinning up at me like a death's head. You know, I've always been concerned about kids—not just my own three but all kids—what kind of an image I'm providing for them, what kind of inspiration. I don't know now. Maybe I'm leading them down the path to self-destruction. Our house in Butte is surrounded day and night by people wanting to look at me, to take something as a souvenir. And that damn little Robbie of mine, the 11-year-old, you know what he has gone and done? He has got a big old sign out in front that says SEE EVEL JR. JUMP—25¢. It's not a good thing."
Imitation may be the greatest of compliments, but in Evel's case imitation can indeed lead to death or a wheelchair, as nearly a dozen would-be Knievels have already discovered over the past two or three years. One of the best imitators was formerly on Evel's staff. Robert (Wicked) Ward, age 26, of Buffalo and Atlanta, is a slim, grinning, long-haired daredevil who claims he recently cleared 19 cars in a bike jump at Palmetto, Ga., just two cars fewer than Evel's"world record." One of Wicked's wrists is still wrapped in an Ace bandage, and he speaks in a hoarse whisper, the result of a karate chop courtesy of his handlebars during a bad spill. Wicked nods sagely as Evel rambles on about the dangers, both social and personal, of the canyon jump, but the avidity in Wicked's eyes, the sparkling joy at the prospect of death, cannot be disguised. Not that Wicked would like to see his guru gone; it's just that the act itself—the great hubristic leap, the slap in the face of gravity—is too much.
Evel is sitting in the lounge of the Blue Lakes Inn on the outskirts of Twin Falls, Idaho, not three miles from the jump site. Well-wishers and autograph hounds surround him in an ever-changing ebb and flow. Twin Falls (pop. 22,700) is a smiling, open-faced town set in the midst of southern Idaho's temperate, potato-rich "Magic Valley." Its citizens don't quite know what to make of Evel. The boosters among them realize that the jump will not only "put us on the map" but generate an unprecedented one-shot windfall of tourist bucks when the teevee crews and other gawkers arrive. The loners among them resent the show-biz aura of the event, the impending, lemminglike descent of meat-faced strangers determined to be in on the kill.
"Fifty thousand people?" says a cocktail waitress, bringing Evel a fresh gin and tonic. "Heck, I ain't never seen more than a thousand in one place. It's scary."
"Fifty thousand, hell," snorts Evel, recovering from a mood of introspection. "That's just tickets at $25 a throw. They'll be a hunnerd thousand more just trickling around the edges. You'll need a helicopter or a quarter horse to get in and out of that jump site."
The size of the crowd suddenly raises the prospect of an added danger: Can the eroded lava of the canyon's rim stand the weight of such a vast, milling mass? What if the ledge just flakes off, precipitating Evel, Sky-Cycle, launch ramp and fans onto the boats and rocks and raging currents below? It would be a cataclysm worthy of Nathanael West, particularly since there will be a small circus, replete with daredevil acts, performing on the ledge below the jump site. The Crumbling of the Canyon....
"Not very likely," Evel sniffs. But then again, what has ever been very likely about anything Evel does?
A woman reporter takes advantage of a pause in the spiel to request an "in-depth interview." Evel stares at her as if a giant Idaho spud had suddenly started to talk.
"No in-depth interviews!" he roars, slamming the floor for emphasis with his $22,000, gold-and-diamond-headed walking stick full of vodka, gin, bourbon and Scotch. "And no tape recorders, neither! I know what you got in that big purse of yours, lady. You got a tape recorder in there! I don't want no one writing up these stories I tell about bank robberies and sexual conquests. No tape recorders!" Slam, bam, bam!
The reporter shrinks back, blanching. She had waited five days to put in her request. She had never met Evel before. She did not recognize the web work of laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes—dead giveaways of a classic Knievelian put-on—nor the fact that, where Evel is concerned, there is no such thing as an in-depth interview. Ask him a straight question and one will get 50 crooked answers. The man is a monument to logor-rhea, a master of instant self-history; in the phrase of one of his partners in the venture, "the white Muhammad Ali."
"Come on," says Evel to a companion. "We're going to shoot us some golf."
The Blue Lakes Country Club, a few miles downstream from the jump site, is a verdant oasis tucked away under the rotten lava walls of the Snake River. Limpid streams black-bottomed with big trout wind through the golf course. Evel's adversary in the match is Chuck Cosgriff, a bearded, barrel-bellied Idahoan of 30, who owns the biggest billboard company in Twin Falls and is generally conceded to be the town's best golfer. He and Evel have teamed up in many a celebrity tournament. Today Cosgriff is competing in a Byzantine labyrinth of hole-by-hole and shot-by-shot bets against not only Evel, but the Knievel fils: Kelly, 13, and Robbie. Evel's pretty wife Linda, 31, and his nine-year-old daughter Tracy are along to run messages, fetch lost balls and clubs and zoom back to the club-house at the master's whim for more gin and tonics.
"We've been married 15 years," Evel confides as Linda trots off on one of a few hundred harshly ordered errands, "and you know something? Her face is always the same: a smile. Oh, I yell at her and boss her around, but she says she has only one job in life. To serve me. I made a deal with my kids, though. I promised them that if I ever yell at Linda or at them unnecessarily or too harshly, they can punch me in the nose. If they can hit me, they get $100. If they can knock me down, they get $200."
The golf game is no great shakes. Evel demonstrates a larruping long drive, but his short game and putting are inconsistent if not downright lousy. Cosgriff, by contrast, is steady and smooth, and his constant consumption of double Gibsons during the course of the match seems neither to aid nor to erode his game. The boys show flashes of brilliance and Evel watches them with pride and worry: the burden of fathers everywhere.
"That damn little booger Robbie," he says when the younger boy flubs an iron shot. "Come on over here, Robbie, and give your dad a kiss!" The kid blushes and turns away. "Come on, honey," says Evel with a wicked grin, adding sotto voce: "He thinks he's gotten too old to kiss his daddy good night. So I told him, 'O.K., now, you're going to have to go to work.' The next morning I got him up at seven o'clock and set him to a bunch of chores. That night he come to me and said, 'If I kiss you good night, can I sleep late tomorrow?' The little booger."
"He's a good little golfer, though," says Cosgriff. "They both have the makins. And that's more'n I can say about their daddy."
Evel is up and down, on and off. Between holes he drives his golf cart as if it were a motocross bike. On one late hole he blows both his drive and his second shot, then slams the iron against the golf bag. His rage is open, unfaked. But on the 18th green he sinks an 80-foot putt to retrieve all his losses and win $5 from Cosgriff on the afternoon, an afternoon in which the betting ran to hundreds of dollars in total but finally canceled out nearly even. So much for those $1,000-a-hole golf matches that have entered the legend.
During dinner that night he yells at Tracy. She throws a halfhearted punch that barely grazes her father's nose. He laughs, and peels off a $100 bill.
Later he moseys into the Blue Lakes Inn cocktail lounge for a nightcap or three. In attendance are Bob Arum, president of Top Rank, Inc., which is orchestrating the wholeshow and claims to have paid Evel $6 million up front for a share of the action, and a few of Arum's aides. Evel is in a combative mood. He chides Arum for wearing a red and white seersucker suit—"Who do you think you are, the Great Gatsby?"—and wonders aloud why he ever signed on anyone to help in promotion of the jump.
"Hell," he says, "I'm better than P. T. Barnum and Colonel Parker put together." Nobody denies it.
A couple of his Butte buddies join the party. These are the men who built Evel's launch ramp and he welcomes them heartily—Coors all around.
"Hell, I don't need nobody," he continues. "Certainly don't need no smart Harvard lawyers. Hey, Ralph, remember that big old Euclid I used to drive up at the Anaconda mine? One day they dropped about a six-ton rock in the back of that Yuke, and when I took off I popped a wheelie. The front of the Yuke hit a 4,800-volt power line overhead and blacked out all of Butte. Hell, it blacked out the whole county. The foreman tells me I'm fired, so what'd I do? I went and picked up my pay and then I drove the Yuke on down to the foreman's little hut and I dumped 17 cubic yards of dirt on it. Got on my motorsickle and roared on out of there. I don't need nobody. Hell, maybe what I'll do now, I'll buy Anaconda and fire that foreman. Like they always said: God made man, and the Winchester made 'em equal!"
Arum leaps to his feet, resplendent in his Gatsby suit, and begins singing a Harvard fight song.
By midafternoon of the following day Evel is ready for the first public unveiling of the Sky-Cycle X-2 at the jump site. The vehicle is already mounted at the base of the ramp, dwarfed by the big sky overhead and the deep canyon below. Evel roars up in his station wagon and dismounts. He is dressed all in black and he starts to run up the 40-degree earthen ramp toward the Sky-Cycle. About halfway up he starts to puff and wisely walks the rest of the way.
"Get that crane away from here," he yells to a workman. "Get them photographers away till I call for them." He spies Wicked Ward standing guard at the bottom of the ramp. "Wicked, you keep them civilians the hell away from here. Chase 'em off if they try to get up."
Incipient paranoia? Evel has gotten extremely wary of late—"There are hundreds of guys who want to know how this Sky-Cycle works, and if they find out, everyone will be into the canyon-jumping game." So cautious has he become that he registers at motels under aliases (Mr. Forbes and Mr. Rosenstein are two recent noms d'espionnage); only the mention of a given code word, which is changed week by week, will get a caller through to him by telephone. The press, which once scorned Evel as a blow-hard, is now getting scorned in return as jump day nears and the market for Evel stories rises.
The crane trundles off and Evel retires to his van, emerging a few minutes later in his red, white and blue leathers. He stalks up the ramp slowly this time, cane in hand, cape flapping in the hot breeze, posturing for the cameras. Suddenly a car roars onto the site and brakes to a halt in a cloud of dust. Out jumps Jim Welch, president of Nabisco Confections, Inc. Welch, 43, a prematurely gray but boyish-looking Bostonian, has paid Evel $100,000 for the right to put a decal advertising Chuckles candy on the tail fin of the Sky-Cycle X-2 and a label on Evel's helmet. He has been up all night and most of the day supervising the proper preparation of the decals. Now he runs up the ramp, labels aflap, to get them pasted on before the monumental picture-taking session begins.
Evel stares down at the panting figure laboring up the slope toward him. "Hey," he yells. "We're going to forget this label for now. It's too big."
Welch slumps in dismay. "But I made it smaller than we'd planned, for God's sake!" he yells piteously.
"Wicked!" yells Evel. "If one more civilian comes up this ramp, I'm going to kick your butt!"
Jim Welch trudges back down the hill, his shoulders slumped, as Evel climbs the 13 iron steps leading to the cockpit. He has never attempted to enter the Sky-Cycle X-2 in this position before. The cockpit is no roomier than that of a Grand Prix race car, and set at such a steep angle it is 10 times more difficult to squeeze into. Since all of this will be carefully scrutinized by the electronic eyes of the world on jump day and since the buildup for the jump itself can brook no gracelessness, the mere act of climbing into this fancy flying machine is fraught with high drama. And the danger of a cataclysmic pratfall.
It takes three burly workmen to help Evel up and in. One places his hand squarely on the pristine white leather of Evel's rump and pushes manfully. Upsydaisy! Camera shutters chitter like a locust invasion.
"What if he slips on jump day?" says one of Arum's lieutenants. "What if he slid right down the rocket and landed on the tail fin? His legs would be two feet longer."
But for now, atl east, he has made it. As the photographers scramble madly uphill at Evel's order, he half rises to lean out of the toylike machine and look around for Arum.
"Hey, Bob!" he yells, his voice muffled by helmet and cockpit. "I don't wanna do it! Haw, haw!"
Finally Jim Welch is permitted to affix his Chuckles decals, and once they are in place he asks Evel to smile for the corporate camera.
"Can you think of anything funny enough for me to smile about being up here?" Evel snarls.
A few minutes later Evel climbs out, much faster and more gracefully than he climbed into the cockpit, and disappears for another fast change of costume. The rest of the afternoon is to be taken up with a static firing of the Sky-Cycle's engine, an exercise that proves as tentative as Evel's climb into the cockpit. On the third try the engine fires. A great gusher of steam, loud as a dragon's roar belches from the tail pipe. Dust, rocks the size of a man's head, machine-gun bursts of pea gravel fill the air. Evel himself, standing a good distance from the rocket, dives for cover behind a cotton-wood tree. When the engine shuts down, he emerges, pale under his tan.
"Did you hear that?" he asks no one in particular. "And I'm going to ride that thing?Over there?" And he points across the gaping black canyon into the sagebrush distance where dust devils spin. "You damn right I'm going to ride it. I'm going to go over that canyon like a frozen rope."
And so the stage is set, for what it's worth. (About $32 million, gross, Bob Arum reckons.) The monster is alive and growing, nearly mature now, ravenous and snapping, waiting to be turned loose. Whether Robert Craig Knievel can control it remains to be seen. But even if he cannot, even if the monster of his own device turns finally and destroys him, he will have achieved his aim: true fame through excess. As he likes to say, paraphrasing Teddy Roosevelt, "I think it's better to risk my life and to be a has-been than to never have been at all. Even though crippled and busted in half, it's better to have taken a chance to win a victory or suffer a defeat than to live like others do who will never know victory or defeat because they haven't had the guts to try either."
The night after the static test of the Sky-Cycle X-2, Evel sat with his wife and friends in the lounge of the Blue Lakes Inn, sipping a beer and telling a few hundred more tall tales. The lapels of his blood-red jacket spread like the wings of a giant bat; gold and diamonds winked on his broken hands; the trusty, $22,000 walking stick stood at his side. Then the cocktail guitarist introduced a song he had written just that day.
Evel is his name,
Danger is his game,
The canyon is his aim.
I never knew a man
So determined to take a stand
Jumping from land to land,
On a motorcycle.
Evel Knievel is the man of the day.
He stands courageous in his suave but robust way.
He knows where he's goin', you can bet on that.
You never know, he might outlive us all at last....
Evel shook his head and took a final swallow of beer. "No way," he said. Linda just smiled and smiled.