From coma to American legend

I'm not sure how that icon of seventies schlock, Evel Knievel, muscled into this column - and I'm not sure that he's a sportsman either - but I've been reading about him lately and in the spirit of Christmas giving I'm about to share what I've found with you.

Robert Craig "Bobby" Knievel was born in Butte, Montana on 17 October 1938. The man in the Liberace style garb later to become famous for his daredevil stunts was, according to Steve Mandich in The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel, "a born hellraiser", a kid who threw rocks at the local prostitutes until he was told to scram by their pimps, a kid who scraped through life as he always seemed destined to do with the usual mixture of bravado, recklessness and cunning.

Amidst the dreariness and lack of money there were fabled good times. A formative experience in young Knievel's life was the performance in Butte's Clark Park by Joie Chitwood's Auto Thrill Show, a group of stuntmen who did all of the usual things with cars, motorcycles and flaming hoops.

Other than spending time at Clark Park, young Bobby ran wild and apparently did his best to get into trouble, failing to graduate from high school as he took an unpromising first job at the Anaconda Copper Company mine. True to his natural self, Knievel was fired from the mine and then spent some time in the US infantry. Afterwards he blazed through a variety of jobs (if robbing banks can be classified as a "job") most of them, fortunately, on the right side of the law.

While recuperating from a shunt on a bike in the early sixties he took a job with the Combined Insurance Company of America. "According to the Legend," writes Mandich, "he sold a record 271 accident and health insurance policies during one week in July, including a single-day record of 110 policies, sold to the staff of the state mental hospital."

After being fired as an insurance salesman and throwing his safe-breaking tools off a bridge, Evel underwent a period of comparative calm. He rustled the money together for a bike dealership, started reading books with wonderful titles such as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and flirted with making a living from racing bikes.

One day, though, he got a brainwave, inspired possibly by financial desperation, possibly from dreams of Joie Chitwood's Auto Thrill Show. "Motorcycle sales were slow and the family was short on money, so in 1965 he came up with an unusual idea to drum up business: he would jump a Honda 350 over two mountain lions, plus a wooden pen filled with venomous rattlesnakes. This stunt is generally considered to be his first public jumping performance, and another tale in the Knievel Legend."

And so began the Knievel myth. He got together with a group of similarly wired stuntmen but, given his streak of fierce independence, the association didn't last long. He then started an agonising trawl round the tracks, raceways and civic centres of California, Washington and Montana. Strapped for money, he couldn't afford the services of seconds or mechanics and so built the ramps he used to jump lines of cars himself (the cars usually being provided by a local dealership in return for a plug or two).

Evel was so cash-strapped during the early days that he was usually his own compere, his own stuntman and his own medic. The poor family followed in the trailer behind as Evel fine-tuned his talent not only for dare-devilry and self-promotion but also for the highlife (and the leather suit with the cheesy cape billowing out behind).

Through the sixties Evel gained in reputation and notoriety. He wormed his way onto national television and made much of his desire to jump the Grand Canyon - a chasm of 3 000 feet - on a rocket-propelled bike dubbed the "Sky-Cycle". Plans for the stunt and the design of the bike were at an advanced stage when the Navajo tribe in a reservation on the one side of the canyon refused to give Knievel permission for him to use their land on which to build take-off facilities. He offered them $100 000 for their part in the deal but they still refused.

"The poor, broke sons-of-bitches seem to be more concerned about cattle grazing and erosion," Evel lamented.

Not to be deterred, Knievel hit on the idea of jumping through the largest fountains in the world at Caesar's Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The stunt was duly arranged and took place on New Year's afternoon in 1968. Unfortunately, the back wheel of Knievel's Triumph hit the safety ramp, he lost control of the bike and was hurled onto the tar, ending up in hospital in a coma. But he was lucky. Not only did he survive but there was a cameraman (well, camerawoman, actually) aiming her camera at the exact spot where Knievel fell. The images were syndicated across America. His name went up in lights. Evel had arrived.