When it was all said and done, it wasn’t a rocket-powered “Skycycle” in the Snake River Canyon or a horrific, bone-shattering crash alongside the fountains of Caesars Palace that did him in. No, in the end, the life of professional daredevil and American icon Robert “Evel” Knievel came to a screeching halt in the least likely of places — in bed last Friday, waiting for an ambulance to arrive.
What were the odds?
Perhaps better than you might think, given that the 69-year-old motorcycle jumper had suffered through almost 40 broken bones (many of them twice), multiple concussions, two strokes, a liver transplant, diabetes, hepatitis C and an incurable lung condition known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Knievel could die only once, and if more than 300 perilous motorcycle jumps over everything from shark tanks to 13 double-decker buses couldn’t kill him, something had to, and it was that lung disease that did it.
As spectators, we loved Evel precisely because he didn’t die. The tough old coot from Butte, Mont., hucked his hard-tail over just about anything, earning a larger-than-life reputation as much from his spectacular failures as his successful landings. The biggest flop of them all — his 1974 rocket launch into Idaho’s Snake River — remains as memorable today as the maternal scolding it and dozens of other crashes inspired: “Who do you think you are — Evel Knievel?”
In this X Games era more than 25 years after his last jump, it’s evident that more than a few modern-day action-sports icons answered that otherwise rhetorical question with a resounding “Yes,” even if only in their minds. Evel was living proof that you can walk away from almost anything, albeit often with the aid of a cane. He essentially invented a sport, and his successful pursuit of the daredevil’s dream opened the doors to an entire industry of gravity-defying freestyle fliers still standing in line for their own “King of the Stuntmen” action figures.
“I became part of their lives,” Evel told The Associated Press last year. “People wanted to associate with a winner, not a loser. They wanted to associate with someone who kept trying to be a winner.”
No one, of course, can replace Evel Knievel, not even his son, Robbie, who at age 45 has matched all but two of his father’s jumps (the Snake River Canyon and the 1975 bus-jumping record set by Evel at Kings Island in Ohio) on motorcycles designed with half the weight and twice the suspension. And in the absence of the legendary swagger, innate athleticism, courage, charisma and creativity that created this American folk hero, no one should bother to try.
“The Knievel name spans three generations. In terms of sports celebrities, Muhammad Ali is the only name bigger than my father’s,” Robbie told me before a Colorado performance in 2005. Even then, as his father breathed with the assistance of an oxygen tank, ingested 50 pills a day and sucked on painkilling fentanyl lollipops, the younger Knievel marveled at the old man’s durability.
“All those guys who live like he did — the Houdinis and Billy the Kids — they’re all dead by 50. But not him. It’s amazing,” Robbie said.
Evel’s amazing life as a barnstorming motorcycle pilot has come to an unremarkable end, offering reminders of man’s endurance and fragility at once. But just as his signature red, white and blue jumpsuit sits alongside his motorcycle in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Robert Craig Knievel has earned a well-deserved rest.
“I can’t wait to go meet God,” he told the AP last year, “and ask why he didn’t make me go faster on some of those jumps, why he put me through all this pain.
“He knows I’m not evil.”
