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       3 What’s in a Name?

       ‘Evel Knievel was a character I created. He was even hard for me to live with sometimes. He wouldn’t do anything I told him, the dumb son-of-a-bitch.’

      Very few people become so famous that they are identifiable to the mainstream public by a single name. The vast majority of people in the Western world would know exactly who Sinatra, Ali or Hitler were, but these are all surnames and the Recognisable-by-a-single-name Club becomes much more exclusive when only first names are permitted. Elvis can certainly claim membership, but so can another white-jumpsuited icon: Evel.

      Perhaps it is because both names are unusual, although Elvis is genuine while Evel is merely a nickname-cum-stage name; or it may be that both men were the single-handed creators of the phenomenon they respectively gave rise to. Whatever the case, Evel could rightly lay claim to being one of the few celebrities of the late twentieth century who was recognisable by his first name without any need for further expansion or explanation. Yet how he came to have one of the most recognised stage names in showbiz is not quite so simple, and it is quite possible that the origins of it were hazy even to the man himself, given, as he was, to repeating tales with such frequency that, true or false, he certainly seemed to believe in them himself.

      The most commonly repeated anecdote of how Bobby Knievel became Evel Knievel is the jail-cell theory, which holds that Bobby was being held in a Butte police cell overnight along with a man called William Knoffel. According to the legend, a police officer quipped that he had better double the guard because he was housing both ‘Awful’ Knoffel and ‘Evil’ Knievel on the same night. Contemporary newspaper reports prove that a William Knoffel did exist, and Butte police officer Morris Mulchahy has actually testified to this version of events in the documentary Evel Knievel: The Last of the Gladiators.

      The problem with this theory is that Evel himself later claimed he was nicknamed ‘Evil’ at a much younger age. In Evel Ways: The Attitude of Evel Knievel, he is quoted as saying, ‘The first one to call me Evil Knievel was Nig McGrath, a friend of the family. My brother Nick and I stole his hubcaps and he hollered “You’re just a little evil Knievel.” It sort of stuck…even though I was somewhat ashamed of the name.’ (Although later in the very same book there are claims that the nickname was started by a neighbour and/or the local police due to Knievel’s bike-riding antics.) The name McGrath turned up again in Penthouse magazine but under different circumstances when Evel explained, ‘The guy that actually named me “Evil” was Nick McGrath, a baseball umpire. Every time I’d come up, even in Little League, he’d call me “Evil Knievel”.’ Whether this Nig McGrath and Nick McGrath are one and the same person (their names are repeated here as they were spelled in the respective publications) is open to debate, but the salient point is that Knievel was claiming to have been nicknamed ‘Evil’ from a young age.

      One aspect of the famous name which Knievel did not contradict in his explanations was the changing of the spelling from ‘Evil’ to the less demonic ‘Evel’. He always claimed that he didn’t want any young fans to think he was a truly bad man or an evil man, or, as he once wittily suggested, ‘I didn’t like it [the spelling] the other way. It was an unnecessary evil.’ Although the change in spelling does not affect the sound of the word, it does neatly mimic the spelling of his surname, adding to the sense of alliteration, and there’s never been any harm in a self-publicist having his very own unique name to market – and eventually copyright.

      However long he may have had the nickname of ‘Evil’, Bobby was never actually officially billed as ‘Evel’ in any of his shows until 1966, the year after he started performing motorcycle stunts and several years after he’d started dirt-track racing, where the name, one presumes, would have been equally beneficial in attracting attention. Indeed, another version of how he got his name relates to his time as a bike racer, as Knievel explained in the BBC documentary Touch of Evel: ‘I put together a stunt group called Bob Knievel and his Motorcycle Daredevils, Hollywood, California. My sponsor [Bob Blair of the Berliner Motor Co. who supplied Knievel’s team with bikes] said, “The nickname you have at the racetracks is Evil Knievel, why don’t you use it? It’s a better name.” So anyway, I did. I wasn’t too sure about it because I was ashamed of being called Evil.’

      So it was that on 23 January 1966 the newly christened Evel Knievel and his Motorcycle Daredevils made their public debut in the grounds of Indio’s National Date Festival, where the team performed a selection of stunts, some original and some borrowed and adapted from car stunt-shows. It would presumably not have been known to Knievel that there had been a troupe of riders performing similar stunts in Britain for years. The Royal Signals Display Team – The White Helmets – was formed in 1927 as a means of demonstrating the skills of its Army dispatch riders, and their repertoire included jumping through hoops of fire, fast crossovers (where two riders race towards each other narrowly avoiding a collision) and six-bike pyramids. But while Knievel’s daredevils were not an entirely new conception, they were new to American audiences and their presentation was certainly a far cry from the officious military performances of The White Helmets.

      Knievel often claims to have used 750cc

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