Life of Evel: Evel Knievel - Stuart Barker

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he admitted, ‘I must have spent at least five or six thousand dollars, at three dollars a time. Every whore in this town knew me. There just wasn’t anything else to do there but go into a bar or a whorehouse. When you got tired of going to the whorehouse, you went to the bar.’

      But as a kid there were often more conventional games to be played than pimp-baiting, and Big Sky Country was a better place than most in which to play them. Like any young American boy, Bobby loved playing cowboys and Indians, and since Montana had been as much a part of the Wild West as anywhere else in the States it formed the perfect backdrop for escapist cowboy games. Television cowboy Roy Rogers was Bobby’s greatest childhood hero and he would spend hours pretending to be him, dressing up in a makeshift cowboy outfit complete with sheriff’s badge and his grandfather’s hat. By the time he reached his mid-teens, Bobby even had a real horse, Alamo, gifted to him by his step-grandfather, Roy Buis, to add a touch more realism to his escapades. It would have dumbfounded the young Knievel to imagine that he would not only meet but befriend his hero Roy Rogers in later life, but for the time being he was content just to imitate him.

      Another of Bobby’s childhood idols was boxer Joe Louis, better known at the time as the ‘Brown Bomber’. Bobby was a huge boxing fan and always tuned the radio in to listen to Louis fight the likes of Billy Conn, Max Baer and ‘Jersey’ Joe Walcott. As a kid, Bobby owned a pair of boxing gloves but had no punchbag. Being as inventive as any other child without the resources to actually buy what he wanted, Bobby soon found a solution to this, albeit an unlikely one. ‘My dad was in the Second World War and he sent me his canteen from Japan, so I hung it up in my grandmother’s [house] upstairs and I used to use it for a punching bag.’ When Knievel’s father managed to get Joe Louis’s autograph for his son, Bobby was so thrilled he carried it in his wallet for 12 years.

      Despite having being abandoned by his parents, a scenario that can often result in children becoming rebellious and delinquent, Bobby Knievel wasn’t an inherently bad child – he simply had a mass of energy and an inclination to mischief like most young boys. In other words, he was perfectly normal, but he did seem to have an inherent fondness for danger and so sought out thrills whenever and wherever he could. Apart from the adrenalin rush he enjoyed when being chased by pimps, Bobby also loved to build his own ramshackle soapboxes and race them down the hill at the end of Montana Street. Naturally there were crashes – the first of many in Knievel’s life – but they rarely amounted to more than a bloodied knee or scuffed elbow and injuries were always something to boast about in a town like Butte. Bobby was also extremely fond of football and would don his leather safety helmet and play with his brother Nick every night after school as their grandmother cooked dinner.

      There was nothing about Bobby’s early childhood to suggest he would be anything other than a regular working Butte man when he grew up; nothing which marked him out as being particularly different to the other kids he played with on the block. It was not until he was eight years old that he witnessed the event which would ultimately inspire him to carve his own way in life and become famous the world over for doing so.

      In 1946, Butte’s Clark Park played host to Joey Chitwood and his Auto Daredevil Show, and when Emma Knievel took her grandsons to watch the performance she could never have imagined the far-reaching consequences their day out would have; in fact, if she had known, it is most probable that the family would have stayed at home. Bobby was completely mesmerised by the performances of the daredevils and thrilled to see their Ford V-8s crash through fire walls, jump from ramp to ramp and perform choreographed rollovers. ‘I had never seen anything like it,’ he later recalled. ‘Using a take-off ramp, Chitwood had leapfrogged his car over an automobile while stuntman Cliff Major jumped a motorcycle through a hoop of fire. This set the course for the rest of my life.’

      Although he didn’t decide there and then that he was going to become a professional stuntman, Knievel did set about imitating the stunts he had seen on his bicycle. ‘I went home and took the mudguards off my bicycle and put cards in the spokes so it would sound like a motorcycle and I built little ramps and jumped off of them. I’d put on little shows for the kids in the neighbourhood.’

      Even those early shows combined the three key elements to Knievel’s later career: his love of performing in front of an audience, his willingness to be hurt while doing so, and his entrepreneurial skills for making a fast buck – Bobby charged his friends two cents apiece to watch. Using his grandfather’s garage doors as ramps, Bobby’s brother Nick would chalk a mark where Bobby landed before moving the doors further apart to allow him to try and better the distance. When this became too mundane, the brothers set flame to piles of scrub and Bobby would amaze his young audience by leaping over the flames. Leaping fire proved to be a real showstopper until both doors caught fire and left the budding stuntman with no ramps. Needless to say, Bobby’s grandfather was none too impressed upon discovering that his garage no longer had doors, but after reprimanding Bobby he merely chalked the experience down to ‘boys being boys’.

      Witnessing the Chitwood show was certainly the defining moment of Bobby Knievel’s childhood. At the time it may have simply been a fantastic spectacle and an exciting escape from the realities of growing up in Butte, as well as being the inspiration for his own little stunt show, but at a deeper level the experience had a more profound and lasting effect on Knievel. He had learned that people would pay to watch men risking their lives – and would love them for doing so.

      But while Knievel’s marketing and PR skills would become legendary, they certainly weren’t learned in Butte High School where he showed little aptitude for the discipline of scholastic pursuits. He was more interested in the opportunity school gave him for meeting girls. ‘I didn’t like school very much – I never did. The only time I liked it was when I had a girlfriend and I wanted to go to school to see her.’ Knievel later rued the fact that he had not persevered in school, admitting that ‘Education is so important. I didn’t have much schooling and regret it now.’

      While he was still in formal education, Bobby relied on sports rather than academic pursuits to provide the inspiration for getting out of bed each morning. He enthusiastically played hockey and football and tried his hand at pole-vaulting and most other track and field events, usually with a considerable degree of success. In fact he became so competent at skiing that he went on to win the Class A division of the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association men’s ski-jumping championship in 1957 – his first real, high-profile jumps of any kind and another crucial piece in the jigsaw that was to make up his unique and bizarre career. Years later, Knievel would utilise ski-jump-style ramps for several of his motorcycle jumps when there was insufficient space to reach the required take-off speed.

      Further refining the necessary skills for the career path he would eventually choose, Knievel also tried his hand at rodeo riding all over Montana. Again, the physical involvement and danger appealed to Bobby just as it did on the football pitch or hockey rink; he was a natural-born thrill-seeker and those thrills simply could not be found sitting behind a desk listening to a lecture on the American Civil War, much as he enjoyed tales of the Old West. Rodeo riding also happened to be another discipline that would stand Bobby in good stead when it came to muscling a bucking and weaving Harley-Davidson down a landing ramp.

      But the sport that most of his childhood friends and sports coaches remember him as being particularly good at was ice hockey, even though he was never noted as being much of a team player as his high-school hockey coach Leo Maney recalls: ‘He was an individualist and he did not learn, at any time we were associated with him, this matter of team play; passing the puck to the other players. He’d get the puck at one end of the ring and away he’d go all by himself.’

      That streak of individuality, that preference to rely on himself instead of others and that desire to attract the glory of the limelight for his own achievements were all crucial elements in the making of Evel Knievel. While his grandparents did all they could for him, Bobby was continuously aware that he had been abandoned early in life and that the only person that was going to be able to help him make something of himself was himself.

      But, much as he would have liked to, Bobby couldn’t spend his entire time at high school playing sports and, when the pressure and boredom of class work finally became too much, he decided to leave school at 16, before graduating,

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