Life of Evel: Evel Knievel - Stuart Barker

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never displayed any real anger or bitterness at having been abandoned by his father (and mother) as a child. On the contrary, he usually spoke well of his dad. ‘Jeez, I thought my dad was a helluva guy,’ he would later say. ‘I used to go down there [San Francisco] when he raced midgets and sports cars. Helluva good driver.’ Whatever his true feelings were about being given up as a child, Bobby certainly had his dad to thank for kick-starting his two-wheeled career.

      The pattern for Bobby’s wild-riding style was set right from the first time he ever rode his little bike. Without any formal tuition, Knievel threw a leg over the Bantam, pulled in the clutch lever, engaged first gear, popped out the clutch, roared off down the street and smashed straight into a mailbox. ‘I couldn’t control it. I really got in trouble on that motorcycle that day. I almost got killed.’

      Undeterred, Bobby brought the Bantam back to Butte and set about learning the skills of his future trade as well as annoying and amusing the good citizens of the town in equal measure. ‘I used to ride through bars here and ride down the sidewalk, and my dad said, “What is the matter with you? You’re going to get killed.” ’

      Tales of his cop-baiting (in which he would spark off chases from Butte’s finest) have become legendary and are, at least in part, due to the depiction of such events in the 1971 George Hamilton movie Evel Knievel. Officer Mo Mulchahy lends some credence to the legend, however, with his testimony that ‘It got to be kinda fun. Most times you chased him you’d go have a coffee. If he didn’t wanna be caught, you didn’t catch him. But it was never nothing serious.’

      While Mulchahy’s version of events is certainly within the realms of possibility, other versions show how the legend of Evel Knievel has been added to over the years to the point of absurdity. In his book Evel Knievel: An American Hero, author Ace Collins relates one particular incident involving Knievel and the local police. Without crediting anyone as a source or witness, Collins tells of Knievel being trapped in a dead-end alley by police, who had barricaded the entrance with their patrol vehicle. Undeterred, Knievel rides straight towards the police car, but bears to the right at the last minute, hits a convenient earthen ramp and sails straight over the police car! At best it’s a highly unlikely scenario, and had there been any element of truth in the tale it’s certain that Knievel would have told and retold it over the years. The fact that he hasn’t done so would seem to prove that it is just another myth.

      However much truth there is in the cop-baiting tales, there is no doubt that Bobby Knievel loved his motorcycle and spent countless hours riding round Butte on it, his thrill-seeking character making him a natural when it came to trying wheelies and rear-wheel slides and gunning the little Bantam flat out for all it was worth. ‘I learned to do wheelies on my little BSA and when I later had bigger bikes I could do a wheelie either sitting on the motorcycle or standing on it better than anyone else in the world. And I mean that – better than anybody in the world. I was the first guy to do one standing on the seat. I could wheelie until the oil ran out of the pan and the engine seized up.’

      Knievel’s two-wheeled antics became something of an institution in Butte, and locals were particularly fond of turning out to watch Bobby race up impossibly steep mine hills on his bike. ‘I was goin’ up and down mine hills here in Butte. Everybody thought I was a nut. Fifty or sixty cars used to come out every night to this mine-hill dump. I used to climb it; I’d fall off ten times and make it once. They’d all sit there and blow their horns.’

      Bobby also started to discover that people would actually pay to see his motorcycle pranks, and he found he could make a buck here and there by amusing his drinking buddies. On one occasion outside Bobby’s favourite watering hole, the Met Tavern, a friend bet Knievel $10 he couldn’t ride over a Volkswagen car which was parked outside. With friend and Met owner Bob Pavolich riding pillion, Knievel hoisted the front wheel of his Bantam onto the boot of the car, rode up over the rear window, smashing it in as he went, then revved the bike up and over the roof and finally back down over the bonnet and onto the street. He scared the life out of Pavolich, amused the hell out of the gathered drinkers and won his $10. The owner of the Volkswagen was presumably less than pleased.

      Knievel may have been good at performing stunts on his BSA, but back in the 1960s there was no obvious means of pursuing motorcycle stunt-riding as a career. Therefore it was to becoming a motorcycle racer, rather than a stunt rider, that Knievel aspired, and in America in the early 1960s there really was only one kind of motorcycle sport and that was dirt-bike racing. Had Knievel been born 20 years later there is every chance he would have taken to road racing on purpose-built Tarmac circuits but back then this was almost exclusively a European pursuit. The Americans preferred to race ‘flat-trackers’ round dirt or shingle-based ovals ranging from a quarter-mile to a mile in length. It’s a fearsome spectacle, with riders racing their bikes flat out down the straights at around 140mph before slewing their machines sideways to scrub off speed into the corners. The nearest European equivalent is speedway, but speedway bikes are far less powerful than the big 750cc American flat-trackers, personified by Harley-Davidson’s legendary and enduring XR-750 V-twin machine – the same bike Evel would later use in his jumping career.

      Having gained his national racing licence from the AMA (American Motorcycle Association), Bobby headed out to California to try his hand at dirt-track racing. Borrowing all he could from his ever-supportive grandparents, Knievel was still extremely poor and his accommodation at race meetings, as often as not, was the back seat of his car, usually with Linda and Kelly along for the ride. On many nights the young family would camp out under the stars and wash themselves in rivers or creeks, all so Knievel could pursue his dream of becoming a professional motorcycle racer.

      Knievel did meet with some success in the racing world, but the prize money was poor and barely enough to keep him going to the next meeting. He also found his six-foot frame put him at a disadvantage next to the smaller riders. ‘When the AMA put us on 250s, the little guys who didn’t weigh anything would go past you like a rubber band,’ he complained. It was during one of these races in May 1962 that Knievel achieved something of a landmark in his life: he broke his first bone. It was his collarbone and it was to be the first of many bones he would shatter; enough, in fact, to earn him a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the man who had broken more bones than any other. The 1972 entry for this, however, is laughably inaccurate. It states that in that year alone, Knievel fractured 431 bones. As Steve Mandich correctly points out in Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel, that would average out at 1.2 bones being broken every single day of the year, a feat which even Knievel would find hard to admit to with a straight face.

      But back in May 1962, apart from being a month memorable for breaking his first bone, Knievel had good reason to celebrate as his second son, Robert Edward Knievel, was born on the seventh day of the month. He would become known to the world as Robbie Knievel, the world-class motorcycle jumper, but his relationship with his father would be stormy in the extreme. But right now, Robbie was just another mouth to feed and his father was still not earning any money worth talking about. Bobby knew he would have to try harder to support his family.

      His interest in racing and bikes in general had become such that by late 1962 Knievel made his first attempt to earn a proper living from motorcycles. Having been disillusioned with the carinsurance business, Bobby borrowed as much money as he could from his grandmother and his friend Joe Dosen, put it together with his own meagre savings and opened a motorcycle dealership in Butte called ‘Imported Motors’. He stocked a range of bikes including Hondas, Triumphs, BMWs, Indians, Ducatis and Matchless machines. With his innate gift for promotions and sales techniques Knievel should have been a natural as a bike dealer, but money was scarce in Butte and there simply weren’t enough people in the position to buy a motorcycle. The shop did a poor trade and in 1963 Bobby was forced to close the business, whereupon he fled to Spokane, Washington with his young family, which grew again to include a daughter, Tracey Lynn, born on 22 October of that year. In Spokane, Knievel tried, yet again, for a new start in life.

      The experience of having raced and of owning a bike store, albeit an unsuccessful one, stood Knievel in good stead when he arrived in Spokane. He’d made lots of contacts and friends within the bike industry and one of those, a man named Darrell Triber, readily offered Bobby a job in one of his Honda dealerships.

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