Over Labor Day weekend, Twin Falls, Idaho, held a 50th anniversary celebration of the September day in 1974 when Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket. Twin Falls is a city of about 50,000 people in southern Idaho, but in 1974 it was less than half that size, and it was bracing for—and dreading—the arrival of tens of thousands to witness Knievel’s long-deferred attempt, which had been promoted in the manner of a heavyweight championship fight. “Heck,” a waitress said, hearing the speculation about invading hordes, “I ain’t never seen more than a thousand in one place. It’s scary.”
In the end, a much smaller number, about 15,000 people, crowded into the space where the canyon sits, a remotely located gorge in the Earth not user-friendly for travel, lodging, public gatherings, or much of anything else. Thousands of others around the country watched at theaters over closed-circuit television, the preferred technology in those pre-cable, pre-pay-per-view days for showing big events, usually championship boxing matches, that priced themselves off free TV. For the star of the show, it was the culmination of a career spent daring, and cheating, death. This time, it looked like death would have its say.
Evel Knievel was one of those classic American figures who emerge from nowhere, burn consumingly, and then flame out. In the early 1970s, few names were better known in the United States. Hailing from the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, where he was born in 1938, Robert Craig Knievel grew up hardscrabble, fighting, stealing, carousing, conniving—and, soon enough, performing. As Leigh Montville chronicles in his rollicking, addictive 2011 biography, Knievel was a born self-promoter, a talent only enhanced by his discovery of W. Clement Stone’s Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. (“He was the biggest bullshitter in the world,” one friend remembered. “He could sell an Eskimo a refrigerator.”) It was his instinct to make bets and dares about virtually anything that led him to create motorcycle jumping as a kind of sport. By the late 1960s, he had achieved some notoriety doing this, mostly out west; he shrewdly chose to spell his performing name with an “e” instead of an “i” to lighten the connotation.
Today, stunt jumping and “extreme sports” are well established, and their practitioners happily credit Knievel as an originator. Their endeavors, while not for the fainthearted, are carefully managed and planned, with angles and speeds and distances mapped out in advance, and using equipment well designed for such tasks. By contrast, Evel Knievel was making it up as he went along. He rode heavy Harley-Davidson motorcycles meant for road travel, not flight. They were not equipped with the suspension or shock absorption to handle what he was asking them to do. He’d make touchdown on a landing ramp and the bike would boomerang him out of his seat and send him flying off to his next catastrophic wipeout.
Knievel began appearing on the American radar screen on the last day of 1967, when he jumped his motorcycle over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Footage of the almost pornographically violent crash that resulted, shot by actress Linda Evans, was mesmerizing (if you could bring yourself to look). Even today, in a desensitized culture, the Caesar’s images have the feel of watching someone try to create a snuff film on himself. It was one thing to survive such a horror; it was another to see it as a marketing opportunity for bigger things. Guess how Knievel saw it? After Caesar’s, slowly but surely, the daredevil became nationally known.
The crashes Knievel suffered were a crucial part of his appeal. They were dramatic and lurid and made for great television, especially on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, a hugely popular weekend program in that analog era that provided sports-hungry males with a dose between major fixes. Knievel performances accounted for seven of the long-running show’s Top Ten-rated broadcasts, including its Number One.
A superhero-sized legend built up around Knievel. He wore Elvis-like, star-spangled leathers, though he was definitively an antihero, one who took a good licking in his daily labors. He had been hospitalized and undergone surgeries more times than he could count to repair ribs, shoulders, hips, pelvis, and who knows what else. He had all kinds of plates and pins in his body. He called himself “the last gladiator in the new Rome.” What made him transcendent to kids (especially boys) was not just that he kept surviving his crashes but that he kept signing up for more. The inspiration he provided, I think, was rooted in the concept of the dare, a fundamental experience of childhood. Kids get together and say, “I bet you can’t walk across that log and stay up and not fall into the rocks;” back and forth bantering ensues, but finally some bold kid steps forward to accept the challenge. Evel Knievel was that kid, and more: he was the one who tried, fell off, and brained himself on the rocks, then came back the next day and crossed successfully—and asked, “What else you got?”
Someone who does this persistently, upping the stakes and assuming greater and greater risks to himself, acquires a special aura in his social circle. Knievel’s career dramatized this ancient dynamic, on a national scale and at a physical price that few would have imagined before he showed up. Once he had penetrated the American consciousness, it was as if he had always been there. We couldn’t get enough of him.
Almost from the beginning, Knievel was boasting about how one day, he would leap over the Grand Canyon. The idea was dodgy, technologically and otherwise; you can’t clear the expanse Evel was contemplating on a motorcycle, at least not without some form of rocket propulsion, and besides, the Department of the Interior wasn’t interested in letting him use federal land for such purposes. Undaunted, he leased some acreage around Twin Falls and began targeting the less magnificent, but still imposing, Snake River Canyon. It would be many years of talk, money spent, and postponements before the jump became a reality.
Knievel’s team set about constructing a homemade rocket, which he insisted on calling his “Skycycle.” It was designed by Robert Truax, a former Navy rocket engineer, whose work was central to the development of U.S. missile systems. Truax spent years working on the Skycycle. The original idea was to shoot Knievel over the canyon and have him eject from the cockpit in a parachute. Finances got in the way of this design, however. The final model—the Skycycle X-2, a Frankenstein’s monster of a contraption assembled from a discarded fuel tank and using a seat from an old go-cart—would instead blast off, clear the canyon, and parachute down, with Knievel inside, to a soft landing, aided by a shock absorber on its nose that would cushion the impact.
The idea sounds like madness when considered in the light of day, but the 1970s aren’t remembered for that kind of light. How do you land a rocket successfully, anyway? And wouldn’t the person riding in it have to be an astronaut, or at least some kind of NASA dude? Knievel wasn’t even an airplane pilot. He was a motorcycle rider—and not a very good one, some said. What was he doing messing with steam pressure and G forces?
The specter of death haunted the enterprise. In one sense, that was nothing new: death always traveled along with Knievel. But up to now, he’d been riding motorcycles over, say, a dozen cars or buses. Now he was trying to vault a rocket across a 1,600-foot canyon and land safely on the other side. When it reached the end of its 108-foot ramp, the X-2 would be traveling 200 miles per hour, to reach up to 400 mph by the time it attained peak altitude, at about 2,000 feet, before beginning its parachute descent. “This, of course, was all hypothesis,” as Montville dryly notes. “No one ever had done this.”
To Knievel’s young admirers, it seemed that the man was not afraid of anything, even dying. Most of us would eventually learn that courage has to do not with fear’s absence but its presence, through which one pushes forward. Whatever else critics want to say about Evel Knievel’s act—it was pointless, it was foolhardy, it was self-destructive, it was nihilistic—they cannot say that it wasn’t brave.
“I could look in his eyes and see he was afraid on most of the jumps,” Ray Gunn, a longtime friend and aide, told Montville. “I knew he was afraid. I could even see it when he practiced. He was in a panic.” These terrors never seemed to motivate Knievel to do more testing or otherwise map out the myriad details that might make happy landings more likely. “The ramp was never right,” Montville observes. “The bike was never right. Something was never right. The daredevil was never right . . . and yet he never backed down.” Everything Knievel did was by the seat of the pants; he didn’t even use a speedometer.
Still, whatever fears he had endured before were nothing compared with Snake River. As the big date approached, Knievel openly shared his doubts and grim imaginings. “I can’t sleep nights,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I toss and turn, and all I can see is that big ugly hole in the ground grinning up at me like a death’s head.” He seemed to realize, too late, that he had walked himself out on an edge from which he could not return. It was too late to back down.
Besides, he was a professional and had given his word.
“He was always a real package. He always delivered,” said Dennis Lewen, a vice president of production for Wide World of Sports. “He always did it.”
September 8, 1974, was a Sunday. If Knievel thought he’d have the headlines to himself, he guessed wrong. That morning, President Gerald Ford announced that he was pardoning Richard Nixon. But Knievel had other things to worry about, like his imminent demise. You can see this in his final interview before getting into the Skycycle, when he speaks with David Frost, who was anchoring the closed-circuit broadcast with ABC News science editor Jules Bergman and Apollo 13’s James Lovell. (You read that right). Knievel looks and sounds agonized; the unspoken thought between him and Frost is that one of them will not be around five minutes from now.
Knievel’s dream had put Twin Falls in the crosshairs of an American madness, with biker gangs and druggies and naked women converging on the canyon site, drunk and high and often violent, burning down port-a-johns and concession stands, lighting bonfires, having sex in open view. It was like a rural Altamont waiting to happen, with the big worry being that, once Knievel launched, the people would rush to the canyon’s rim to get a better look—and plunge off. Except, unlike at Altamont, here a group of Hells Angels-like bikers saved the day, pushing back against the crowds teetering near the canyon’s edge and preventing a nightmare from turning into a carnage.
Imagine being in such a situation as Knievel was then, knowing that the X-2 would likely fail—it had failed its two tests—and going through with it anyway. He had created an epic around his canyon jump, built a whole career on it, really, and now it was time to face the deed. He’d even gotten Bob Arum, the boxing promoter managing the event, to agree to a ruse: posing at a press conference with a fake check for $6 million, supposedly Evel’s purse. (In reality, his guarantee was only $225,000, plus a cut from the gate, but the bluster worked again, both short-term and long: in its 2007 obituary for Knievel, the New York Times uses the $6 million figure.) If he cancelled now, he would spare his life but lose everything else. The expression “a fate worse than death” exists for a reason. Better to explode into eternity, with the consolation that all you have created will live on after you—now shrouded in the mystic—along with a slim alternative hope that, just maybe, something would happen and you would get lucky.
Something happened. He got lucky—so lucky as to be almost inconceivable. The X2 blasted off as intended in a roar of white steam, but the parachute deployed almost immediately, far earlier than it was supposed to. It’s generally been regarded as a system malfunction, though it can never be known for sure whether Evel himself might have prematurely pulled the latch to deploy the parachute.
Whatever happened inside the cockpit, the rocket, with its parachute out so early, soon slowed—helped by 20-mile-an-hour headwinds that blew it backward. A rarely seen angle from ABC’s postmortem coverage shows the Skycycle poised to clear the canyon when it slows up, dragged by the parachute; it drifts backward, back out over the canyon, and then begins a nosedive, its white steam now replaced by reddish smoke, like something out of the Batman television series of the late sixties. POOF! Except now Evel seemed headed for a SPLAT! as the rocket drifted downward to the canyon floor—and the Snake River.
He missed the river, Montville says, by a few feet. If he had landed there, he would have drowned; they wouldn’t have been able to get to him in time. Instead, the Skycycle, after colliding with the canyon wall on its way down, came to rest in some brush, out of view of the overhead cameras. Maybe the cushion on the Skycycle’s nose really was effective, though it’s hard to conceive of how the X-2, which looked about as sturdy as a discarded canister from an amusement park ride, could crash-land without breaking up and killing its passenger. Never mind: somehow, Knievel was soon visible again, riding on a rescue craft, waving to the crowds. He hadn’t achieved the goal, but he had gone through with his impossible try—and lived to tell. A life defined by dares had climaxed by carrying out the grimmest, gravest dare of all.
That wasn’t how the media saw it. They derided Snake River as a fizzle, and some who had paid to watch it called it a “rip off,” a term that already resonated with 1970s youth culture: Vietnam, Watergate, the end of many illusions. A rip-off it was definitively not. For one thing, the X-2 could launch only when Evel pressed a button in the cockpit that would release 5,000 pounds of steam pressure. He pressed it. Some may have been dissatisfied because the event offered so little pleasure for the eyes—and wallet, with $10 charged at the closed-circuit theaters and $25 at the canyon site itself. There was enough, though, if you knew where to look: like the stomach-grabbing moment when Evel is lowered into the cockpit, snug as a screw drilled into hardwood; his body settles into the tiny slot in a way that makes it seem like he can never get out.
Figuratively, he never could. There was nowhere to go after Snake River. Like career pinnacles often are, the canyon jump would be the point from which all paths pointed downward. It didn’t take long for Knievel to decline into caricature, riding his Harley over a pool of sharks in Chicago to capitalize on the Jaws craze and then descending into darkness with a baseball-bat assault on the author of a book about him that he disliked, for which he served a lenient jail sentence. Montville’s book, a treasure of biographical anecdote and detail, makes clear that the dark side accounted for a major portion of Knievel’s character: a prolific burglar and hubcap thief back in Butte, he never lost a certain criminal vibe, and all too often he treated people, including his family, abominably. The rest of his trajectory was the familiar one of a fallen star: he spent all his money and drove away people who had stood by him. His life lost the pulsing momentum that had made him the envy of millions of American males. He died in 2007, having lived long enough to see his son Robbie eclipse his motorcycle feats and to give his blessing to countless heirs and emulators. (Amazingly, in 2016 stuntman Eddie Braun would successfully leap the Snake River Canyon, in a replica of the Skycycle.)
For whatever reason, he has proved hard to forget. Maybe this just underscores the truism that formative influences, whether from the home or the broader world, never leave you. In 2007, I scanned the comments sections of Knievel’s online obituaries—all the readers seemed about my age. They talked about the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, which, for a few years in the 1970s, was among the top selling toys. They recounted doing jumps on bicycles with plywood ramps. They recalled their youthful sense of wonder that this man would subject himself to such danger and pain, again and again and again.
Maybe the fascination has to do not only with his extraordinary willingness to persist but also with a sense of mystery about the seemingly motiveless nature of the deeds themselves. Knievel was not, after all, some Navy SEAL, shooting himself into the air in the cause of protecting the United States; he was not a police officer vaulting over cars on his motorcycle so that he could run down bad guys on the other side; he was not a fireman launching himself upward to save lives from a conflagration. His feats were the very definition of optional, so optional that they hadn’t even existed until he came along to think them up. His was a career about nothing, you might even say. Probably the initial motivator was boredom and restlessness; soon enough, it was opportunity and money and fame. But ultimately, it had to be bound up with some quest for distinction, glory, or love—along with a consciousness developed along the way, common to great performers, that you have become something other than what you were, and that this new destiny is the one you must follow. That’s what gets you riding in homemade rockets.
The canyon was fundamental to this mythic new identity. The canyon was worth sacrificing for. It was worth dying for, too, and that is what Knievel was prepared to do. He was betting his life, and you can’t wager anything greater than that. Fifty years on, I’m astonished to reflect that he went through with it, that he didn’t reach into his vast repertoire of promotion, commotion, and BS to find a way out of it somehow.
Nothing doing. He climbed into the rocket. He pushed the button.
Rip-off? Please. On September 8, 1974, Evel Knievel was the most honest man in America.
Top Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images