He scares the crap out of Middle America, but he can't help himself. His name is Knievel
Twice now, doctors have had to knock Robbie Knievel out in order to dig the pavement out of his ass.
Once he was jumping his motorcycle over a car dealership in Austin, and there wasn't enough of a landing zone, so he piled up a bunch of haystacks to make sure he wouldn't crash through the parking lot fence and on to the interstate. He cleared the distance, but came down too fast and went into a slide. Robbie hit the haystacks face-first doing 90 mph, so hard the hay nearly broke his nose. At the hospital, doctors had to anesthetize him so they could scrape the gravel from his buttocks with surgical instruments.
No matter how thick his leathers are, they can't protect him when he skids down a ramp at 90, not with his motorbike lying on top of him like a lover who won't get off. So Robbie Knievel became a part of the road, and vice versa.
He has had broken bones in places most people don't know they have bones, and for considerably less pay than is arguably sane. Let's face it, there isn't nearly the recompense for being a motorcycle daredevil there once was. Recently, as Knievel stood in the midst of the dusty St. Louis County fairgrounds, contemplating a jump over three airplanes (once owned by Howard Hughes, the Baltimore Colts and Wayne Newton) standing wingtip to wingtip, he was forced to ask himself a very profound and germane question: "Who gives a damn if you can sing longer and louder than elvis?"
The irony is that Robbie is every bit the biker his father was, and maybe more so. Robbie can clear 150 feet with no hands and land on a ramp only eight feet wide. He has jumped 223 feet through the air-nearly twice as far as Knievel Knievel did in his prime. Once, Robbie cleared the roof of a bar in Billings, Mont. Last spring, his jump over 30 limousines in the parking lot of the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in Vegas earned him some national attention and put him on a hot little run. He is trying to firm up a deal with Fox television to jump between two buildings, nine stories up. He is contemplating a leap over the Colorado River, and another over 25 hearses-each with a coffin inside. But his most grandiose ambition is to reprise his father's extravagant and ill-fated 1974 attempt to clear the Snake River Canyon in Idaho.
After more than a decade consigned to state fairs and car shows, Robbie Knievel is finally making a decent living, keeping the family name alive and reviving his old man's lost art: scaring the crap out of Middle America.
Robbie believes it is in his bloodlines. He believes that there was bound to be a biker among Knievel's four kids, and he drew the lot, the one that gave him the extraordinary sense of balance, the big shoulders and the orneriness to withstand the injuries and disappointments. He figures it is just as well he has two daughters and no wife. "I truly think I'm meant to do this," he says. "But I never wanted a son, because I don't want him to go through this crap. I'm the last of the last."
...
Once, the term "motorcycle daredevil" conjured the romantic, death-defying and eternally taciturn figure of Knievel Knievel, the 1960s stuntman and folk hero. Knievel grew fabulously wealthy and famous by literally fathering the concept of extreme sports. Astride his garish old Triumph Bonnevilles and Harleys, he jumped boxes of rattlesnakes and tanks full of sharks. He ended up in a coma for 29 days when he tried to clear the fountain at Caesars Palace. Guinness lists him as having broken 433 bones over his two-decade career. He spawned a series of action-figure toys and was nearly as well known as Muhammad Ali. Now, though, it seems every kid with a bicycle can turn three flips in the air and land squarely, and the family trade doesn't carry the prestige that it used to. Where Knievel once jumped before crowds of 30,000 to 50,000, Robbie is the king of the state fair and tractor-pull circuit. As Robbie says, "It's a rags to riches to rags story." He won't divulge his income except to say, "It ought to be 50 times more."
Out of his leathers and standing on firm ground, Robbie Knievel is a reasonable-seeming 36-year-old with a thin mane of reddish-brown hair and a can of Slimfast in his hand. He doesn't especially look like a daredevil. Three things give him away: the tough little sneer in his voice, the swimsuit model named Catalina on his arm and the set of powerful tectonic plates in his chest- the result of hauling all of that iron and chrome into sustained wheelies. He has considered exactly two other career options: thievery and working in a sawmill. The fact is, biking is all he knows. He almost quit in 1989 after he cleared the fountain at Caesars, making good on the jump that rendered his father comatose. He thought he would make a million, but he cleared only $75,000. Afterward, he stood at the top of the ramp and someone handed his infant daughter, Krysten, to him. In baby talk, she unwittingly expressed a sentiment that every idiot with a skateboard seemed to harbor. "I can do that," she said.
For a while he went to work hauling planks.
...
One of his earliest memories is of sitting on the handlebars of his father's motorcycle, screaming and crying with fright while Evel popped a wheelie. Robbie was about 4 when he got his first bike, a Honda 50. Evel sat him on the seat and tied a rope around him. Whenever Robbie hit the throttle too hard, Evel would yank him off the bike with the rope.
The family lawyer, Fred Bezark, remembers visiting the Knievels in Butte, Mont. "Want a ride on my motorcycle?" piped 6-year-old Robbie, astride a bike several sizes too big for him. Bezark figured he meant around the driveway. Robbie hauled him up and down the side of a mountain. It was the 1970s, so Bezark was wearing a pair of stacked heel shoes, real disco numbers. By the time they got back, he had burned away most of the heels.
In those days, Evel was an indelible figure, the coolest, toughest mother you ever saw, a guy with military posture, an iron set to his mouth and luxuriant sideburns. His jump over 14 buses on ABC's Wide World of Sports remains the highest-rated show in its history (52% of U.S. households tuned in). Women wanted to sleep with him, guys wanted to be his best friend. At one point, Knievel claimed his action toy was a $300 million concern. He treated money like it was gasoline. Evel would come home to Butte to take Robbie fishing. They would scream down dirt roads in a Ferrari.
But Evel in his prime was forbidding, too, frequently ill-tempered, always suffering-with things broken, sprained, fractured or ruptured. "I remember him being in a lot of pain,"Robbie says."He'd scream and yell a lot. I couldn't wait for him to leave the house." But it seemed Evel could survive anything. Robbie would invite his friends over to watch a tape of the Caesars crack-up. In it, his old man catapults down the ramp, smashing his pelvis, shattering his femurs, fracturing his skull.
As Robbie got older, he began to understand that underneath all that temper was fear. "I was scared for him all the time," Robbie says. "You could just see the bike get crossed up, and he'd go over the handlebars, and you'd think, 'Dad's going to break into a million pieces, like a piece of hard candy.'"
In 1974, on the same day that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, Evel attempted to jump the 1,600-foot Snake river Canyon in Twin Falls, Idaho. Robbie was 12. About 15,000 people clogged the two-lane road into town to see it. Everyone else had to pay to watch on closed-circuit TV. Evel strapped himself into a so-called Sky-Cycle, a contraption that was part motorcycle and part rocket. On a test run, a faulty parachute deployed on liftoff. Evel went ballistic, screaming, furious. He couldn't afford another test. His fear was that if he hit the water, the Sky-Cycle would sink immediately and drown him in it.
On jump day, Robbie started crying as soon as the Sky-Cycle ignited. The sound alone was terrifying. "It was crazy," he says. "I thought a building had come down. As soon as it took off, I thought my dad was dead."
Once again the parachute device deployed on takeoff. Evel got halfway over the canyon when the wind caught the chute and blew him back against the canyon wall. The next thing Robbie remembers is his father in a rescue boat, nursing a bloody nose.
By then, Robbie was a part of his father's show. When he was 8, he and his older brother, Kelly, had joined the act. He recalls riding into the center of Madison Square Garden on his small bike. Kelly quit after a couple of years; he preferred golf and wanted to go to college. Robbie stayed in the show; he loved it. "I wanted it bad," he says. By 11, he was popping wheelies for huge crowds and the ABC cameras. At 13, he had his own doll like his dad, a "Robbie, The Teen-Age Stuntman," and rode in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to promote it. (He still has a doll in its box. He takes it out once a year-at Christmas, when he puts it atop the tree instead of a star.)
When Robbie was 15, Evel announced that his son was a better biker than he had been at that age. Robbie wanted to take on ever-bigger stunts. Evel forbade it. "He didn't want me jumping more than 10 vans," Robbie says. They argued, Robbie rebelled and their fights grew ugly. In front of an ABC camera crew, Robbie sneered at his father, "You want me to lick the driveway?"
At 16, Robbie bought a Chevy for $100 and struck out on his own. He fathered a daughter named Carmen whom he would not see again until she was 18. He worked part-time in a Suzuki shop. One night, he threw a crowbar through a music store window and stole all the guitars. He got caught and was placed on probation. A year later, he robbed the same store. He was caught again and released in his father's custody. The judge told him, "If that music store is robbed again, I'm sending you to jail." on Robbie's first night home, he stayed out until 4 a.m. When he walked in the door, Evel was waiting for him. They had a fistfight. Curiously, the music store was robbed yet a third time. "They never caught the guy who did it," Robbie says now, grinning through the smoke of a Marlboro.
Eventually, he and his father reconciled and even teamed up occasionally for jumps. Evel officially retired in 1982. Now, at 60, he is partly made out of titanium and suffers from hepatitis C, which he picked up though a blood transfusion during one of the many operations to piece him back together. He lives in Clearwater, Fla., awaiting a liver transplant, and has been told he may not have many months to live without one. At least two Evel movies are in the works. One, directed by Robert Altman, has Bruce Willis as the stuntman. Another casts Matthew McConaughey in the starring role. Evel has gone through most of the money he earned jumping. "If he made $40 million," Robbie says, "he must have spent $50 or $60 million. He was always a little Barnum & Bailey. He's the con man supreme, that guy."
Any remaining friction between father and son is a result of Evel's ambivalence toward Robbie's career choice. To this day, Robbie remembers climbing into the ambulance with his father after stunts gone awry. Evel would say, "Promise me you'll never do this."
...
At the Iowa State Fair, Robbie Knievel is a featured performer, along with Herman's Hermits and Hogzilla, a 1,100-pound pig. It is unbearably hot, over 100 degrees, and he just knows it's going to be a bitch-20 minutes and a whole container of baby powder-to climb into his leathers. Across the way, a rooster-crowing contest is going on, and the smell of the 4-H barns saturates the air. Sure, he'd like to bust out of the fair circuit, to get away once and for all from the skillet-throwing and husband-calling contests. He'd much rather do a deal for a few spectacular jumps a year and maybe see if he can't get the Robbie doll back on the shelves. When his nerves give out, maybe he'll open a motorcycle memorabilia bar. As he checks out his bike, a fan calls out to him, "Do it, Robbie!"
He sighs. "Hey, you can take my leathers, man," he says. "I'll just do the speech."
Someone else yells, "How's your dad?"
But then his pyro team shoots off giant rockets. It is showtime. A crowd of a few thousand has gathered to watch Robbie jump 15 semi-trucks, a 175-foot dare. Little kids start waving American flags, and ladies reach out to grab at the feathers that trail from his collar. The Stars and Stripes wave from the ramps while Catalina sells T-shirts in her red, white and blue bathing suit top and skin-tight shorts. One fan strolls by in a shirt that says, "McGwire May Have the Bat, But the Knievels Have the Balls."
Robbie mounts his white bike, a customized Sidewinder. Swathed in cream-colored leathers, he is instantly covered by a layer of sweat. Robbie revs it up and does a sustained wheelie to roars. Standing on the seat, he makes a pass in front of the crowd. Then he rears back one more time and waggles his thumb. He revs the bike, hesitating. The crowd screams. Inside his helmet, Robbie screams too and revs the bike again. He really ought to quit doing this daredevil bit, he thinks. But he can't. It is simply what he is, a part of him, like the name on his bike or the asphalt in his ass. Suddenly, Robbie Knievel grabs the throttle; he knows the longer he waits, the worse the fear grows. He streaks down the runway and hits the takeoff ramp at 90 mph. As he sails into the air, a thought enters his head. "Idiot," he thinks. "Dipshit."
Halfway across the gap, he takes his hands off the bars for a moment and raises them in the air. He grabs the bars again, and touches down neatly on the landing ramp to more rocket fire. The crowd goes berserk. Yes, it's just a state fair, and yes, daredevils seem a dime a dozen these days. But there is no denying that when Robbie Knievel clears 15 trucks on a motorcycle, it is one absolutely badass spectacle. You can keep your mountain bikes and skateboards, because this is the real thing, every cubic inch of it potentially fatal. The act still scares the crap out of Middle America.
You simply must see it-before one of you dies.