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Death Finally Defeats Knievel

AP Photo

This photo from 2006 shows Evel Knievel and some of his cycles at his Clearwater home.

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By ERIC MALNIC, Los Angeles Times

Published: December 1, 2007

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Evel Knievel, the flamboyant motorcycle stuntman whose thrilling triumphs and spectacular failures enshrined him as America's consummate daredevil, died Friday in Clearwater. He was 69.

Knievel, who survived at least 38 broken bones, multiple concussions and countless abrasions acquired in daring jumps that ended in unplanned crashes, had been in failing health for years, including suffering from diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs.

Longtime friend and promoter Billy Rundle said Knievel had difficulty breathing at his Clearwater condominium and died before an ambulance could get him to a hospital.

"It's been coming for years, but you just don't expect it," Rundle said. "Superman just doesn't die, right?"

Knievel died only three days after it was announced that he and rapper Kanye West had settled a federal lawsuit over the use of the legendary daredevil's trademarked name and likeness in a popular West music video.

Many of Knievel's successes were remarkable - riding fast motorcycles up steeply pitched approach ramps and vaulting through the air over as many as 20 cars or 14 Greyhound buses before landing safely on descent ramps as far as 150 feet from the takeoff point.

It was some of his defeats, though, that won him his greatest fame - slamming to the pavement in a Caesars Palace crash that left him in a coma for a month and falling into an Idaho gorge in a failed attempt to leap across the 1,700-foot-wide Snake River Canyon on a specially designed "skycycle."

The Stunt He Gave Up

Despite repeated accidents that cost him a total of more than three years in hospitals, Knievel once told The Wall Street Journal that there was only one mishap that prompted him to drop a stunt from his repertoire.

He said he used to stand in front of a motorcycle speeding directly toward him, jumping spread-eagle at the last second as the cycle and its rider flashed beneath him.

In 1965, in Barstow, Calif., he didn't jump quite high enough. The motorcycle, going about 60 mph, hit him square in the groin.

"A highway patrolman covered my head with a blanket," Knievel said. "He thought I was dead. So did I."

Knievel was laid up for more than a month, but he came back for more. Glib, shrewd, arrogant and charming, he promoted himself and his dangerous pursuits so successfully that Knievel emerged as a millionaire and a household name in the 1960s and '70s.

At a time when the nation was still struggling with the effects of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Knievel became an iconic American hero in his tight-fitting, red-white-and-blue jumpsuit.

His image was used to market motorcycles, crash helmets, Halloween costumes and candy. Two movies and several television programs were based on his exploits.

"America ... needed somebody who was truthful and honest, somebody who would spill blood and break bones and suffer brain concussions, someone who wasn't phony," he said without a trace of modesty.

Robert Craig Knievel was born to Ann Keaugh Knievel and her husband, car dealer Robert Edward Knievel, in Butte, Mont., on Oct. 17, 1938. His parents separated when he was 6, and he moved a few blocks to the home of his grandparents.

Along the way, he picked up his nickname, Evel. There were conflicting accounts, even by him, of how that happened. The bottom line is that someone, perhaps he, started calling him "Evil," and he changed the I to an E to make the whole thing more distinctive.

Tampa Bay Connections

The trim, 180-pound 6-footer was a good athlete. After dropping out of school in 1956, he won a regional ski-jumping competition, pole-vaulted more than 14 feet during a short stint in the Army, played briefly with the Charlotte Clippers of the Eastern Hockey League and started, managed and starred on his own semi-pro hockey team in Butte.

Knievel opened a Honda motorcycle dealership in Moses Lake, Wash., in 1965, hyping sales by offering a $100 discount to anyone who could beat him at arm wrestling. That same year, he started Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils.

"We had a traveling show," he told The New Yorker. "I'd do five or six stunts - ride through fire walls, jump over boxes of live rattlesnakes and land between two chained mountain lions, get towed down a drag strip at 200 mph."

After a liver transplant in 1999 - performed at Tampa General Hospital - Knievel told The Tampa Tribune that he felt "like a new man."

He was so grateful to his surgeon that he gave him a $25,000 motorcycle, according to a Feb. 10, 1999, story published in the Tribune. The cycle was raffled off and proceeds benefited the LifeLink Foundation, which coordinated his transplant.

Tampa General spokeswoman Ellen Fiss said he was featured in a series of print advertisements where the daredevil claimed the hospital was "the best . . . I've ever been in-and I've been in a lot of them all over the world."

Knievel's name has also shown up in Tampa Bay police blotters. In 2002, his ex-wife Krystal Kennedy-Knievel, threatened to shoot him in a post-divorce argument over her jewelry collection, court records show.

Judge Amy Williams barred Kennedy-Knievel from contacting Knievel or carrying a gun for four years.

Still, the couple lived together in the Clearwater condo Knievel had called home since 1996.

Tribune reporter Ray Reyes contributed to this report.

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