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Leigh Montville’s new biography of Evel Knievel received a good review on the S I site and that was enough to send me to the library for a copy.

Montville is a talented writer and he’s clearly having the time of his life chronicling the adventures of the American daredevil. The ghost of Evel is toothless, and a good journalist can finally transcribe a full account of a man who may, truly, have been more evil than Evel.

Thief, wife beater, inveterate liar, hype merchant, alcoholic…not the image Ideal Toys had in mind when pushing their wildly successful toy line.

Knievel was a product of Butte, Montana, a mining town where the stench of death literally permuted the daily existence of the residents. Mining in the 40’s and 50’s did not have the Health and Safety strictures associated with the modern profession and it was common to have a male family member who had perished underground. The town was wild, a well paid collection of madmen who wanted to spend their cash while their feet were firmly above ground. Whorehouses and 24 hour saloons were common, mayhem saturated every corner.

Knievel was a hustler from the beginning, finding good success in the insurance business while never kicking his habit of robbery. He’d rob his local, the store where he had just done business or maybe just the business across the street. He stumbled into the carnival business and his first jump featured a hop over two sleeping mountain lions and a box full of rattlesnakes.

On the hustle, Evel had his first coup when Caesars Palace agreed to let him jump their famed fountains in 1967. The resulting crash was caught on film, by Linda Evans no less, and became a staple on ABC after the network purchased the footage. Knievel would jump on ABC’s Wide World of Sports seventeen times in the early seventies, including a jump at King’s Island that was watched by over 50 million Americans. The George Hamilton movie, the toys, the mass media coverage - in the early seventies Evel was a king, a contemporary of Elvis and Ali in the American celebrity firmament.

But Montville depicts the boorish, bullying behaviour that grew worse with the success. The closed circuit Snake River canyon farce of 1974, when no reasonable expectation of success was ever conceived by the Knievel team, suggested the possibility of a downward spiral. His proposed attempt to jump a canyon had been an inextricable part of his marketing for years, serving to separate him from the other daredevils. When Snake River was exposed as callous cash grab, the public began to snarl back.

A brutal beating of a former publicist in 1977 sealed the deal on Knievel. Sentenced to six months in jail, he lost his sponsorship deals with Ideal Toys and Harley Davison. He would end up declaring bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

The man’s fall must have been traumatic. He had been brutal to everyone on the way up, and when he proposed a sleazy jump over live sharks one columnist wrote, “I’ll be cheering for the sharks”. The ride back down must have been one nasty tumble.

This is definitely a pre-internet story, a recollection of an age where even a brute like Knievel could massage a genteel public image by instigating an anti-narcotics campaign (this while hammered almost all the time - including during a few jumps!) and decrying the influence of hippies. The excesses of his life, the battered body of his first wife, all would demand attention today.

The book is a fascinating reminder of just how times have changed, how invasive is the modern spectator. The purported hero of Montville’s work is distinctly unlikeable but the ride through the seventies is redolent with nostalgia and popular history. It’s hard to put the book down though one will surely mourn the loss of idealized visions of youth.

My brother once, famously at our house, fired my Evel Knievel cycle off of our roof. Maybe he knew something I didn’t…