Long-retired Knievel frail, feisty, still cheating death

[BERIGAN]

Former daredevil Evel Knievel, who spends his days hooked to an oxygen tank and a morphine pump, still offers up his trademark snarl — years removed from his last motorcycle jump. Knievel, who is showing off his latest licensed toys, has a message for photographers: "I don't smile."

By Jim M. Stern for USA TODAY

Updated 1/3/2007 10:16 AM

THE EVEL KNIEVEL FILE

Age: 68, born Oct. 17, 1938, in Butte, Mont.

Name at birth: Robert Craig Knievel Jr.

Other sports: Competed in track, ski jumping and ice hockey at Butte High. Won Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A men's ski jumping championship in 1957. Played in the Eastern Hockey League in 1959. Has been a life-long golfer.

Other jobs: Diamond drill operator, hunting guide, insurance salesman, motorcycle dealer.

Touring show: Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils began in 1965.

On screen: George Hamilton and Sam Elliot played him in movies, and Knievel played himself in Viva Knievel, which also starred Gene Kelly and Red Buttons.

GAMBLING STILL STIRS KNIEVEL

CLEARWATER, Fla. -- He doesn't chase women anymore. He can't pound shots of whiskey. He no longer goes on shopping sprees for diamond rings or snakeskin boots. But Evel Knievel has no intention of giving up his favorite vice: gambling.

Despite his ill health, he perks up when discussing the time he made two bets totaling $154,000 on Super Bowl IX. Pittsburgh beat Minnesota 16-6, and he won both wagers. Evel says he typically bets most NFL games each weekend.

"We're going to win some money today, buddy," he tells a confidante on the phone.

That wasn't the case one day a long time ago at a dog track in Tampa, recalls close friend and golf partner, Paul Blanda. Evel found the biggest underdog on four legs and slapped down $10,000, triggering an odds drop from 50-1 to 1-5. "I said, 'Evel, what did you do?' " Blanda recalls. "He said, 'If I'm gonna win, I'm gonna bet on the long shot.' I told him it wasn't the way you bet at the track."

Blanda, brother of Hall of Fame quarterback-kicker George Blanda, recalls his celebrated ally as a relentless, aggressive gambler who "never backed down from a bet" and would not suffer fools who tried to deceive him. Years ago, he and Evel played a round with a singer who tried to surreptitiously kick his ball from the rough to the fairway. Evel, he says, pulled out a .45-caliber gun before Blanda calmed him down.

"I gambled so much on the golf course, you can't believe it," Evel says. "One of the greatest compliments I ever got was from the guy who built Caesars Palace. He said, 'Kid, you're the biggest gambler who ever came to this town.' "

Yet Evel was so generous that he would think nothing of walking into a restaurant and picking up everyone's tab, Blanda says. Or handing $100 bills to the cooks.

"Most celebrities have deep pockets and short arms. Evel was the reverse," he says. "He was just a common guy who came up the hard way."

-- Jon Saraceno

Long-retired Knievel frail, feisty, still cheating death

By Jon Saraceno, USA TODAY

CLEARWATER, Fla. — The crippled grandfather of extreme sports inhales deeply. He sits in his leather easy chair, mind clouded by meds, bones throbbing with arthritis. As he watches an NFL game, on which he has bet $1,000, the cantankerous stuntman clutches oxygen tubes supplying life to hardening lungs.

It is a shock to the senses, if not the sensibilities, to see ultra-cool Evel Knievel, 68, looking so feeble, so frayed around his graying daredevil edges, right down to his gnarled knuckles and wobbly gait.

His ravaged, 155-pound body isn't composed of original parts. He has a new liver and a replacement hip, and most recently doctors inserted a drug pump in his abdomen. It gives little reprieve from the excruciating pain in a fused spine mangled by hundreds of perilous, cringe-inducing motorcycle jumps from the 1960s and '70s.

"Ever see one of them before?" Evel asks, lifting a pajama top to reveal a pain-relief gizmo under his pale skin. "This sends morphine and synthetic heroin into my back 24 hours a day. It's awfully strong — it affects your thinking, your brain."

For years he cheated death, sometimes spectacularly so. Numerous crashes cemented his legend and all but guaranteed premature infirmity. These days, in what might be his last great gamble, Evel flies down the cosmic ramp of his final jump — the leap of faith.

While he has avoided the inevitable countless times, he no longer feels invincible. In fact, the bank robber-turned-international icon sounds apprehensive. After decades of hard jumps and harder living, including bouts with alcoholism, Evel tries to bridge the psychological chasm between mortality and eternity.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Father-son daredevil team mends fences

He figures he will be judged not just as a cult-like figure, but also as Robert Craig Knievel, the temperamental show-biz performer from the wrong side of the tracks in Butte, Mont.

"I think about God a lot more than ever," he says, "though I used to ask him, 'Help me make a good jump.' I'm awfully tough to get along with, but I'll tell you what: I am a good person. I wish there was such a thing as reincarnation."

Suffering from the aftereffects of a stroke, Evel bets that a life of crime, fame and indulgence can be outweighed by his good works to those he inspired: children in burn wards, the downtrodden, soldiers.

"Veterans have told me that, for some reason, I made a difference in their lives, that they were headed for disaster," he says. "God, at least I have done something."

His hair is thinning, his face remarkably unmarked yet gaunt. Evel looks nothing like the handsome, devil-may-care Western buck with the swept-back mane, walking stick, flying cape and — to the chagrin of hardened bikers everywhere — the white leather jumpsuit, festooned with stars and stripes and inspired by Liberace.

Evel was a gritty caricature of a superhero whose outfit was as ostentatious as his act was audacious. For decades, he was lampooned in pop culture, but there is no doubt the charismatic showman had a definable aura and mass appeal.

Men admired him. Their sons wanted to be like him. Women just wanted him. (And according to Evel, thousands got their wish.)

Tending the Evel legend

The swagger has been reduced to a struggle simply to get up in the morning and get to the phone. He is a stickler about extending the Evel legend, preserving the Evel persona and creating new business, long after the end of his lucrative stuntman paydays and afternoons of high-stakes golf in which he would bet up to $100,000.

In true Knievelian style, he is determined to stave off the effects of pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that involves scarring of the lungs for which there is no cure.

"God," Evel says, "never made a tougher son of a bitch than me."

Nor a more skilled self-promoter, a man who unintentionally spawned a phrase for the generations: "Who do you think you are — Evel Knievel?"

There is only one Evel, and he knows it. He retains a sense of self-importance as expansive as Idaho's Snake River Canyon, the site of his famously failed hurtle 32 years ago. He retains tightfisted control of everything, and everyone, around him. He can be charming and pseudo-gruff. It might be a photographer ("I don't smile. Kiss my ass.") or a buddy talking point spreads ("You can take your newspaper 'line' and shove it — how's that?").

Last month, Evel sued Kanye West and AOL over the rapper's use of his trademark name and likeness in a music video that parodied the Snake River Canyon jump. Two years ago, a judge ruled the cult hero could not hold ESPN liable for publishing a photo of him with two women and the caption: "You're never too old to be a pimp."

SPORTS SCOPE: Knievel videos, lawsuit

He battled the IRS and Montana over allegedly unpaid taxes; survived abandonment by his parents, who left him with grandparents at 6 months old; endured jail, bankruptcy and divorce — he even ran over a Hells Angel. He continues to fight today … to live a little longer, for better deals, for the affection and respect of friends and family.

"All (my grandmother) wanted was to talk with me and to rub her feet. I just hate myself for not spending (more) time with her and telling her 'I love you' one more time," Evel says. "The saddest thing is when a guy is paying so much attention to the world and everything going by that he can't take the time for his own mother," which is what he considered his grandmother.

Last summer, he and his youngest son, Robbie, 44, who traced his dad's professional footsteps, appeared back home at Evel Knievel Days after years of feuding. The father's on-again, off-again relationship with his son bears the emotional scars of a lifetime because, as Robbie says, "I'm the only one in the family who stood up to him."

Now, he says, "My dad realizes love is everything. To do what he's doing now — to have a talk with God and be loving to his family — I love him to death for it. God loves Evel. Figure that one out."

"I love Robbie," Evel says.

Kelly, Evel's oldest son, owns a construction firm in Las Vegas. (In 1995, Kelly's telemarketing company was sued by Missouri for targeting senior citizens with high-pressure calls. He agreed to stop the calls, and the company paid $150,000 in restitution.)

Evel's family includes daughters Alicia and Tracey, 11 grandchildren and ex-wives Linda Knievel and Krystal Kennedy, 37, the former Florida State golfer who remains his caregiver and companion despite their brief, troubled marriage.

He says he thinks often about his creator and prays for forgiveness.

"If there is a heaven, I don't know anything else I can do to get there — and neither do you," he says. "There are some personal things that I would never do again. … God made us. He's in charge of everything, right? If he didn't like us, why didn't he change us?

"Hey, I faced every challenge that came along. I just did everything. I have no regrets."

Driven to be the best ever

A longtime friend, Jack Ferriter, 72, says he regularly traveled cross-country with Evel and Linda and remembers their animated discussions involving the spiritual.

"She always was trying to promote (him) being a nice guy and to straighten up his act, preaching to him about heaven," Ferriter says. "He would say, 'Linda, I'm not so sure I'm interested in heaven (unless) they've got beautiful women up there and golf courses.' She was a Holy Roller, and he resented it."

The cruel irony for the Knievel clan is watching its willful patriarch slowly waste away. At his madcap zenith, Evel could have met his demise on any of his failed motorized leaps over rattlesnakes, cars, water fountains or double-decker buses.

"He never wanted anyone to surpass him," Robbie says. "For years, it seemed like my dad was pushing me off, like I was his competitor. He just never wanted to move over. I could never fill his shoes, anyway. It's like being Elvis' daughter or Muhammad Ali's son."

With age and debilitating injury, Evel eventually became quite the uneasy rider. He formally retired in 1981. During his wild and woolly years, he broke nearly 40 bones, including his back seven times.

He was in a coma for weeks in 1968 when he crashed after jumping over the fountain at Caesars Palace. The $3 million, closed-circuit TV caper propelled his popularity and fueled record audiences for ABC's Wide World of Sports, where Evel and his act became a fixture.

The old daredevil's crashes are now positively pedestrian: slipping in a Jacuzzi, falling on a golf course. The last time he rode a motorcycle, a few years ago at a mall appearance, he snapped his left ankle. "It's no laughing matter when they put me under the gas," Evel says. "I gave at the office already."

A fortune won and lost

Back in the '70s, promoter Billy Rundle recalls Evel telling adoring fans of his next planned exploit: "I am going to jump from an airplane from 40,000 feet without a parachute and land in a haystack." Offstage, Rundle asked him about his sincerity. "I'm serious — you can bet on which haystack I'm going to land on," Evel said. Rundle remembers thinking, "This guy's crazy."

Marketing risk is what he did for a living. One of the all-time self-promoters, Evel still loves being in the entrepreneurial mix. One potential venture is the Knievel Motorcycle Co., to be based out of Pittsburgh, 30 years after his last major show, a flopped practice run over a tank of sharks in Chicago.

The phone rings. It's a memorabilia dealer. "You want me to sign 1,500 pictures? How much you gonna pay me?" Evel asks. "You're going to pay me $30,000? Well, I'd rather you come in December. I might be dead in January."

His popular stunt cycle toy was reintroduced in 2005 after, he says, various Knievel toys grossed $300 million. He says he earned $30 million over his peak years but lavish spending — big-boy toys included yachts and Ferraris — whittled much of it. In his modest condo, he shows off his latest version of the cycle, an Evel bobble-head and a bottle of Evel hot sauce.

"I was the first one to ever do a wheelie on a motorcycle while standing on a seat — ever," he says.

Today's Gen-X motorcycle performers don't conduct themselves properly, he says. "One kid looked at the camera and stuck out his tongue and made a goofy face. A young man's brain is no more developed than his body. They say with age comes wisdom, right?"

Maybe. It didn't help when Evel imbibed long after his doctors told him to quit, before his liver transplant seven years ago. At the time, doctors told him he had less than six months to live. (For years, his favorite cocktail was a "Montana Mary," a scorching blend of Wild Turkey, beer and tomato juice.)

Perhaps his vices can be traced to a hardscrabble youth, when he frequently ran afoul of the law. Fame and prosperity often were tough to handle, he says.

"You feel important when you're not," he says. "That's the point I reached. I actually had a talk with myself years ago (after) I punched a maitre d' in the puss. I said to myself, 'Who do you think you are?' "

The quest to uncover value and meaning from his earthly existence has greater urgency these days. Evel takes a notepad off a chair-side table and begins to read something that sounds like a eulogy, which friends say he has written.

"I hope I have lived a life that matters … I am ready to leave my loved ones …

"My wealth, my fame will amount to naught … My grudges, frustrations, resentments and jealousies will finally disappear."

Evel glances at his visitor, who asks him if he ever thought life on Earth might be heaven, after all.

"No," he says, staring death in the face with a weary smile. "God wouldn't do that to us."

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2007-01-02-...vel-cover_x.htm