'Evel Knievel: Life of Evel' by Stuart Barker
BOOK REVIEW
Evel Knievel was a superhero, from the tip of his jumpsuit collar to the bottom of his white boots. He mounted motorcycles, and even a few rocket ships. He leaped cars, buses, rattlesnakes and sharks in a single bound. He wore a cape.
Even so, Knievel was no Superman. Underneath the star-spangled get-up, the first son of Butte, Mont., was a tale-telling, philandering ex-con who once smashed another man's arms with a baseball bat.
And about those leaps . . . well, they might have entailed a single bound at first, but they usually involved several bone-crushing, skull-fracturing bounces at the end. This superhero was more a crash-test dummy.
This last idea -- that Knievel was basically but a passenger on his daredevil endeavors -- resides at the heart of Stuart Barker's "Evel Knievel: Life of Evel," a biography of the self-described "Last Gladiator." It's a jarring concept to any child of the 1970s who grew up believing that a man really could fly.
For those unfamiliar with the Knievel story, or hazy on key points in its timeline -- did he blow out at London's Wembley Stadium before or after sticking the landing at Kings Island? -- Barker's book seems a solid place to start. Timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Knievel's death at age 69, the biography is a straightforward, start-to-finish tale, moving from his wild-child beginnings to his ravaged end.
Although it could be argued that an innovator such as Knievel deserves more than a standard story line, there's a certain wisdom in staying out of the way of his story, especially its one-helluva-ride second act. Do we really need more than the facts of Knievel's Snake River Canyon stunt -- the daredevil's most famous, and infamous, "jump" -- to convey the beautiful, misplaced courage of a man willing to strap himself into an undertested rocket and press the launch button, essentially leaving it up to a higher power as to whether he spanned the 1,600-foot gap?
The beginning of Knievel's run was no less touched by madness. In 1965, to promote his struggling Honda bike dealership in Spokane, Wash. -- and with no more relevant experience than some minor motorcycle tricks, an undistinguished career as a dirt-bike racer and childhood memories of a daredevil car show -- Bobby Knievel, as he was then known, ran a 350cc up a wooden ramp, gave the throttle a twist and jumped over two mountain lions and, for good measure and better sales at the gate, a box containing 100 rattlesnakes.
