Some of you will have already noticed that the original Wall of Paul slogan, "Paul Tatara on Movies (and so forth)," now reads "Paul Tatara on Pop Culture (and so forth)." In the winter of 2007, when we launched this site, I knew I'd initially draw readers who were familiar with my CNN and Goodauthority movie coverage, so I mostly wrote about movies. But I live in the same world everyone else inhabits, and I contemplate a lot of things besides motion pictures. It was my goal, then, to eventually examine music, sports, politics, religion, firecrackers, action figures, babies, fast food, heroes, hypocrites, air conditioning, parades, cream puffs, and a slew of other topics that have come to shape my consciousness. Thus the altered, and far more accurate, slogan.Contact Paul RSS Feed
In case you didn’t receive the newsletter, Robbie Knievel, the son of the late daredevil, Evel Knievel, recently managed to jump his motorcycle over 24 ill-defined “delivery trucks,” all of which, in a stroke of dumb luck, were lined up in a neat little row, just waiting to be humiliated by a suddenly airborne Harley. This magnificent event unfolded at King’s Island amusement park in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Evel himself once cleared 160 fully-operational Weed-Whackers, or whatever the fuck he jumped over at King’s Island.
Frankly, the precise objects of his jumpification don’t really matter, because Evel didn’t crash at King’s Island. And when I was growing up in the 1970s, I was big fan of watching Evel Knievel flop around like a rag doll and break his pelvis.
At this point, I should probably write something like “Robert Craig Knievel was born in Butte, Montana in 1938, to Robert E. and Ann Kehoe Knievel,” which is true enough. But why confuse things with facts? We all know people read an article like this to envision someone crashing, so lets just stick with that line of thought.
If you weren’t around to experience it, it’s difficult to fathom just how big a draw Evel Knievel was back when we didn’t have ESPN. When I was 10 or 12 years old, sports fans who weren’t focused on football or baseball had to settle for whatever absurdist competition they decided to show you on “ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” which was broadcast every single weekend on ABC-TV, for something like 65 years.
Originally hosted by Thomas Edison, “Wide World of Sports” would eventually become the domain of Jim McKay, who had funny hair, and never failed to point out that the Harlem Globetrotters were “the clown-princes of basketball,” or that Chris Economaki was now ready to shout something inaudible about blown gaskets “down in the pits.” That was great, of course, but they also showed an inordinate amount of ice skating on “Wide World of Sports,” which was my cue to grab a Little Debbie cake and change the channel to “Star Trek.”
Still, every now and then, rainbows appeared, and McKay would announce that next week's "special edition" would feature Evel Knievel once again attempting to break his neck, back, and ever-popular pelvis. On live television. And I’d feel like I had to pee for seven straight days.
It’s pretty stunning that people now insist Knievel was a great daredevil. I guess it all depends on your definition of “great.” If you mean “able to complete a stunt without a horrific miscalculation that sends him to the hospital,” you need to come up with a better word. Evel was actually a lousy daredevil. But, paradoxically, I guess that’s why you can argue he was great.
If he had elegantly completed every single jump, every single time, nobody would have watched him. But Knievel never invested in a slide rule. Apparently he figured you just had to go “fast” and “high” to complete any jump, as if these two absolutes were guaranteed to carry you beyond whatever random number of vehicles, then gently release you into the warm embrace of yon landing ramp.
He was often wrong.
After several years peppered with wildly telegenic miscalculations, Knievel seemed enslaved by inexplicable optimism. He was practically the George W. Bush of flying through the air on motorcycles, but the only person he could possibly annihilate was himself, and “Wide World of Sports” viewers couldn’t get enough of him.
As a kid, I had a really weird relationship with Knievel. He must have known that 70% of his audience, myself included, was secretly hoping he’d take a header. And he encouraged our fascination by repeatedly sneaking out of hospitals, a month after another concrete-driven re-arrangement of his vertebrae, to jump again. After a while, you could fully imagine him getting pulled through a drainpipe and flattened by a bulldozer, only to shake himself back into traditional form, Sylvester the Cat style, climb on his bike, and splatter himself all over another parking lot.
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Some of the crashes were unbelievable. Knievel connoisseurs all have their favorites, with the back-snapper that took place when he tried to clear the fountains at Caesar’s Palace pretty much getting the Palm d’Or. Let's take a look at this little miscalculation, shall we?
Ouch.
Actually, this late-career one from Wembley Stadium is a lot of fun, too...provided you're not Knievel.
In your memory, though, the crashes all sort of run together, like those square-looking Westerns John Wayne made in the 1960s.
I'm pretty sure the one I can call up in my head is a re-mix of several different events. In it, Knievel flips over the handlebars and gets folded in half when the bike slams down on his ribs. Then he bounces off the cement and spins lazily through the air like tossed pizza dough. Then he does the Funky Chicken - on his back - at about 50 m.p.h., for about 70 yards. Then he rolls into a sitting position, waves to the crowd, lights a Lucky Strike, and goes down on his face for good.
There’s also one - and I know for certain this happened, because I recently saw the footage - where he successfully completes the jump, then falls off the bike and slides into a concrete wall that’s situated way too close to the landing ramp. SLAM! Right into it.
It seems like somebody would have said, “Hey, that wall’s way too close to the landing ramp.”
It was often reported that Knievel had broken 56 bones during his career, in a wide variety of publicity-generating ways. So it’s pretty unfortunate that he’s best known today for attempting to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, a multi-million dollar prank that didn’t stand a chance in hell of working, and basically just scared the shit out of him. “Jump” is a pretty loose term, anyway, given that Knievel was sitting in what amounted to a homemade rocket covered with Chiclets logos when he did it.
He almost drowned that time, because his seatbelt got jammed when the missile’s improperly-deployed parachute lowered him to the ground. That’s right— he was victimized by a seatbelt and a parachute. This is nowhere near as cool as having your innards squeezed out of your butt when a motorcycle rolls over you.
The whole Snake River thing was hugely embarrassing, and was pretty much the end of Evel Knievel for me. Even though he had once quite literally jumped a shark, this time he jumped the shark, and, for his trouble, the poof permanently abandoned his pompadour. In a word, he suddenly seemed human.
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In later years, Knievel got a pretty cranky about how people were treating his “legacy.” In 1977, he actually took a baseball bat to a 20th Century Fox movie producer who wrote a tell-all book that Evel didn’t like, and I don’t mean he chased the guy around in fast-motion while Boots Randolph played “Yakety Sax.” He was sentenced to several months in the pokey for it, and, when he got out, he had bouts of both money and health problems.
Through it all, though, his fans remained his fans; you can certainly imagine him posing for a few thousand ego-boosting snapshots at the Ft. Lauderdale Denny’s (“Of course I’ll sign that napkin, Darlin’”) before polishing off another Lumberjack breakfast. His death this past November means that any reunited-Beatles dreams – you know, Evel strapping on the leather for a final, crazy-ass jump in his wheelchair or something – have been forever put to rest. But this guy left us with a legacy that, with the possible exception of Andy Kaufman’s, is unique in the history of popular culture.
Most of the time, he got it right, landing safely and heading off to the casino for another shot of Jack and a new piece of tail. But his raison d’etre, the reason people cared at all, was that he blew it so spectacularly. Knievel knew that if he wanted his career to continue, he had to periodically almost kill himself, so he figured out ways that he might do that, then proceeded accordingly. He didn’t just play hurt, he played at getting hurt, and that takes a level of commitment that most of us, unless we’re members of some dungeon club in Chelsea, simply refuse to muster.
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