Evel Knievel.
For legions of Baby Boomers, mere mention of the flamboyant motorcycle daredevil conjures up visions of star-spangled leathers, diamond studded canes … and horrific crashes.
Knievel, who died in 2007 at age 69, was labeled everything from a common criminal to a suicidal kook. Modern day gladiator? Reluctant folk hero? Con man extraordinaire? Take your pick. But one fact is indisputable: Robert Craig Knievel roared out of Butte, Montana, to electrify millions of fans for the better part of two decades. His death-defying stunts struck a chord with North America’s love affair with the shootout mentality of the Old West, but instead of gambling for relatively penny ante stakes, Knievel captured the world’s attention by repeatedly laying down the biggest chip of all.
Sept. 8 marks the 50th anniversary of Evel’s hugely-hyped attempt to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon aboard a steam-powered “sky cycle”, but before we get into that – and a look at some of the collectibles he inspired — a little history is in order.
Born in Butte on Oct. 17, 1938, Knievel left high school after his sophomore year and got a job in a local copper mine, but his first love was motorbiking. He was fired by the mining company after he made an earth mover do a motorcycle-type wheelie before accidentally driving it into Butte’s main power line, leaving the city without electricity for several hours. According to his website, Knievel got his nickname after spending a night in jail after being arrested for stealing hubcaps. In a neighboring cell was a prisoner named William Knofel, who was nicknamed “Awful”. This led to Knievel being dubbed “Evel” by one of the jailers.
After performing with a ragtag stunt team through the mid-1960s, Knievel decided to go solo. The event that thrust him into the international spotlight took place on New Year’s Eve, 1967. Thundering off a makeshift ramp at 90 miles per hour, he attempted to leap his 600-pound Harley-Davidson XR750 over and across the 145-foot fountain outside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
The resultant crash was captured on film by neophyte actress Linda Evans.
At the top of his trajectory, Evel lost control of the bike. When it hit the slippery landing ramp, he was catapulted over the handlebars and bounced like a rag doll 30 yards across the parking lot before slamming into a brick wall. The impact drove Knievel’s hip bone through his pelvis. Other injuries included seven broken ribs, a fractured arm, three crushed vertebrae and a skull fracture.
“That one was pretty bad, but it wasn’t the worst,” Knievel recalled in a 1990 interview with Canada’s Sun Media. “Two years earlier, in 1966, we were performing at the county fair in Barstow, California. It was a thrill show, and one of the stunts called for a guy to gun a motorcycle at me as I stood in the middle of the track. At the last second, I was supposed to jump up and spread my legs so he could go underneath me. Well, I jumped just high enough to miss the front wheel … but the handlebars caught me right across the thighs and groin. I was thrown 15 feet into the air and my body did a couple of somersaults. I landed on my back and couldn’t feel anything at all. A cop ran over and threw a blanket over me. He thought I was dead.”
Topps later commemorated the jump in its 2016 Heritage Baseball ‘Flashbacks’ insert set.
On May 10, 1970, Knievel crashed while attempting to jump 13 Pepsi trucks in Yakima, Washington. He managed to maintain control until the cycle hit the base of the ramp. He was thrown off and bounced 50 feet on the pavement, crushing his collarbone and sustaining multiple fractures to his right arm and both legs. On January 7–8, 1971, Knievel set a sales record at the Houston Astrodome by selling over 100,000 tickets for back-to-back performances, and six weeks later he set a world record by jumping 19 cars at Ontario Motor Speedway in California. The stunt was shot for the Hollywood biopic Evel Knievel, starring George Hamilton.
On March 3, 1972, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Knievel broke his back and a suffered a concussion after getting thrown off and run over by his Harley after a botched landing. He returned to action in November 1973, successfully jumping 50 stacked cars at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
On Aug. 20, 1974, 22,000 fans jammed Canadian National Exhibition stadium in Toronto to witness what was billed as Evel’s “last hurrah” before the Snake River Canyon jump: a world-record attempt to leap 13 Mack trucks. “I was especially proud of going to Toronto because it was the first time my sons Kelly (14) and Robbie (11) performed with me,” he recalled. “They got the crowd warmed up by doing some wheelies and other stunts ahead of the main jump. There was a lot riding on that day. A lot of folks who had various interests in the canyon jump were pretty nervous about it, but the CNE paid me a lot of money and I wanted to put on a good show.”
As it turned out, the concerns were unfounded. Knievel easily cleared the 35-yard distance and his flawless landing on the exit ramp elicited a tumultuous ovation from the big crowd.
The canyon stunt, which took place just 19 days later, was the culmination of a long battle between Knievel and the U.S. government for permission to attempt a mile-wide jump across the Grand Canyon in Arizona. When Uncle Sam refused to budge, Evel leased a section of the Snake River Canyon in northern Idaho to stage one of the most eagerly anticipated spectacles of the decade, but when the smoke cleared, the jump was a financial and promotional disaster.
In front of a live audience of around 50,000 and millions watching via closed-circuit theatre television, the sky cycle malfunctioned before it cleared the launch ramp, then plunged nose-first into the rocky bank of the river. “We lost a ton of money, but I kept my word to myself and my fans,” said Knievel, who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated the week of the jump.
Evel returned to the public eye on March 25, 1975, when the founder and former captain of the semi-pro Butte Bombers got back on the blades at a home game of the World Hockey Association’s Toronto Toros, taking part in a between-periods penalty shot competition against Toros goaltender Les Binkley. Wearing No. 13 and a star-spangled helmet, Evel pocketed $10,000 for scoring twice on five attempts – and showing enough puck-handling prowess to cause Toros owner Johnny Bassett to seriously consider offering him a tryout.
Two months later, in front of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium in London, Knievel crashed while trying to jump 13 single-deck AEC Merlin buses.
After the crash, despite breaking his pelvis, he addressed the audience and announced his retirement by stating, “Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country, I’ve got to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will ever see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.” Ignoring pleas from Frank Gifford of ABC’s Wide World of Sports to use a stretcher, Knievel walked off the Wembley pitch stating, “I came in walking, I’m going out walking!”
Of course, Evel couldn’t stay “retired.” He returned on Oct. 25, 1975, to jump 14 Greyhound buses at King’s Island, Ohio, then had a handful of smaller successes before finally hanging up his leathers for good after crashing ahead of a scheduled jump over a tank full of live sharks in Chicago in 1977.
The Legend Lives On
Knievel was one of the biggest sports and pop culture icons of his era and took advantage of it with deals that utilized his name and high flying image.
Released by Topps as a test issue in a handful of states in late 1974, the 60-card Evel Knievel trading card set is considerably rarer than other test issues of the era and has steadily gained in value. The cards have a blue border with a red stripe adorned with white stars, and the photos include a mix of shots from various stunts, with a heavy emphasis on the canyon jump.
The card backs are blue and have a head-on drawing of Evel on his motorcycle, adjacent to a gray screened writeup. Below the writeup is a printed warning: “Motorcycle and bike stunting can be dangerous. Don’t take chances!”
With a simple cello wrapper, each six-card pack also includes an “auto sticker” card containing 16 car-related mini stickers. The 22 sticker cards are actually reprints from 1970’s Topps Way Out Wheels, and have no connection to Knievel.
Because of its small print run, the set carries solid values today. PSA 9s of cards No. 1 (Evel Knievel), No. 23 (The Living Legend) and No. 35 (Star Spangled Hero) sold for $275, $220 and $200 respectively at the Toronto Sportscard Expo in April, while a raw near-mint set dropped for $1,500 and an ultra-rare display box sold for $2,100.
To date, PSA has graded nearly 1,400 cards from the set but there are only 73 rated Mint 9 and no Gem Mint 10s.
Despite the relatively limited distribution, single cards, packs, a set and even an uncut sheet can be found on eBay.
Other Evel Collectibles
Tickets to Evel Knievel’s biggest jumps can be hard to come by, with sellers typically asking at least several hundred dollars for the uniquely shaped Snake River jump ticket.
Tickets to to one of the closed circuit broadcasts are much cheaper.
Between 1972 and 1977, New York-based Ideal Toy Corp. released a series of Evel-related action figures and accessories, and over those six years, the company claimed to have realized more than $125 million in sales. The original release was a series of seven-inch figures of Knievel in a variety of outfits, followed in 1973 by the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle.
Subsequent models included the Scramble Van, the Canyon Sky Cycle, a dragster, a stunt car, a trail bike and the Evel Knievel Stunt World playset –- all of which maintain a steady presence on eBay nearly 50 years later. Other popular collectibles from Evel’s career include posters, programs and handbills – not to mention a full-sized Bally pinball game that often sells for thousands of dollars today, record albums and even an electric toothbrush designed to look like his Snake River sky cycle.
Sales of Ideal’s Knievel line plummeted after he was sentenced to jail for assaulting a former press agent.
Whether or not the memory of Evel Knievel outlives the generation that propelled him to international fame really doesn’t matter. Perhaps the most appropriate tribute to his legacy as a death-defying anti-hero is that it inspired one of the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe. According to artist Mark Texeira, quoted on card G7 of Comic Images’ 1992 Ghost Rider II set: “Ghost Rider first appeared 20 years ago as a combination of two early ’70s pop icons — Evel Knievel and The Exorcist.”
The real-life inspiration for both a best-selling toy line and a comic book super hero? There couldn’t possibly be a more fitting legacy for the world’s greatest daredevil.
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