Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel
By Leigh Montville. Doubleday, 416 pp, hardcover

Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel was larger than life. He was Superman, a Roman gladiator, and Elvis all wrapped together in one incredible, swaggering, death-defying, star-spangled package. Nothing could stop him—no horrific crash, not a 29-day coma, not even a Guinness-record grand total of 433 broken bones (some, obviously, more than once). A true bad-ass, he held a very special place in the pantheon of self-made heroes and inhabited a more rarefied plane than mere mortals.

At least, that’s the way it seemed to pretty much any red-blooded boy back in the 1970s. We couldn’t get enough of the guy, whether by watching his daredevil motorcycle jumps on The Wide World of Sports, playing with our Ideal Evel Knievel Stunt Cycles, or skinning our elbows in mishaps involving homemade ramps and copy-cat stunts.

It was a different time, to be sure. There were no home computers, no video games, and no VCR/DVD/PVRs. It was an era before the life-altering arrival of Star Wars, which changed North American childhood forever, upping the ante on everything kid-related—movies, books, toys—and ushering in a new era of mass-marketing.

It was a simpler time, and more complicated. There was, after all, a lot going on under all that shag carpeting—Watergate, Vietnam, and all the fallout of the 1960s. There were bad cars and worse fashions, as well as earth-shaking changes to the most basic social contracts.

Knievel, it seems, was also much more complicated than we kids knew (or cared) at the time. As Leigh Montville shows in his new biography Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend, he was a hustler, a felon, an idealist, a thug, a narcissist, a businessman, a skirt-chaser, an athlete, and a snake-oil salesman.

“He was a character straight from the dusty back roads of self-promotion,” writes Montville, “from the land of carnival shows and fast talk, three-headed goats and cotton-candy excitement.”

As it turns out, Knievel’s story is just as gripping now as it was back then. Not a particularly likable man but never a boring one, he drifts from scheme to scam, leaving a trail littered with bad business decisions, ex-lovers, and run-ins with the law, along with some really thrilling (and insane) stunts.

Montville’s prose is especially enjoyable, too. Amusing and lively, with a stylistic nod to Tom Wolfe and the New Journalism, it’s a great fit for the subject matter. And with biographies of Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, and Dale Earnhardt under his belt, Montville has become skilled at re-creating the feel of the past and bringing back a lot of memories.

He certainly brought me back, anyway—to one of the most exciting events of my childhood: it was September 30, 1976, and a family friend took to me to see Knievel live at the Kingdome in Seattle. It was the first time I’d been to the Kingdome (the Mariners didn’t even exist yet) and the excitement was palpable as we waited for the big event, Knievel’s jump over seven Greyhound buses.

After what seemed like an eternity of preliminary diversions (some snowmobile stunts, some car crashes, Knievel’s son Robbie jumping cars), the big man himself came out on his trusty Harley-Davidson Sportster and did some laps, and a bunch of wheelies, around the stadium.

Finally, it was time for the big event. Knievel wheeled to the top of a huge ramp and sat still for a moment, surveying those seven buses. Was he praying? Meditating? Visualizing the jump? Whatever he was doing, it didn’t take long. He quickly kicked the bike into gear, roared down the ramp and hung airborne for one magical, breathtaking, seemingly endless moment. Then, all of a sudden, he’d cleared the buses and touched back down on the far side, totally safe and completely sound.

Of course, Knievel did eventually turn out to be mortal after all, succumbing to a host of health problems in 2007.

But for a few short seconds, thirty-five years ago in Seattle, Knievel had not only overcome gravity and defied death, he’d proven that he was the biggest and baddest bad-ass of them all.