Evil Knievel RIP

[glam]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7122258.stm

Richard's documentary on him is due to air on Christmas Day

[lymaze]

Yes, just heard this on the news. RIP.

[inky]

lymaze said:

Yes, just heard this on the news. RIP.

That's really sad news He wasn't that old in the great scheme of things. RIP evil

[Mayfayre]

That's sad, it's no age at all nowadays. RIP

[lew]

......awful

[Sloopy]

Very sad news.

I wonder if they will still air Richard's show as a tribute??

[hypnobird]

sloopy said:

Very sad news.

I wonder if they will still air Richard's show as a tribute??

Depending on when it was recorded it might be one of the last interviews; assuming the people administering the estate are OK, I suppose it could go ahead.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evel_Knievel#Post-daredevil_years

[Eclair]

Very sad to hear that, its been on the news here too, unfortunately he wasn't well for a while. RIP Evil.

[PP]

Article in The Mirror....


Evel Knievel my hero
EXCLUSIVE RICHARD HAMMOND ON HIS WEEK WITH STUNT LEGEND JUST MONTHS BEFORE HE DIED
03/12/2007

Riding a slightly too shiny hired Harley into a gun club on the outskirts of Butte, Montana, I felt nervous.

This was one of those meeting-a-childhood-hero moments, and there's never any shortage of people to tell you that's a bad idea.

Like millions, Evel Knievel's heroic status had dominated my childhood games. I built ramps out of hardboard and bricks and jumped over Action Man and toy buses on my bicycle.

If it rained, we went indoors and sent a wind-up plastic model of him and his bike hurtling across the living room.

Advertisement
Now, 30 years later, his grizzled head peeped out of the window of a huge SUV in a car park at the foot of the mountains around Butte.

It was this summer. I was there to make a documentary about his life, spending a week with him during the Evel Knievel Days festival in Butte, held every year in his honour.

I shook his skinny, old man's hand and said hello. He breathed through oxygen tubes in his nose, attached to a tank at his side. As his breathless speech was punctuated by the oxygen tank's hiss, I realised my hero was old and badly broken.

He had a serious lung disorder and severe diabetes - and a lifetime spent breaking and re-breaking nearly every bone in his body had taken its toll.

But immediately, I glimpsed some sort of inner strength.

That sounds faintly ridiculous, but there was something about his wiry, sinewy frame, his small, fierce eyes and the grip his dry, bony hand gave back when we shook, that suggested indestructibility.

While filming, I met Evel at various locations around his hometown for private screenings of archive footage of some of his most famous stunts. We sat in a drive-in movie theatre and watched him leap the fountains at Caesars Palace. As the film ended, Evel announced he needed to go home. I drove him back to an assisted care home and dropped him off - I watched him go in, an elderly man, accompanied by a nurse carrying his oxygen tank.

I never really imagined I might meet my childhood hero but had I done, I'd never have thought it would be like this. Still, as he staggered back into the home, and the male nurses in their starched white suits helped him, there was something about him that suggested he might, at any moment, punch one to the ground, leap on a bike and jump out of the car park.

We met to watch and talk about his famous Wembley jump in 1975. He set up the jump to conquer Europe and was to leap over 13 double decker buses in front of a huge crowd watching at the stadium and on TV.

But he landed badly, was flipped over his bike and hurtled across the stadium floor with the Harley following behind like a charging bull.

There's a moment - after he has fallen and his minders have picked up his limp and broken body to carry him out of the stadium - where he tells them he wants to walk out.

They look appalled. He has broken his pelvis, his legs and pretty much everything else. He is on the point of slipping into a coma but, sure enough, supported on each side by minders, Evel limps out of the stadium to an ambulance. It is a strangely moving piece of film anyway: to watch it while sitting next to that same man, now old and very ill, was an unforgettable moment. And that was the only point in my week with him when he admitted it really was all over. He told me his jumping career was finished - "in a heap". I had to wipe an eye as he said it.

It wasn't easy, spending a week making a film with this challenging and challenged man. He could be difficult: very difficult. If he thought the camera shot was wrong, he told us. If he didn't like a question, he told me. That was just what I wanted to see, he may have been a showman, but he was no 'luvvie'. He was the real deal - a rugged, tough-talking man who didn't see the need to waste time on niceties and schmoozing.

He didn't earn his legendary status just by being good at jumping motorbikes over buses. Look at his career record and you'll see he fell off pretty much as often as he landed safely.

His legendary status is something he set out to achieve, fighting from a very humble beginning. Bobby 'Evel' Knievel came from a dusty Montana mining town, where the only guarantee was a job down the mine, made easier by visits to one of many whorehouses.

Shortly before our last meeting, Evel asked me to see something at a local stone yard. There, I found a headstone he had commissioned.

It bore his name. He wanted it erected in the centre of his beloved hometown.

It was a difficult moment, staring at the stone and considering the man I'd spent a week with. I guess he knew he was near the end, but he carried himself to that end in a characteristically tough, flamboyant yet hard-bitten way.

Strangely, it came as a surprise on Friday night to hear he had gone. Somehow, despite his frailty and illness, it didn't seem like a fight that would ever end.

But it was time. I hope the stone gets put up in Butte and I very much intend, one day, to go to see it.

Rest easy Evel. And give 'em hell.

[glam]

thanks for that, it was nice to read