Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Read Free Page B

meet but befriend his hero Roy Rogers in later life, but for the time being he was content just to imitate him.
    Another of Bobby’s childhood idols was boxer Joe Louis, better known at the time as the ‘Brown Bomber’. Bobby was a huge boxing fan and always tuned the radio in to listen to Louis fight the likes of Billy Conn, Max Baer and ‘Jersey’ Joe Walcott. As a kid, Bobby owned a pair of boxing gloves but had no punchbag. Being as inventive as any other child without the resources to actually buy what he wanted, Bobby soon found a solution to this, albeit an unlikely one. ‘My dad was in the Second World War and he sent me his canteen from Japan, so I hung it up in my grandmother’s [house] upstairs and I used to use it for a punching bag.’ When Knievel’s father managed to get Joe Louis’s autograph for his son, Bobby was so thrilled he carried it in his wallet for 12 years.
    Despite having being abandoned by his parents, a scenario that can often result in children becoming rebellious and delinquent, Bobby Knievel wasn’t an inherently bad child – he simply had a mass of energy and an inclination to mischief like most young boys. In other words, he was perfectly normal, but he did seem to have an inherent fondness for danger and so sought out thrills whenever and wherever he could. Apart from the adrenalin rush he enjoyed when being chased by pimps, Bobby also loved to build his own ramshackle soapboxes and race them down the hill at the end of Montana Street. Naturally there were crashes – the first of many in Knievel’s life – but they rarely amounted to more than a bloodied knee or scuffed elbow and injuries were always something to boast about in a town like Butte. Bobby was also extremely fond of football and would don his leather safety helmet and play with his brother Nick every night after school as their grandmother cooked dinner.
    There was nothing about Bobby’s early childhood to suggest he would be anything other than a regular working Butte man when he grew up; nothing which marked him out as being particularly different to the other kids he played with on the block. It was not until he was eight years old that he witnessed the event which would ultimately inspire him to carve his own way in life and become famous the world over for doing so.
    In 1946, Butte’s Clark Park played host to Joey Chitwood and his Auto Daredevil Show, and when Emma Knievel took her grandsons to watch the performance she could never have imagined the far-reaching consequences their day out would have; in fact, if she had known, it is most probable that the family would have stayed at home. Bobby was completely mesmerised by the performances of the daredevils and thrilled to see their Ford V-8s crash through fire walls, jump from ramp to ramp and perform choreographed rollovers. ‘I had never seen anything like it,’ he later recalled. ‘Using a take-off ramp, Chitwood had leapfrogged his car over an automobile while stuntman Cliff Major jumped a motorcycle through a hoop of fire. This set the course for the rest of my life.’
    Although he didn’t decide there and then that he was going to become a professional stuntman, Knievel did set about imitating the stunts he had seen on his bicycle. ‘I went home and took the mudguards off my bicycle and put cards in the spokes so it would sound like a motorcycle and I built little ramps and jumped off of them. I’d put on little shows for the kids in the neighbourhood.’
    Even those early shows combined the three key elements to Knievel’s later career: his love of performing in front of an audience, his willingness to be hurt while doing so, and his entrepreneurial skills for making a fast buck – Bobby charged his friends two cents apiece to watch. Using his grandfather’s garage doors as ramps, Bobby’s brother Nick would chalk a mark where Bobby landed before moving the doors further apart to allow him to try and better the distance. When this became