Being Evel - Johnny Knoxville Evel Knievel Documentary Film

the following program is brought to you in living color [Music] tonight we have evil knife he's probably only a man in history has become very wealthy by trying to kill himself it's true he is uh somewhat of a legend he does incredible stunts with uh motorcycles uh and he has broken i guess more bones uh than anybody in history and yet he keeps at this so let us meet the gentleman here is evil knievel [Music] i grew up in the 70s and evil knievel was the 70s he captured my imagination like no one else some of you may have seen this film before this is a jump that you made at caesar's palace what happened the motorcycle landed short ripped the handlebars out of my hands and i bounced for 60 yards into the dunes parking lot god you're an incredible man [Music] i didn't think of him as a daredevil i thought of him as a superhero no one ever went for it like that before he invented that since then it has taken off in a major way that's such a large part of our culture now he inspired all that but there'll never be another evil i know i've been called a lot of things by a lot of people a crazy man or con man but when you head down that long white line you better have had major peace with god and you better know what you're doing because a con man ain't gonna get there i didn't know the story of the man and it was you know pretty complex california judge has ordered motorcycle stuntman evil knievel to serve out the rest of a jail sentence behind bars i'm a grown-ass man and some of the stuff is tough to reconcile it's a crazy story it's just fast faster and disaster [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] isn't just [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i wanna [Applause] [Music] two [Music] i was a member of the sportscasters association of los angeles and we used to have uh monthly meetings on a thursday in a place called red tracktons everybody who was anybody came tommy little sword uh billie jean king was there muhammad ali when he was cassius clay first made his appearance here they were legitimate athletes in their chosen professions all of a sudden there was this commotion on ventura boulevard there was this nutcase going up and down doing wheelies i didn't even know what a wheelie was until they explained it to me people didn't do wheaties up and down the road i mean that was crazy on a rear wheel on a motorcycle going 80 miles an hour everybody stopped and go whoa whoa look at that even the hard-bitten uh sports announcers of that day and age were taken aback by this guy who of course turned out to be evil knievel if you told me that he was going to be world famous i would say you're nuts [Music] if you're going to try to understand evil you got to go back to his childhood his parents split up and left town and he was basically raised by his grandparents you know grandma and grandpa did the best they could do and he was just rambunctious i guess maybe he didn't have that attention as a young boy when he needed it truth is i think that bobby was kind of angry with his father because he didn't get to stay with him that's what i think he wanted to be with his father we were up at my grandma's house and he and i were wrestling around and i punched him in the mouth and he lit on the back of his head and i said bobby and nothing i thought oh my god i killed him and instantly he had these wild eyes because he knew what had happened and across the kitchen there was a door that was slightly open the pantry door and he ran at that door and slammed it shut with his head and that half stunned him again and he turned around sitting down and he pointed at me and he said did you see that nobody can hurt me you can't hurt me nobody can hurt me [Music] i think growing up in butte montana without a father would uh would be hard to handle i would think [Music] butte montana was just a tough ass mining town when the mines were going full the wars were open 24 hours there was a lot of prostitution there was about 3 000 [ __ ] at that time it was just miners drinking and fighting you had to learn to cope you sometimes coping meant with your fists you fought you stood up like a man you fought and you were you were taught that and that's part of the butte creedo is you just don't back down was a fighter from the get-go uh even during grade school he'd get a little obnoxious at times you know you'd have to settle him down well you couldn't dare him if you dare me do it i remember when bob got his first motorcycle i don't know why he had two tires he always rode around on the back [Music] you never know what he was going to do with that motorcycle in town i mean he's riding it all over crates and raising hell with everybody he liked to have the cops chase him you just couldn't catch him on a bike when you were in a patrol car one day i go run up to the store and who's up there about big bad gun evil you know he was a character [Laughter] i was scared but i was kind of flattered you know gee he's paying attention to me and then one day he just said uh you're going to marry me the story is that he he kidnapped her well i don't know if he came after or not you know that might have been uh that might have been something that they were planning together anyhow who knows yeah i guess i was kidding i think i was just walking home from school that day when he said get in the car you know i don't know it was just uh something just almost like overtook me and he drove me down to dillon and uh danged if we didn't get married there he had some weird ideas about how life should be lived and he he thought that he should be at the top of the heap in life and that's why he did the stuff he did to make money he'd rather there'd be a shady side to it he's happier if there's something a little shady about it he made up his own job actually he started working as a security officer at night he had a route where he used to go around at two o'clock in the morning three o'clock in the morning and check all the different establishments you'd pay him to be sure the doors were locked at everything and if you didn't pay him you might be robbed within a month or so he broke into my place he might have got 40 or 15 or something like that but nothing nothing big yeah he was he was on a racket yeah no question about it the police called me up and wanted and told me that there was a known safe cracker in town i knew they were talking about he he was a crook a con man i guess you'd call him at the age of 19 he starts a semi-pro hockey team and convinces the czechoslovakian national team to come to butte to play them in the checks kill them like smoke them 22-3 but i don't think evil was that upset about the score i think he left in the middle of the second period and the money disappeared there was no money to pay him so you know draw your own conclusions where did the money go well butte likes people who bounce up against the edges of the envelope they're forgiving about some criminal activity but they don't particularly like criminals he had three kids at the time threw all of these burglar bags in the in the river and decided to go straight so knievel gets this job selling insurance for combined insurance company and it was run by this guy w clement stone who wrote a book called uh success through a positive mental attitude i feel healthy i feel happy i feel terrific i think it really changed his thinking drastically i mean he was that way to begin with and it just intensified it he was a legendary salesman when he was selling insurance he was selling insurance and he was selling a lot of it remember he went to the uh mental hospital and and i believe was dear lunch and he wrote 271 policies in this hospital mental hospital it was a super record nobody had written that many policies in a week ever and he talked to the president of the company at that time and said i'll break every record in the company every single one that exists and you make me a vice president after i do that and mr stone says sorry that isn't going to happen well knight didn't like that so he picks up his family and moves to moses lake washington where he gets a job selling honda motorcycles he was making a good living at it but it wasn't good enough for him he says i think i need to do something weird some kind of a stunt so it'll get people to come down here and see the motorcycles so he had this kind of crazy idea about doing this jump he says i'm going to jump over cougars and rattlesnakes you got to be kidding me well my part in that mountain lion jump was i wore a white coat like a doctor and evil introduced me as a veterinarian which was a crock a bull but so he brings him down and put the cougars underneath and they're scared to death they won't come out they're not kitty cats but the snakes holy christ we put them in a big refrigerator carton and they were pissed off so he goes around the track and then he goes up the ramp and well the minute he went up in the air i could see he wasn't going to make it by god he's about three feet short his back tire hits a refrigerator cart and the takes go flipping into the crowd talk about people running and getting out of there jesus christ the poor guy from vantage wants us to help catch his snakes you got to be kidding me and he just rode back on his motorcycle went up the jump and waved at the crowd he didn't he didn't care about the snakes people started to talk to him you know what you know what can you do next what can and and he started thinking about that kind of stuff that's when he come up with the idea of starting a stunt show i told him i said yeah they're going to eat you up boy you'll never make it [Music] i was a bartender at marty's bar in orange california and this fella comes in sits at the end of the bar and we start talking well he's a motorcycle daredevil and he has jumped rattlesnakes and he's wants to do a big ramp to ramp jump he said people will go wild and he just convinced me somehow i was able to get two pickups a tractor in 40-foot trailer the logo on the side was evil knievel and his motorcycle daredevils well the name evil came from his wild years in butte he was given that name uh by the cops he was in jail with a guy named kanawha and they they said well better lock up the doors pretty good tonight we got an awful kanawha and evil knievel in here [Music] he heard that and he liked that he changed it to evie eo because he didn't want to sound too evil what he did is get a bunch of people working with them good guys like sweet savage and eddie mulder and clutch fargo so he started uh syncing up different stunts to do the flaming boards we soak them in gasoline and light it on fire and he hit that first board and just go boom and the sparks the stuff would fly in the air and then boom hit the second one sparks and flame boom at the third one hit the fourth one and this one somehow bob got this [ __ ] uh butch wilhelm and talked him into joining the show bob said he will do everything i do in miniature and he would crash on every single one so then it looked like when bob was going to make his jump something terrible was going to happen [Music] kenny was such a crazy son of a [ __ ] she'd do these stunts and he never tried him before one time he had a motorcycle run at him about 60 miles an hour and he jumped up but he didn't jump high enough and the motorcycle hit him and flipped him over he was sprained from his waist to his ankles i think at that point is when he decided he was just gonna stick to jumping the motorcycle [Music] the equipment my dad jumped on compared to what's going on today unbelievable that thing weighed 500 pounds it'd be like a jumping a dump truck over all those cars but he'd do it anyway i was the speedometer for evil i had to stand or watch him say you're going fast enough or you're not going fast enough i guess you'd call it guesswork bob jumped further and further with each show the only thing is those stands were not full not by any means how do you convince people to come to a sport they never heard of [Music] we were 52 000 in debt bob kept spending money we didn't have and that's when i decided i had to leave well of course then he saw that he didn't need the team he went on his own now it would just be him looking for his big break [Music] expanding the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport a few years i was singing it in my sleep the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat and the agony of defeat the thrill of victory in the agony defeat and they always showed that skier where you never knew the word was he died the crash like that's what you remember from wild world sports i remember like the crazy stuff that they would show once in a while skateboarding was on my wall of sports i remember that we were in the business of sports theater sports was drama sports was a story i loved it i i covered some weirdest things myself as long as it brought in an audience america loved it everybody rush home from church and watch abc world war sports at one o'clock and that was the biggest show on tv evil knows that the motorcycle race at ascot speedway is featured on wide world of sports uh so he fast talks the owner into letting him do his thing before we get back to racing i'd like to introduce to you most unusual young man this is evil knievel and uh his specialty in sports is to take a motorcycle up over a ramp and leap through the air some 90 feet that's what he's going to try to do today over 15 automobiles you're trying 15 today well the parachutes ready uh motorcycle's ready and i'm ready and i'm not going to miss today and he set the [Music] he'll goal up speed as quickly as he can and here he goes [Applause] [Music] he makes it [Applause] a beautiful leap as evil gets the [Music] here we are at the white worlds forest biggest race of the year biggest dirt track race of the year and i won it i won the race and you think anybody remember it no they know knievel they remember knew a lot of them that whole deal not me and i went 100 left rode my ass off so evil got his foot in the door and uh now he's going to knock it down [Music] if you used to think of the most outrageous thing you could do what would it be it'd be jump those fountains of caesar's palace i don't know where it came from how a guy would go down caesar's palace strip look at the fountains what was he thinking where did that come from so evil wants to do this stunt in vegas but no one knows who the hell he is so he switches into hustler mode this guy called every news outlet told him that evil knievel famed a stunt motorcyclist was going to jump caesar's palace come saturday morning be there so then he calls jay sarno the guy who runs caesar's and each time he would call is a different person and each time he would mispronounce his own name i told him my name was larson i was with sports illustrated i said you ever heard of evil naval he said evil naval who heals this evil navel so i waited two more days and i called him back up i said this is dennis lewin from wide world sports do you know evil knievel he says evil neville evil naval evil knives who is this crazy guy i said everybody's calling me up about him he said i think we got to deal with him i don't know call back like a lot of his stunts caesar's palace was one of those that he dreamed up and sold before he even knew it was possible and then on the day he's got the crowds there and he doesn't know if he can make it he's just got to go for it i talked with him for a while before he jumped and he was very unsettled about the jump you could tell he was nervous he was making runs at the ramp and you know we could hear the motorcycle and you could hear the crowd and then the doorman the doorman got on the phone and told us what went on [Applause] [Music] my god that was horrible i thought it was good i thought it was dead i was horrified to watch my friend look like a ragdoll [Music] i don't think it was unconscious but he was hurting so off to the hospital we went he had a broken wrist two broken ankles crushed his pelvis and then somehow word gets out that he's in a coma and might not make it he told that story but he wasn't in a coma in fact i flew down there and it hadn't been like two days since he'd had the wreck and he was awake when i walked into the hospital room you know the press come in there and play it up oh i'm about to die i don't know if i'll make it well this is knievel that's what he did he played it up right to the end pretty soon the crash footage was everywhere we saw him jump caesar's palace we saw that fall and his body flopping and his head hitting and and you know all of the agony of that and the broken bones that piece of film was amazing to see him go over and over and then roll all the way up to the wall and that's one of the great pieces of footage of all time boy he was national news all over the place it became instantly famous this guy somehow had captured what america needed he came along at the right time [Music] there was a certain cynicism throughout the country society was changing you had corruption in government well i'm not a crop country had been battered by many years of war america was coming apart at the seams we were a little down on ourselves and along comes this kid from butte montana who showed us who we were and wanted to be again he wears red white and blue stars and stripes too i guess we were looking for some sort of a a hero we had superman and batman and but this guy was the real thing [Music] most motorcycle people wore black that was what evil wanted to change and that's where the red white and blue leathers came from he wore red white and blue because he was patriotic he he loved this country but he also saw that that would give him a boost in his image and people were respecting him more he came out of those mountains in a star-spangled suit with his cane and he said i'm gonna face death he opened the door and invited people to buy a ticket to watch truth [Music] for that disenchanted disillusioned generation where you didn't trust anybody because even the president lied he's a guy he's gonna risk everything you know there's three tv stations back then and when evil was on abc everyone knew it that's what you did that night is watch and that's what you talked about for the next few weeks afterwards he was so popular that out of the top 10 rated wide world of sports shows in the 37 years of the show he holds seven of them he was the talk of the world you know he was the greatest reality show before reality shows existed you know are you scared before a stunt do you have fear i am not scared when i go off of that jump let's say i have some concern but i don't think i've ever been afraid of anything if i know something's going to happen i try and train myself to where i have complete control over my mind and my body i relax when i hit instead of freezing up and being scared well he said to me one time you know what i was really good at was the takeoff you know what i was bad at was the landing he said it was the bad landings that's what brought the crowds out you know bobby used to say nobody wants to see me die but they don't want to miss it if i do and just to go up that ramp and take a look at the distance that he's got to in effect turtle aboard his harley-davidson machine he knew if he wasn't just perfect though when he left that round something awful was going to happen between the time he left there and came down way over here if he told you he was going to do something he'd do it i mean even if he knew it was going to kill him [Music] you know you were always the question of whether or not he might not make it alive i would think my dad would die every time he jumped it was stressful it was hard on us if he crashed you know and got hurt and then he go on he's gonna do it again and everybody says he's nuts you know he got hurt the last thing doctors especially surgeons have been amazed at how i can keep going he had recuperative powers that were beyond normal people they would say you'll have this cast for eight weeks and he would take it off at three this may look like just some abstract plumbing this is actually is the right hip and right femur of evil knievel uh i think i've probably become immune to pain i've learned to live with pain for so long that i think uh what would hurt an average person doesn't hurt me so much when we were growing up and my dad broke bones and he was in pain he never bitched about it he'd never complained about it no no i'll be all right i'm gonna jump some more it was just he accepted that that's what he had chosen to do and it's just something he had to deal with and that's the way he dealt with it [Music] to be something a little extra special no matter what i want to do if i like to do it to be a champion or to be the best even though i've been hurt so many times than live like a lot of people do that live in a a gray twilight world that these kind of people they don't even know victory or defeat because they've never tried anything and this is something that i feel compelled to do and i'm going to do it i had sort of been brought along the way of a teen idol i had enough star power going but i kept trying to toughen up my act i thought god if i could get a really good western or i get a good action movie and i was looking for sort of a modern day western character who would that be i remember seeing the the footage from caesar's palace and i thought yeah that's the movie in my mind there was only one guy who could do this right john millies he'd written dirty harry jeremiah johnson and of course later apocalypse now they just wrote it as though he was writing it for pat it had this sort of mythic sound to it you know and it's got this man who thinks he's a gladiator and i was excited to to show evil this so he tells me to come meet him in hollywood at the saharan motel that was up on sunset he's been up all night got another huge wound kotex pads all in there and he's lying there like a pasha in a bad motel and that's when it all got crazy he took a bottle of the wild turkey and i heard the snap of the turkey and he drank half of that thing donning sit down i said well i want to tell you that we've got a great script and i just brought it to you and i want you to read it he said you read it and i said well i i have read it and i i really love it i think it's great he said i want you to read it to me and and i i just didn't want to read the script i mean it was just crazy the idea of me reading the script to him but he was dead serious and and i saw this gun and and he put it right to my head and i thought he means this you know this is really real stuff my performance on on reading that script was the best i've ever given and i probably should have gotten an academy award ladies and gentlemen you have no idea how good it makes me feel to be here today it is truly an honor to risk my life for you before i jump my motorcycle over these 19 cars and i want you to note there's not a volkswagen or a datsun in the road evil was not happy with it i don't believe from what i understand talking to him i don't believe he's at all happy with george hamilton i don't think evil appreciated me climbing into his letters and getting on his motorcycle but what happened is by osmosis when he went to see it in the theater when he came out he was saying these things and her extraordinary words coming out of his mouth that john had written for him they told the wright brothers the fly was impossible and they probably told neil armstrong to walk on the moon was impossible they said that shepard and glenn had never get around the world and they said that armstrong wouldn't step on the moon you know he was using a writer's words and this is the evil he's become i'm all alone when i jump those ramps it's only two things to keep the rest of them from doing it that's fear in that big hole in the middle and as long as i can stand alone and be the best at what i'm doing i want to continue to do he created a character named evil knievel and then try to live the part he never broke character he had the evil knievel persona and that's what he presented to the world [Music] we don't want guys in gray hats we want black and white evil represented that he definitely thought of himself as the guy in the white hat the good guy if i look like i'm rigging up for a trip into outer space you're right nobody should ever ride a motorcycle without a helmet i never do he was uh somebody who was seeking what many of us do in her own way and that's recognition and if you get into his background you can understand that he he wanted identity he needed that he just wanted to be loved [Music] thank you very much believe me it's a pleasure to be back here in portland oregon and on behalf of my sponsors the mack truck company the harley-davidson motor company and the desire series crane and steam shovel company in milwaukee my dad he invented the licensing business i mean how many people can you think of that had their names on products before evil i mean there was a few but he really elevated the art of the licensing business yeah he had to deal with everyone mack truck harley-davidson but that's not the one i remember this is evil knievel and his stunt cycle he's the only rider to do so many stunts mid-air somersault evil knievel has become a legend in his own lifetime when ideal came out with the evil knievel toy the president of ideal called me aside and said this is going to be a really big item for us [Music] for me there was only one action figure when i was growing up that was even knievel it was as cool as you could possibly get at the time it came with a motorcycle you could wind up where you wind it up and you stop and it takes off you just wind it up and you're building the suspense you don't know what's gonna happen but you know it's gonna blow up and it's not going to be pretty but you're lucky that this toy's evil can evil because it can take it that's awesome [Music] the evil knievel stunt cycle comes with figure winder gg wheelie stand and front flip bar new from ideal the toy sold out i would say he made more money off of ideal toy than he didn't have any of his jumps i was once at one time he showed me two royalty checks and both of them at that time were half a million dollars each both of them two chicks i thought well you made it you're on the pinnacle you said you're going to be a millionaire you are a millionaire [Music] it was an amazing time the money was rolling in by the millions everywhere he went he went first class yeah my dad liked to spend money all of a sudden there's five ferraris two liter jets five other airplanes he'd get a boat oh he needed a beaker boat oh how about a yacht how about another yacht with the helicopter's on top and he's got evil eye one painted on the side of it he's no easy rider he's proud of the material things his money can buy his cadillac's his 140 000 luxury appointed van he took me into his office opened up a huge safety head and there was a gold-plated full-size motorcycle but you know what you could hardly see it because it was covered with cash like it had been thrown in there like a confetti he built a big beautiful home on the 18th green with this huge iron gate with a great big ek right in the middle of it was was the actual handle you know for beat montana that that was that was the stuff so i'm risking my life for it i'm going to spend every damn time yeah my dad had an affinity for clothes he liked to dress with flair i mean he'd walk into a store and see a sweater he'd like and he'd just buy one in 20 colors come on with me and i'll take a little tour of my office and dressing room and show you what you can buy with a few dollars if you're willing to jump a motorcycle over 19 cars evil was very flashy walked with a cane with diamonds in his cane and his jewelry had diamonds and and he had gold all over he always loved elvis and they traded the belt buckle in the cape my dad was a big fan of liberace for being a showman all the money in the world can't buy your way into heaven i can't buy your way out of hell it was made to be spent right here and i uh i'm gonna have the best clothes best boots best diamonds best cars trucks motorcycles boos and women on the face of this earth just as long as i can keep going [Music] when he came into money and fame and fortune it's like the women became almost an equal part of his thrust from day to day part of it was that women were extraordinarily attracted to him i know because he and i go out drinking once in a while and hell they'd line up and uh he'd pick the prettiest one he's unbelievable he's got more fire in him he's unbelievable it turned the hat trick half the time because i see him do three at night for about a week when i was there hang on come on i mean back in the 70s every woman wanted somebody like that i was always mad because he was maybe cheating on my mom i'm the other woman the other linda was aces aces i mean she was the nicest woman that he could have ever married you know she stood by him and a lot of times he didn't treat her right not good-looking you're going swimming again yeah he didn't hide anything and that's probably where i'd get a little upset with him he'd come home with a little lipstick on his collar and i'd get a little ticked off i'd like to take you out to dinner somewhere in a real nice quiet little spot get you swacked and take you home someplace [Laughter] i think i married this guy i don't know i just you don't leave that man unless he wants you to let's say i died and landed in heaven bang i'm there okay here i'm sitting there in a white robe on a hard marble slab next to jfk martin luther king and some pokemon what the hell would evil knievel have to say to any of those three guys i couldn't carry you on an intelligent conversation with them i want to go to my own kind of heaven it's got draft beer that doesn't make you fat it's got a lot of beautiful girls like you running around my wife won't get mad if i go out with any of them he was okay before he became evil knievel and then you know people just can't handle that fame some of them he's he's a small town guy from a small town in really in the span of seven years became one of the most famous people in the world i think that he he forgot how to be bob and when he became evil it's like the world took him away from us if you want to be in this business and you want to be the best in the world you want to wear a red white and blue number one on your back you have to be man enough to handle the consequences king of the daredevils number one evil evil was on top of the world but he was starting to lose his grip a little and that thing with the hell's angels didn't help evil was at odds against the hell's angels and the biker image he used to talk about the hell's angels a lot you're always putting them down they're murderers thieves are drug dealers i mean these guys are dogs they belong in penitentiaries must have got through to them you know they got pissed off and san francisco is one of their main areas the announcer was the guy that started the whole thing when he introduced enable he says if knievel makes his jump tonight he's going to set the hell's angels back 100 years wrong thing to say [Music] he barely made that job came back around and i noticed the a couple of hell's angels that come out onto the floor and this tells angel grabbed him well i'm i'm i'm hoof the hell's angel threw him down just when i got there and i give this guy a body check and he folded like a just went out well then the war started you know hillary's angels come boiling over there and the people come out of the stands and started beating on them [Music] they put two of those los angeles in the hospital [Music] after the cow palace incident evil got a little bit paranoid he said do you have a gun i said yeah i got a couple of them well he says those hell's angels you didn't know they're gonna walk in here with a shotgun and he says i gotta be ready for him [Music] the man had crashed numerous times of course it's going to add up mentally and emotionally in your head it has to [Music] watch that right shoulder broken right there the right collarbone are you afraid if i am i'm not going to tell you about it what i've been concerned i'm evil knievel honey i'm not supposed to be afraid he was constantly being tormented with the thought of you know you're not going to make this one you're going to die at this one and so he's doing everything he can through alcohol through being flamboyant through being you know crude or whatever to get these thoughts out of his head but they were eating his lunch you know evil you're shaking a little bit well if you did what i did you'd be shaken too i could see it in his eyes sometimes when he'd come back by to ask me if he was going fast enough i could i could see the fear in his eyes i knew he was scared but he would never he would never say no you know he'd go ahead and do it the medicine that he was taking the drugs he was taking for his pain plus he was drinking he became just schizo i mean paranoid he got paranoid about protecting his stuff paranoid about who he let in we'd be talking and almost as if he was schizophrenic he'd flip and become ugly about things i had to stamp two guys down who wanted a piece of him and they wanted a piece of him because he was being an [ __ ] he was being a jerk i'm the guy who just you know is trying to keep the peace i'm the guy protecting the troublemaker from the good guys you know and i thought i can't do this it's really interesting when you you are a man like evel knievel and you've created this myth and once you're defined it's hard to live up to it he was always reselling what he had already sold how do you get any better than that how do you get any bigger throughout his life he was insatiable even when he was the most famous daredevil that ever lived he wasn't satisfied he had to make another half a million dollars on a jump he had to find one more woman prettier than the last he couldn't satisfy himself he had to do something else he had a friend that uh they were at the bar talking and uh this fella just made a comment what's your next thing i think you said the grand canyon well of course that started wheels are turning [Music] one of the favorite pictures of my dad is he's on the rim of the grand canyon and there's these two navajo chiefs there and my dad's pointing at the other side of the grand canyon and they're just like looking at him like this man is crazy my dream was to jump the grand canyon the secretary of interior told me that i could i took his word for it then he changed his mind so i told him to go get hosed and i bought my own canyon the snake river canyon the state of idaho and the only way they'll get me out of the air is to shoot me out with an anti-aircraft gun because i am going to go believe me the jump across the canyon will be approximately a mile it's somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred feet to the bottom as you can see pete this motorcycle is unlike any motorcycle you've ever seen in this world these uh rockets put out about 90 pounds of thrust a piece knievel's original concept was take a motorcycle put a rocket on it and that's impossible and so the necessity just required that he make a rocket vehicle our partner was bob truax and he was known as the father of steam rocketry and that was our answer for getting evil knievel over the canyon basically building a hot water tank and uncorking and let it go this machine is powered by steam steam is the most reliable source of power we have in the world and it'll go from zero to 350 miles an hour from a dead stop in eight seconds flat the super stunt billed as the death defying event of the century will be viewed by almost two million people most of them watching on closed circuit movie screens i'd like to say to you what evil knievel says wherever he goes or whatever he signs if he were talking to you right now he'd say hey jim happy landings when there was an event of any magnitude during that period i'd probably get the first call to do the promotion remember first time i saw evil knievel he showed up on ventura boulevard doing wheelies on his uh motorcycle that's when i first met him but i really didn't know until we did the snake river canyon jump when i had control of the policy and promotion for a brief moment in our dull mundane life here is a man who vicariously we can live through i thought what he was doing was exciting so it was never hard to sell something you believed in and i believed in it we did a 30-day tour which was my idea to do press conferences at like literally 90 airports when knievel flies into town each day in his two lear jets his pilot watching mccollum and his co-pilot wear crimson crushed velvet dinner jackets you ought to see her socks on underwear every day was a was a party there were close to 2500 press credentials given out it was bigger than any ali fight and i did them all bigger bigger than a presidential entourage donnie branca was in charge of all the logistics i was a concert promoter i i did act like the stones and the doors the who and then eva comes along with it with a pay-per-view closed circuit you know this was the biggest event of its kind in the history of entertainment the unknowns were magnificent this sunday a daredevil hustler named evil knievel will try to cross a canyon in idaho riding a rocket if he makes it he'll be many times a millionaire if he doesn't he'll be dead [Music] he was a hero of mine in many ways i was a little crazy he was a whole like crazy and you just had to dig his courage it just didn't seem to me that courage would be enough it looks a lot further than i thought a mile would look it was a the kind of stunt where you would actually see probably a guy kill himself it was so audacious it was so daring it was so almost impossible in many ways but for his confidence what about the g-forces i mean when you start something that's going to be going 350 miles an hour aren't you going to be knocked out almost yes i'll wake up see the other side of the ground way over there wherever the hell i'm at and i'll pull a rip cord and open a parachute behind that sky cycle are you saying that you're gonna be unconscious when you're up in the air 2000 feet i probably will be yes so that means you have to regain your conscience that's right but i can do that i'll do it evil had no training he had no training for pulling gs like a centrifuge or even in an airplane zero parachute experience he had a dead stick kind of thing where it was spring-loaded and if he passed out and let go of the handle the parachute would come out there were actually three of the steam-powered sky cycles built the original called the x1 was tested without a pilot about three weeks ago it ended up at the bottom of the canyon that was a test shot we made some mistakes if i'd have been in it i'd ended up dead but i don't think that's going to happen what the press did not know is that the first one was designed to fail we purposely underpowered the rocket so it wouldn't make it to the other side he wanted it as a promotional thing he wanted to crash in the water and uh and let people see that eventually we did convince evil to do a real test but he'd only do it if it was done in secret so the press wouldn't get any pictures of it or anything [Music] we thought it would make it but there was a problem with the parachute it deployed early and it also landed right in the middle of the river kenny was there to see that i saw it and i was wondering at that time what was going through his mind i was thinking to myself that he really was looking at his mortality and thinking you know this might not be such a good idea however give him credit he was going through with it at this point we're batting zero for two and uh the world is watching us i mean i i felt that became more and more surly streaching orders at everybody that he could belittling he'd be little little people he was just mean about a week out is when we started sensing things not going our way with the press because the press is up here living now and the press start to see the real evil do one thing for me i do not ask for your respect i demand it shelley gathered everybody around evil's trailer and says why don't you just have him stand up so we can see you know because there was a big crowd of people there and evil heard that and came out and do you uh that i said have a smile on your face all right get him out get him out out go on get out of here that's when he came down the stairs with his cane and he grabbed my camera and he was a pretty strong guy and grabbed my camera and started pushing me back and whacking me and the camera with his cane are you going to uh apologize to that cameraman after roughing him up i wouldn't apologize and if i see the little son of a [ __ ] again i'll throw him out of here how's that as hard as we tried a lot of evil's true temperament came out to the press i think you should apologize well i want to straighten you out right now number one i was in the sky cycle all day number two you were a guest of mine in my press area do you understand that and so was he number three when i've been up there all day and that blood's come out of my legs and my feet and gone to my head and i come down to want to get some rest and get along with you people you don't tell me to come out and stand up and smile if i want to come out and try and get along with you you should at least allow me to sit down and smile so tell him i said to kiss my ass there was a point where we were all kind of sitting around and saying you know the guy's a jerk he's just a jerk he's a bully he's a boar uh what are we doing here the rest of the press can now thank you because i'm going to leave how's that boys people started coming in and it started getting crazy every biker in the united states that didn't have a job was there i believe you know you have umpteen different motorcycle groups you know none of which you'd invite to your house for dinner they have a good time everyone gets loose around here you could say it was like a woodstock but the evil twin of woodstock it was like not a happy flower children sitting around in the rain those guys were i mean they were really rough wackos with tattoos all over their bodies drinking beer and screwing in public and all kinds of it was it was bedlam crouch clams papers they had a marching band from butte high school that was there it was not a place for a butter marching band to be that day i'd have to say right when we pulled in there was a man and woman naked uh you know having sex right there under a tree i saw all the people that were drinking and uh smoking pot and uh they were pretty wild we fired up the band it's like the whole place arose oh the crowd went wild yeah absolutely they were totally prepared for a celebration the crowd just started mingling and just wanted to play our instruments they they tugged and pulled and next we know we're separated a good hundred yards away from the rest of the band so we were basically fighting for our lives as far as i was concerned at that point they just stuffed my tuba full of everything beer bottles popcorn peanuts rocks i pulled a bra out of there it i never played a note [Music] we also had uh with us the uh drill team and the drill team's their name are the purple bees and a good friend of mine they tore her dress right off totally tore her dress off i guess we all thought of this as something different than what it was really going to be the crowd were given oh beer and and when the beer was closed up that's when it got kind of rowdy they actually rolled the beer trucks over the semis over on their side shot the locks off and everybody was walking through the camps with cases of beer next thing you know they took the outhouses they took them down they started just dumping them over and they lit them on fire the place was absolutely out of control at that point things got as bad as it could get back without somebody dying uh it's as simple as that just as bad as it could be i could hear out in the darkness i can hear the girls being raped i can hear fights going on you know i can hear gunshots going off you know but there's nothing i could do and finally i reached the point where i said you know what i'm going to call the national guard in so i i called him up and he said don he said i'm sorry but our men are split up and i just can't come out there to help you you're on your own son and i i hung up that phone and i i felt like crying there were more than 33 000 paid admissions as you can see they needed control they were perilously close to the edge of the canyon some 600 feet straight down what i was concerned about is that there is this canyon there's this killer canyon in front of you and they put up a a standard cyclone fence i mean just push it note followed and i thought to myself everybody's gonna rush to that edge of the canyon to see what happens and then you're gonna have people pushing from behind and like the lemmings in the sea they're gonna go right over the ledge yeah i thought it was pretty ironic how donnie solved the security problem he went down where the hell's angels were camped and hired them to come up and provide security for us here i went there and i explained them what i'll do here's what i'll do i got a thousand dollars in cash and i want you to guard the fence and and keep the people on that side of the fence and uh the guy said are you bullshitting me i said i'm getting [ __ ] with you guys here okay you got a deal mister [Music] on the morning of the jump i looked at him and i saw a very pensive very reflective very quiet man he didn't look comfortable i don't know why he would look comfortable through that climbing into a tin can to fly over a canyon there is bob truax himself the chief engineer testing the wind the 15 mile an hour wind was not the right direction we recommend it to knievel he delay the launch i just said you know bob i don't think you ought to do it you know i i think this is crazy i think this thing isn't going to make it because i can't back out now too much has been said they call me a coward he says he's not going to do that i'm going and that's it i've got a team behind me with mr truax and all the boys that are 100 and i think we'll do it i wish the wind wasn't blowing so hard but i think we'll do it there was no braggadocio there was no bravado as the time counted off he said to his family let's pray yeah i remember when my dad brought me in the trailer in that truck the whole family and he hugged me and says he lo i love you and he didn't know what's gonna happen he was like god take care of me linda and the children were crying [Music] especially the little girl yeah that was a very sobering moment you know suddenly i realized have i had a hand in getting a man killed here he goes up the ramp toward the launch site and toward the vehicle and he's being introduced to the crowd now i've never been afraid in my life of dying i think that a man was put here on earth to live not just to exist and today is the proudest day of my life i'm living a dream that they thought it could never be done but it'll be and then instead of a roar a silence like an eerie silence fell over the crowd because this guy truly might be going to his death [Music] evil got out of the crane and into the sky cycle and the whole time patriotic music is being played and at that time even i got emotional a bit fugundu and i strapped him in and got a couple of pictures of him in the cockpit he looked a lot different than he did when we started this project his hair was gray and he was real serious we had a big clock 10 seconds nine seconds eight seven you look out the audience no one's even breathing five four three two one immediately something failed it fizzled it went down like a bullet shoot is out the mane shoots out there she goes david i can't see anything i hit my camera i'm taking click click click click right into the canyon i turn around and the first fence just goes flat just troop it was a stampede it's exactly what it was i saw bikers pluck people out of the sky it was right out of a movie you know robert craven prepared to have landed in the snake river he will definitely try to get out but he couldn't david i am very scared i thought he's gone and i'm not gonna get to him in time he's gonna drown there was people running up looking over the edge and linda was scared and the boys were scared i thought my dad was dead i was screaming crying i got into my helicopter got over the canyon and there from the muddy banks on the side of the river was evil waving and i said this thank god that son of a [ __ ] is alive evil is standing in the boat i think people i don't know i just can't say i'll have to let bob that's always examine it bob what happened well this right here is the cover to the parachute canister it obviously came loose much too soon right on the pad what had happened is uh as it went up i knew immediately that the chute had been deployed it came off because of a mechanical problem with the design you didn't do a damn thing on the the can is still on the thing it is blew off right there on the lawn by accident yeah it was our fault yeah that's what that's not your fault yeah we shut it around one more test [Music] it was clear to me or to us that it was a mechanical failure but there was another story being bandied about back at the president that perhaps evil had released the shoot early i told i told people that that's what happened when i went to the press tent after the jump the press was asking for me to come and make a statement i told the press that uh he uh his hand came off of the bar i really like the rocket crew they're a bunch of nice guys i just knew the the mo of how he treated people nothing was ever his fault i told i told people that that's what happened if by chance that took a little bit of the pressure off of the rocket team then so be it so it got out that it was evil's fault but the nagging question remains was this the legitimate attempt of a brave man or was it the great ripoff of 1974. then uh the press tore him up because they think that he along with me had perpetrated a fraud hero or hustler or for americans are those the same thing it was evil knievel against the snake river canyon and the canyon was the sentimental favorite evil would have liked his jump to have been huge front page news but it was overwhelmingly squashed by the big news of the day which was the pardon of nixon by president ford that was a major transition in the country [Music] maybe maybe he had outlived his novelty because i think people just might have got tired of listening to it and that's when he came back to butte and he was i don't know if he was depressed or what hey he just uh i thought sure he'd just give up after that say well you know i'm done [Music] england swings like a pendulum yeah well they hadn't heard the teddy roosevelt speech he could to your parents famed old wembley stadium of london england for a jump that will be made over 13 london buses when he arrived in london he had only sold 3 000 seats for a 100 000 seat stadium and he was in trouble there was some press there to meet him he looks at the press and what did he do i'm so glad to be here in england where we came and won the war for you oh and they start writing he knew his job which was to get people in wembley stadium we drove around london just making friends how you doing what's your name stephen so the yankee pied piper collected the young and the old and led them all to wembley stadium [Music] thank you 80 000 people showed up to watch the man do it so we walked into the arena of wembley where the bus was lined up and he said i can't do that i said what do you mean again i said pull a few buses out of there come on they won't hurt a thing to do that i go over and grab a producer i said doug i said evil says he can't do that he really didn't think he was going to make it so we went over to talk to evil and talk him out of it and he was on in a trailer we knocked on the door and he said oh no i'll give it a go i'll give it a go it was always i'll give it a go he was right he couldn't make it [Music] you know eva one has to wonder after the snake river uh the one has to wonder why you continue well i uh sometimes think that maybe i should quit but you always want to keep going and i'm kind of proud of that red white and blue number one i wear on my shoulder i want to keep it on there i'm glad you're here today you know i've never had an accident when you're around good luck he told me earlier that outside of the jump of caesar's palace where he was severely injured that this will probably be the most difficult jump he's ever made hurt himself in the o 1967 season paul siri goes and he will go [Music] it was almost eerie the motorcycle was ghostly it was tumbling after him sort of then he eventually landed on it [Applause] oh my god [Music] man you see now leaning over you the evil is john hood that's his uh chief mechanic i knew well he's got to be hurt on this one and i kneeled down and said are you okay i got his helmet off and he said help me up and he wanted the microphone he's gonna talk [Music] 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 [Applause] [Music] that crash was one of the worst as far as injuries would go he broke his uh hand back re-broke his pelvis after wembley i went home to edit phone rang hello doug evil he's calling me from his hospital room in london doug you can't use that quote what do you mean evil you can't use that quote a quote where i said i wouldn't jump again i i said well why he says cause i may jump again when the jump was over in london i said that i'd never jump again that was the pain in my body overpowering the brains that i'm supposed to have in my head i will jump again but 13 is an unlucky number this time i'm gonna jump 14 buses somehow he gets the idea i am not going to go out with a crash i'm going to go back to the united states and i'm going to jump 14 buses i that's just who he was you can't do it and say you're the best in the world then fall off and get up and say i quit not if you're a naval canadian you can't the kings island family entertainment center located just outside of cincinnati ohio it's damn packed with people who have come to watch evil knievel out of retirement and here he comes right now robert craig knievel a lot was writing on this jump uh it was a different evil i mean he actually did practice jumps i'm gonna go frank there's no wind gonna stop me not even a hurricane it was very gutsy jump the doctors told him just don't ever do that again you know one little slip wrong thing and he'd probably been paralyzed [Music] the total concentration now is getting that bike off the approach and onto the landing ramp [Music] and he's not hesitating he'll go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you this motorcycle is the finest machine in the world as far as i'm concerned it broke in half but it held me up and all i can say is thanks to number one thanks to harley davidson you've been so good to me through the years i would like to tell all of you something though that but as far as i'm concerned i have jumped far enough today i'm gonna walk away from here with you and i feel as being a professional that's what i'm gonna do kings island was the longest jump of his career it was the biggest television audience he ever had and it was the highest rated episode of wide world of sports ever he did some small jumps after that but he never went that big again kings island was the gum fighter putting away his pistols if you were on a bike did you do stupid [ __ ] but you would do stupid [ __ ] in the name of evil knievel i thought that's why he had a bike i didn't know he just rode bikes around i thought the whole purpose of bikes were to hit things and fly off of them we'd line up the neighbor kids and see who could jump more neighbors without landing on them and things like that but we just dreamed of having a motor between our legs i love just going down steps and i crashed all the time they're like yeah you're gonna be just like an evil one not as good [Music] there's no way that a youngster is not going to want to try to do what his hero does i don't think there's anything wrong with a kid wanting to be an evil knievel any more than he'd want to be an o.j simpson or frank gifford or be any kind of a professional athlete do you view him as a as a hero yeah yeah he's one of the greatest heroes he was a hero to so many kids but his own son was his biggest fan this is robbie where did this little guy go wouldn't you know it would be the young one who would steal it he's the one that's got to have the longest wheelie he totally saw me and him and was like i'm gonna be you dad and the legend continues i'm gonna jump the fountains at caesar's palace before i end my career [Music] that was for you dad yeah robbie broke all of his dad's records i mean hell he could jump 14 buses with no hands [Music] but uh robbie was jumping on lighter more powerful bikes that were designed for jumping he could jump farther and longer than evil and all that stuff but it didn't matter robbie couldn't tell a story you know he was he was not a showman knievel is the ultimate showman a guy could sing longer and louder in elvis presley but who gave it damn he was elvis presley my dad was evil knievel even when bobby wasn't jumping in anymore he still wanted to be in the spotlight and he had to find other things to do to get himself attention yeah one of his projects was hollywood in the end there was one guy meant to be evil and evil and that was evil evil had a movie star quality about it there's no doubt about it uh not when he tried to act look at you you're trying to destroy yourself if you don't believe me here's the proof i'm not gonna let you commit suicide around me uh he performed for the audience but when it came to the acting part i guess there's a difference it was too far stop it all right stop it any way you'll want it man it stop it once it came out uh it was a mowi that wasn't really well received [Music] i guess the exciting part is the jump huh you know we've got the melinda's on the high wire and a metal list at the edge of the canyon and a motorcycle so you know when i knew i was going to take on the snake river canyon event uh i decided something very important that i would write a book a legacy that people could read about the evil knievel promotion of the state river canyon and knievel he was my 50 50 partner and he says don't forget and just tell the truth so with permission i carried a audio cassette recorder during the evel knievel tour he's got an agreement with me i'll type if you listen to the tape you can form your own opinion i can write little chicken [ __ ] piss ants off like him in a [ __ ] day the only thing that makes me sad is when his wife begged me to [ __ ] her that i didn't do it that's right but i will someday don't worry about it the motion picture industry ought to throw him off at the top of 9000 sunset we don't belong on the face of this earth believe me if god ever gives the world an enema he'll stick the tube in his ass to start it and so when i wrote my book i kept out a lot of things stuff i would never write about because remember when the book was coming out i was still protecting his image uh evil's attorney he checked everything told me that they had evil's approval in writing and then the book was published i was at evil's compound one day and he throws me this book and he says uh here keep this be worth some money someday i open it up here's all his footnotes in there the the first part of the book x-rated evil he writes in there constitutes adultery so right from the get-go you could tell he was mad it just starts and you can tell by the the farther it gets in the book the matter he got this is a lie and not accurate lies lies lies i read the book and you know what i said yeah what's the problem he could have said a lot more worse stuff i read the book a couple times i didn't see anything in it bad nothing it was very factual very very very factual i think the chili that wrote it was uh accurate and it made him really mad i was on on the 20th century fox lot and all of a sudden i saw evil with a big smile coming at me loping along and i was actually glad to see him the book was out and i was like maybe i could even talk him into doing some promotion with me i said hey evil and all of a sudden my hands were behind my head behind my back they tell me it was two men i didn't know maybe one maybe two and he uh he came at me with a he with a bat an aluminum baseball bat he said i'm going to kill you son of a [ __ ] i did everything i could to defend myself and i remember putting my hand up so what are you doing what are you doing i was fighting for my life and he was wailing on me and then i passed out [Music] knievel came to court accompanied by his wife linda and his attorney the 38 year old daredevil faces charges of felony assault and the baseball bat attack on television executive sheldon saltman knievel could have gotten away with it he could have if he would have just stopped being knievel for 10 minutes it was a very interesting hour in division 91 a municipal court in which evil knievel fired his attorney and entered a plea of guilty he fires them and says to the judge judge i did it and i do it again do what you will with me you know this old frontier justice thing you know in butte montana you settle things out in the street you don't settle them with lawyers and and uh evil always settled it with uh with his fists or sometimes a tool helped not with a baseball bat that's not beaut i never knew of anybody in butte did that if i did not think there was a much stronger judge someday that i will stand before call god than the judge i stood before in that courtroom in santa monica california i would have killed that lousy little bastard i broke his arms with a baseball bat and i think that's just what he deserved i'll guarantee you one thing he doesn't write anything else about me oh well but i mean i think i was a sophomore in high school at the time and i i i was not proud of my dad for doing that at all stuntman evil knievel got a jail sentence yesterday for beating his former press agent with a baseball bat the judge told the 39-year-old motorcycle daredevil that while as a judge he found knievel's admission of guilt as refreshing at the same time raffiti said long ago we abandoned frontier justice in california that graffiti sentence could evil to six months in jail and three years probation a judge is a good judge and he's a fair judge of course when he was in jail it was like i think in his own way he played it as a game [Music] so he's in jail but he's on work release so he's only in there at night and he would have his chauffeur pick him up every morning and take him to the bar knievel believes in sharing the wealth so this morning he hired a dozen limousines to transport his fellow work release inmates to their jobs you know uh putting him in jail he got more prison than anything else there was no end to the shenanigans that guy would pull the inmates were amazed but the authorities were not so enthusiastic well the judge got pissed and he revoked evil's work release privileges i was pissed off at him he started believing the hype that he was totally impervious and he could get away with anything i don't think he thought about the public or maybe if he did he thought that that's what they expect of me the ideal toy company which manufactures the evil knievel toys says it has already lost 1.6 million dollars since evel knievel went into the county jail we had immediate ideal the next day or the day after and i said you know no we don't we we don't sell toys of murderers or gangsters or stuff like that and uh so therefore we are going to suspend sales in the united states [Music] on the toy front it may not be a merry christmas for daredevil evil knievel the contracts were canceled and he lost a lot of money it all it all started coming apart anymore it doesn't matter knievel says his experience in jail was a good one but that it has set him back financially i hated to see him lose everything he worked for in 10 minutes when it was falling apart it fell apart very quickly the cars the boats allergies ferraris everything to go down the drain that was hard the house that we all loved um got repossessed because my dad didn't pay the property taxes bank came and got it and the irs sold it we loaded up all the furniture everything of any value from the saddles to guns and we would just bring so much out at a time and we'd have a garage sale the arc of the sky cycle is like what happened to his career he was at the pinnacle and then he destroyed his whole life i just dropped out of sight and played golf i just completely withdrew from the public when i met him he was in a bit of a low point um i mean he was kind of just getting by um hustling golf he might make a couple hundred here a couple hundred here he lived day to day at that time he didn't keep the fact that he was married a secret or anything and in two weeks i packed up what i wanted to take with me and we went on the road it's over and uh i just let it go at that the heck with it you know you know after 38 years of somebody told me what to do i didn't like them it's over i didn't like them nobody wins [Music] you could see that his health was declining you know he was getting worse all the time he had a hip replacement a pelvis reconstruction a spinal fusion a liver transplant seven or eight bouts of staph infection i have hepatitis c and i got it through blood transfusions and i've been told by the doctors five years ago that i didn't have five years to live i'm taking it one day at a time yeah you felt sorry for him i did really i thought you're really hurting if you're gonna be dumb you've gotta be tough when you get knocked down you gotta get back up i ain't the sharpest rig in the 10-pack [Music] then the 90s come around and motorcycle jumping was just one part of this whole new huge thing called action sports it's amazing how quickly the sports progressed this multi-million motorcycle jumping skateboard riding surfing industry has definitely come a long way from daredevils to professionals in 2006 i was able to land the first double backflip on a dirt bike no one ever thought that that was possible the bikes have evolved the riding has evolved they have coaches they have schools they have camps but the spirit will never die and evil was the one that set our foundation for the future the thing about the knievels it's really captivating and inspiring to all of us is the showmanship side of it you know i stay awake at night and i dwell on how to do what i do in the biggest most grandest way and to continue this legacy the extreme sports or acting sports whatever they're commercially referred to is definitely a result from the way evil dreamed in the 70s and how he wanted to push the limits [Applause] you can do stunts on television [Music] evil had to make his jumps the stunts i do i know they're going to fail matt hoffman and i did a tribute to evil hello i'm johnny knoxville and i'm about to backflip this bike i think we should push the limits get some more friends together and just set some records and just celebrate evil's life and uh that's what we did i broke my dick in that tribute oh yeah i feel great no really i tore my urethra thanks a lot evil [Applause] you know i've definitely been compared to evil knievel i think that's because of the fact that i have had some big crashes so i figured see how far i can find the harley davidson in honor of evil knievel when seth inslow did that record-breaking harley-davidson jump he dedicated it to evil and when robbie madison set the new world record for distance type jumping over an entire football field he did it on the 40th anniversary of evil's caesar's palace jump [Applause] in the back of my mind like and it wasn't like we had forgotten about him we just didn't really know what he was up to and i think that people started asking what he was up to and the one and only og evil knievel it was great to see a new generation understand how important he was to us somehow we raised his profile again but he deserved that all along he greatly appreciated that that the kids paid their respects to him and they did and he was amazed by that don't ever forget you can fall many times in life but you will never be a failure as long as you try to get up i think my dad likes his role as an elder statesman at the end of his life he thought it was really cool and and where he deserved to be deservedly so i'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the next uh 20 years if i'm so lucky to live that long i had to have a hip replacement a complete hip replacement i had to have a you guys i'm really having problems why don't we please after a lifetime of injuries and surgeries the thing that really kicked his ass was lung disease if you'd asked him would you rather have lived this long bobby and be this sick or died at the end of the ramp i think he would have chosen the end of the ramp the last couple of years of his life were hell he was having trouble breathing and being in that living hell he put his life in perspective i think he probably thought a lot about the things he'd done and thought about how badly he treated some people [Music] he was preparing for the end on every level he righted a lot of wrongs with people because he felt like that was important it became important to him [Music] he told me that he had led a life that he was ashamed of in a lot of ways uh and he was just trying to talk to the people that he truly that truly meant something to him was the way he put it and put it right he said to me i was so sick he said i i was just a sick person with women it was so wrong and i said ah dad it's so good to hear you say that he tried to make amends with people at the end and that's great but it's kind of tough to put the toothpaste back in the tube at that point it caused a lot of hurt [Music] well first time i ever heard him say i'm sorry he was pretty much on his deathbed yeah he just said i'm sorry that was it you know the most important thing in life that really counts is your scorecard with god the the real bob knievel the bobby knievel that's the guy i knew and that's a guy that i loved and that's a guy that was emerging back out of the slime and and uh i was moved by it i talked to him the night before he died he said you got to do me a favor and i said okay what and he said say a prayer for me once in a while and i said okay all right all right and he says hey i'm worse than you think i was on the phone with evil and he started coughing and the phone dropped and he went unconscious so that was it [Music] but it was hard i wasn't ready [Music] but he was ready and that's what was important [Music] you just never thought that evil was gonna die you know he was indestructible and then it it just reminded you that he was human i didn't lose the daredevil [Music] i lost this little kid who at one time i thought was my brother [Music] that's the indelible knievel to me i still think he's a superhero and yeah i know a more complete story now and some of the stuff is really heartbreaking you know but to me what he did transcends that [Music] most of us don't take chances in our lives most of us aren't willing to lay it on the line so to speak like he was what my dad did nobody's ever gonna do again but there's a little evil in all of us i guess i i'd like to have him remembered as a man who uh when he was down got back up you know he never quit i think in fairness to him they should not remember the evil that evil did instead he should be remembered for the good things he did in times of stress i believe somebody on a white horse wearing a white hat will arrive that's the american way life's pretty tough [Music] life can be pretty [ __ ] tough and uh you need your heroes man [Music] he used to always say to me he says that canyon has not moved one inch and i do not see a big long line of daredevils waiting to jump [Music] there's ringing in my ears and no [Music] i'm kneeling on the floor [Music] show me the way [Music] well i can't see no reason [Music] you're living on your nerves when someone drops a cup a nice submerged plant [Music] i'm swimming in a circle i [Music] i want you [Music] show me the way i want you stay after day [Music] you

Channel: Gravitas Documentaries

Views: 1,101,877

Keywords: Being Evel, Being Evel film, Being Evel movie, Being Evel Knievel, Johnny Knoxville, Johnny Knoxville Evel Knievel, Evel Knievel documentary, Johnny Knoxville documentary, Documentary, Inspirational, Sports, Evel Knievel 2015 film, Evel Knievel full movie, Evel Knievel HD movie, full evil knievel movie, Brandon Kiernan, Jeff Tremaine, Mat Hoffman, evil kenevil, evel knievel documentary, evel knievel, evel knievel grand canyon jump, being evel, being evel knievel documentary

Id: bLRcs4SWCcg

Length: 100min 51sec (6051 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022