A hero Passes
Evil Knievel Dead at 69
on 11/30/2007 at 07:08 PM
I wonder how many broken bones and fractured skulls this guy gets credited for.
I remember as a kid growing up on Long Island, New York; the day after one of Evil’s jumps, word would spread quickly throughout the neighborhood some kid was building a ramp. Later that day, that kid would be about 6 feet in the air when “oh shit” finally registered in their brain.
Had the privilege of signing the casts of the local hero at least a couple of times.
This probably played out quite a few times across the country.
i remember a line in a movie.....jail scene...."and his nephew Awful Kenawful”??
anybody else??I 2nd Kuso. Thank God I didn’t have motorcycles at that point in my life.
Rancino
Hot Rod perhaps? Haven’t seen it, don’t know about a jail scene, but the plot would seem to fit an Awful Kenawful moment.
Rancino, Awful Kenawful was my hero for his attempt to jump a garbage truck over twenty motorcycles. The failure was a disaster of epic proportions. The ramp collapsed as he hit it, causing him to smash through the line of bikes. The twenty hells angels ripped the cab of the truck to shredds dragging him from under the seat and pummelling him so bad he may very well still be in the hospital.
Glad to see that others went through it as well.
Many a Saturday afternoon watching Wide World of Sports. Evel personified “the agony of defeat”.
I made, then crashed upon many ramps on my Schwinn Stingray. The worst being the day they showed the Snake River Canyon fiasco. Mom was picking gravel out of my forearms for an hour. A bucket of iodine.
That’s the way it was in Randolph, Massachusetts.
I don’t think I ever jumped anything higher than about two feet, and that long before Eval was on the scene. Frankly, I always thought Eval was hiding behind the door when the Lord passed out the Good Sense packets.
But the fact is, Eval Knievel was the genuine article and did it. That’s a sadly missing commodity in today’s United States. We could sure use more men with his attitude if not his career path.
Does anyone (else) think Eval might be setting up a jump over the Pearly Gates?
That “Awful Kenawful” line came from an old movie biography of Kneival and tried to explain how he got his nickname. Like most stories about him it was probably more legend than urban.
Oh, my own personal Kneival moment: My father had picked up a street bike at a garage sale and we started using it to do errands around the farm. He knew nothing about motorcycles: one day he was tooling around, showing off how well he could ride and a neighbor asked him why he never took the bike out of first gear. ("It has gears?") My sister and her husband moved back in with us during a slow patch in the oil drilling business; he was something of a motorcycle racer and decided to “improve” the bike a bit. So one day I went out, jumped on the bike, rode around to move the water to a new set of rows on the far side of the farm, jumped back on, and came tearing back to the house to make supper - and that’s when I discovered he had been “fixing” the throttle and hadn’t quite finished. It came apart in my hand just as I hit 70.
I almost made the turn back to the house. “Gravel, meet farm boy. Boy, meet gravel”. My brother-in-law wouldn’t stop apologizing to me for a week. That was 30 years ago, we still laugh about it.
My dad never bought me a mini bike for tha very reason.
My bad earlier, it wasn’t awful Kunawful, it was Evil Kowalski the Polish daredevil who was nearly killed in the garbage truck incident.Don’t know that I would call him a ‘hero’ Mr. Christian. I remember, at the time of his attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon, thinking how stupid is that?
Heroes don’t do stupid.
Heroes may do stupid things in service of a greater good. Heroes retrieve wounded comrades while under enemy fire. That’s stupid. The smart thing is to leave them and go for revenge. Smart, but not heroic.
Heroes go against ‘political correctness’ at whatever the personal or professional cost. Why? Because ‘political correctness’ is just censorship. Opposing censorship is a greater good.
Attempting to jump the Snake River Canyon may indeed show Knievel’s personal courage, but I would not give him ‘hero’ status. It was courage in pursuit of fame. It wasn’t courage in pursuit of what’s right.
He may well be a hero. I’ve never heard of his military service, especially since his heyday coincided mostly with the Vietnam War. If he’s a veteran, I’ll grant him hero status.
Otherwise, his motorcycle escapades were just stupid. Stupidity in pursuit of fame.
Fame is fleeting.
Having said all of that, yes, I mourn the passing of yet another icon of my youth. He may not have been a ‘hero’, by my definition, but he certainly made the news when I was in high school. Another reminder that time pauses for no one.
11/30/2007 at 07:43 PM
