The American Spectator

TAS Live

Evel Descends

By Paul Beston on 3.20.08 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

The last time an Evel stunt seemed to matter was in 1977, when, capitalizing on the Jaws craze, he agreed to jump a pool of live sharks in Chicago. But he made the odd decision to do a test run first, in which he easily cleared the pool but then crashed into a retaining wall, and the official jump had to be canceled. The network was savvy enough to have filmed the practice crash, though, and so TV audiences got their dose. A few months later, the sitcom Happy Days spoofed the stunt, and eventually the phrase "jumping the shark" was born.

Things were winding down, though, for Evel and for me. One day, as I vaulted my Schwinn over a stack of garbage-can lids, the handle on the top lid caught my back tire, and I hurdled forward onto the cement of our driveway, palms extended, landing hard -- and looking at a pair of black office shoes. It was my father, home early from work.

"Right now, today," he said, in that controlled voice that was always his scariest, "is the end of Evel Knievel. Do you get me?"

SOME SEE KNIEVEL as the precursor to today's extreme sports, which seems logical enough. But his career pointed less forwards than backwards, to an era of traveling circuses and barnstorming ballplayers, hungry prizefighters and avaricious managers blowing into obscure towns, pulling down paydays, and moving on. He was a hard scrabble Westerner and a true survivor, a man who would have flourished a century earlier in something like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, where no less a mythmaker than Sitting Bull had held court. But Evel labored in a tougher age for myth, when even great spectacles fit on a small screen in the living room, all scale and scope and wonder lost. His job was to burst through that frame; boy, did he try.

When I heard he'd died, I surfed cable channels and the Internet, all along feeling a certain embarrassment. I was reminded that at heart I'm a lowbrow; reminded, too, that it only takes the faintest suggestion to transport me back to my lucky boyhood in suburban America -- where hunger was banished and danger had to be conjured. Browsing the user-comment sections on blogs and news sites, I was struck by the sameness of the reminiscences -- plywood ramps, bicycle jumps, childhood awe. I wasn't the only American man hearing that faint sound of another door closing on the past. The daredevil had touched down.

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