They welcomed his body to the Butte Civic Center on Sunday night with a $12,000 fireworks show, and thousands of people on Monday morning filed by the open casket, where Knievel was dressed in his famous white jumpsuit with red, white and blue trim, many of them snapping pictures of the body with their cell phones and digital cameras.The funeral drew people from the world of sports (former world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier), Hollywood (actor Matthew McConaughey) and politics (Gov. Brian Schweitzer).
Doug Wilson, a producer and director for ABC's “Wide World of Sports” and ESPN, drew laughter when he told the crowd, “He wasn't a great motorcycle rider - look what happened time and again. But as a marketer and promoter he was a genius. He was the greatest barnstormer of the century.”
Knievel's most famous jump - and most famous failure - came in 1974, when he attempted to clear the Snake River Canyon in a rocket called the “X-2 Skycycle.” The parachute deployed early and pulled him back into the canyon, where the Skycycle was deposited half in, half out of the river far below. Knievel, who suffered only minor injuries, earned $6 million for the stunt.
Far more dangerous were his motorcycle jumps over everything from fountains to buses to sharks that sometimes left Knievel with broken bones, concussions and in comas.
“He had a higher threshold for what it takes to get a buzz than most of us,” McConaughey said. “But any thought that he had a death wish was obviously false. I asked him one time what it was that ticks inside of him, and he said, ‘I've got to find a way every day to sweat in my boots.' This was a man looking to live, and he did.”
Robert Craig Knievel - “Evel” to the world, but “Bobby” to many of his friends in Butte - became known around the globe for his brushes with death.
But in Butte, Knievel was just as well known for his brushes with the law as a younger man, and for the flamboyant lifestyle he lived with the millions he earned from his stunts once he settled on his unusual career.
“The biggest crook that ever lived.”
In the Met Tavern, across the street from the Civic Center, Bob Kovacich drains a whiskey and makes the pronouncement on Evel Knievel.
He does so with a tone of awe for the man he met when they were both boys in Butte in the 1950s. Kovacich is talking about how Knievel allegedly arranged for a famous jump of the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. (Knievel reportedly created a fictitious corporation, fictitious lawyers and pawned himself off on the telephone as everything from a producer at ABC-TV to a writer for Sports Illustrated to drum up interest among the Caesars Palace execs.)
But Knievel did run afoul of the law plenty.
“We went hunting ducks over at the Poindexter Sloughs about 1956, and we ran out of shotgun shells,” Kovacich recalls. “We went into Whitehall, into this mom-and-pop sporting goods store called The Pines, with our hip boots on.”
Kovacich bought the shotgun shells, and they headed out to his car.
“He was walking funny when we left,” Kovacich says, imitating Knievel's gait by keeping one leg stiff. “I asked him, ‘What the hell did you do to your leg while we were in there?' ”
Once on the street, Knievel reached into his hip boots and pulled out the brand new .30-.30 carbine he'd stolen.
“I thought, ‘Great, now I'm an accomplice,' ” Kovacich says. “We get to my car, a 1940 Chevy, I turn the key and it won't start - dead battery. So now we get out and start pushing the car, the .30-.30 sitting on the front seat, and I'm sweating bullets - no pun intended.”
They got away, and it reminds Kovacich of another Knievel story.
“We were in the Spot Bar, and he didn't have a dollar to his name - he was broke,” Kovacich recalls. “He went outside, and there's a new Chevy pickup truck parked there.”
The truck had a spare tire in the back, so Knievel lifted it out and rolled it into the bar.
“He hollers out, ‘Anybody own a Chevrolet? I've got a nice spare tire I'll sell you,' ” Kovacich says.
A customer looked up, said he'd be interested, and Knievel made him a great deal - $20.
“The guy bought his own tire, and before he could go put it in his truck, we left,” says Kovacich, who wears a ring - OK, he wears lots of rings - but, on one finger, a ring with a diamond-studded “K” Knievel gave him on his 50th birthday.
“He used to wear it, but he gave it to me because my name starts with a ‘K' too,” Kovacich says.
Bobby Knievel was no stranger to the Butte jail in his younger years, often for speeding around town on his motorcycle, and it was on one of his nights he spent there that a jailer gave him the nickname that Knievel rode to fame.
Noting that in one cell was a man they called “Awful” Knofel, the jailer discovered Knievel in the next and came up with “Evil.” Knievel later changed the spelling.
When Knievel arrived in London in 1975 to jump over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium, only 3,000 tickets had been sold for the 90,000-seat venue, according to Wilson, the “Wide World of Sports” producer and director.
“He held a press conference, where he fired a couple of people,” Wilson told the crowd. “And then he said, ‘I'm so glad to be in this country, where we came and won the war for you.' ”
That got people's attention.
Knievel loaded his motorcycles into his custom red pickup truck, put on that “star-spangled, Yankee Doodle Dandy suit of his,” and drove around the streets of London every day, stopping at street corners to urge kids to wear helmets on motorcycles, according to Wilson.
He called up newspapers and TV stations and told them he was going to knock a golf ball across the River Thames.
“Like a lot of his jumps, the ball didn't make it,” Wilson said. “Then he held another press conference, where a woman reporter asked him, ‘Mr. Knievel, don't you think your failure to jump the Snake River Canyon damaged your credibility?' ”
Knievel's response, Wilson said: “No canyon, nor any woman, I ever jumped has damaged my credibility.”
“Wembley Stadium was jammed,” by the time Knievel was through drumming up publicity, Wilson said.
As fast as he made the money, Knievel spent it - on jets, yachts, cars and motorcycles.
“He once said, ‘I made $51 million but I spent $52 million,' ” said Paul Riley, a friend of Knievel's son Kelly who shared stories at the Met the night before the funeral. “He created his own sport. Not a lot of guys can say that.”
Knievel didn't stay out of trouble after he became famous, either.
He was convicted of beating up Shelly Saltman, author of a book called “Evel Knievel on Tour” that painted a less-than-perfect picture of the daredevil, with a baseball bat, and sentenced to six months' jail time. Saltman, whose arm and wrist were shattered in the attack, was later awarded a $13 million judgment that he's never collected.
Knievel also had run-ins with the Internal Revenue Service and eventually declared bankruptcy.
Then, his health began to fail him. Knievel was diagnosed with Hepatitis C in 1993, and underwent a liver transplant because of it in 1999.
When he died Nov. 30 at the age of 69, it was from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs.
Son Robbie Knievel, who followed in his father's daredevil footsteps and who was estranged from Evel for many years, thanked his father's latest ex-wife, Krystal Kennedy-Knievel, for staying by his father's side throughout his health problems, even after they divorced in 2001.
“You're one of only two women he ever said ‘I love you' to - for more than a day or two, anyway,” Robbie Knievel said.
And son Kelly Knievel thanked their mother Linda Bork Knievel, who was married to Evel for 38 years.
“Through the good and bad, the highs and lows, our mother held her head high, with dignity and humility, and your kids love you for it,” he told her.
Evel and Linda had four children - Kelly, Robbie and daughters Tracey and Alicia.
Alicia came along many years after the first three, and Robbie said he always kidded his baby sister.
“By the time Alicia came along in 1980 Dad was broke, and she never saw the yachts, Ferraris and jets,” Robbie said. “But what you got was his love, more love than he could give the rest of us when he was younger.”
Kelly may have summed up his father best, when he recalled a day on the golf course with Evel. Kelly's game was not going well.
“I asked him what I was doing wrong, and he told me, ‘It doesn't matter what you're doing wrong,' ” Kelly said. “ ‘The only thing you need to figure out is what you need to do right.' ”
Knievel often said if he hadn't turned himself into a world-famous motorcycle daredevil he would have ended up dead or in jail.
And he always said the death part didn't bother him.
“He told me he wasn't afraid of dying,” Alicia's husband, Matt Vincent, said. “He said, ‘We're all going to end up in the same place anyway. We're just going to get there on different days.' ”
Former Gov. Judy Martz said for years, Knievel told her that he “believed in God, but he did not have to believe in Jesus Christ.” Jesus was just a middleman, and Knievel preferred to speak to God directly, she said.
“If you knew him, you knew there was no sense arguing with him,” Martz said.
But as his health worsened, Knievel changed his mind, and his heart.
Like everything else with his life, Knievel saw his switch to Christianity as an event.
“He called me out of the blue,” said the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, the well-known televangelist from California who officiated at Monday's service. “He told me he was looking for the guy who's got the biggest audience in the world.”
Schuller baptized Knievel on his television show.
“I never heard a testimony that rang so true,” said Schuller, who was flown to Butte on a private jet owned by Missoula businessman Dennis Washington.
“During the last six months, his tone changed,” McConaughey, the actor, said of Knievel. “He said, ‘I'm not looking forward to moving on, but I am ready.' ”
“I think the times between the jumps were the hardest for him,” said McConaughey, who became friends with Knievel when he hosted a History Channel program on the daredevil. “When he was on the ground, that was the toughest. When he was flying through the air, it was all grace. The landings could be tough. Coming back down was a little rough sometimes.
“But this is his final jump, and he's now forever in flight. He doesn't have to come back down any more. He doesn't have to land.”
To see a Missoulian slide show about Even Knievel's funeral weekend, click here.
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