Evel Knievel’s meticulously restored Mack Truck hauler is on display in the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka, Kansas. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but the museum is totally worth a visit and the $15 cost of admission. (Great photo courtesy Dan Wayne.)
“Hell, I never knew a broad that wasn’t a pushover.”
“When I die, you’ve got to bury me with my complete trailer, with my bikes and everything inside. But you’ve got to leave the big airhorn sticking out, so when I think it’s time for me to come back and do some good, I’ll just toot my horn and drive right out of the grave because I’m really Superman.”
I recently read “Evel Knievel on Tour”, a memoir written by Knievel’s PR flack, Sheldon Saltman, covering the weeks leading up to the daredevil’s ill-fated attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon.
The thing that struck me throughout this story was, if Evel had been born just a few years later, and to money in New York instead of white trash in Butte, he may well have become the President of the United States—because Evel basically was The Donald, before there was a Donald.
Both are white men, of course—that’s the only type of person that fails upwards instead of paying the price for ignorance. And both were (are, in the case of Trump) demonstrably terrible at the thing they nominally became famous for doing.
In Trump’s case as a real-estate developer, casino owner, and impresario of airlines, steaks, and God-knows what else it was one bankruptcy after another.
Evel one-upped him there. His failures weren’t just somehow overlooked, he became rich (albeit briefly) and enduringly famous for his failures. When I recently toured the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka, the founder walked me past the display related to Evel’s famous fountain jump at Caesar’s Palace and offered that, “If he’d landed this jump we would not be talking about him.”
Both were misogynists and serial philanderers; both wrapped themselves in the flag and claimed to stand for law and order while freely admitting to an early life of petty crime in Evel’s case, and open self-dealing as President, in Trump’s. They were both golfers prone to exaggerating their skills on the links.
Evel was Trump’s prototype as an idiot-savant when it came to manipulating the media of his day; he owed most of his fame and fortune to free coverage. Again like Trump, Evel railed against the press. After craving and currying coverage, he bitterly complained it was unfair. Also Trumpian: Evel was quick to imagine that when things didn’t go his way, it was because people in general and the press in particular were conspiring against him.
Both men’s lives amply demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect and powerful fools’ tendency to surround themselves with incompetence. Evel’s idiotic, low-tech, steam-rocket “Sky Cycle” was destined to fail, just as Trump’s strategy of handing Covid-19 response off to the states will doom the U.S. to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Of course, Trump won’t accept responsibility for that massive fuckup. Meanwhile Knievel realized too late that his Sky Cycle stunt was unlikely to pan out, but climbed in anyway—which illustrates the one significant difference between the two blowhards: Evel was no coward.
This fascinating book is almost impossible to find in print, but if you click this cover image you can read or download a high res scan of the entire text.
In the end, Saltman’s book—which was authorized, based on hundreds of hours of recordings, and the truth of which was never challenged—proved to be Knievel’s undoing. Not because Knievel’s millions of fans abandoned him, but because it indirectly led to Knievel’s sponsors abandoning him.
Even though Knievel and his lawyers had approved Saltman’s text, it is likely that Evel never really read it. (Sound familiar?) It wasn’t until the book came out that he realized how unflattering it was. Knievel could not control his temper; he attacked Saltman in front of witnesses, which led to criminal charges. Ideal Toy, which paid the daredevil millions per year in royalties in order to market Evel Knievel toys, immediately dropped him. Within weeks, he was bankrupt. The end was a long, slow, embarrassing descent.
Which brings me to that quote about burying him in his truck. Evel was a malignant narcissist too; he was jealous of anyone else’s fame. As soon as Trump emerged as a serious contender for the GOP nomination in 2016, Evel would have burst from the grave and loudly proclaimed that he’d had his name on jet long before Trump ever did and that he, not The Donald, deserved to be the President.
I’m not sure how Evel would’ve negotiated the Republican primaries, but I am certain that many of the people who voted for Trump in the general election would just as blithely have voted Knievel.
He wouldn’t have made a worse President.