By Pat Jordan
 The greatest daredevil who ever lived is half-lying in an easy chair in a track suit, like Fidel in his hospital bed, struggling to breathe through a nose tube that’s connected to an oxygen tank in the living room of his small condo in St. Petersburg, Florida. At 69, he is a gaunt man with a wispy puff of white hair and taut, shiny, pale skin stretched over his high cheekbones. But that doesn’t mean he’s about to take crap from his bookie, who’s on the phone. “You telling me I didn’t take the Patriots?” Evel Knievel rasps. “I know who I took!” Minutes later he takes another call, from a manwho wants to “give” him a star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars—for $15,000. “Not if I have to pay for it,” he says firmly, then hangs up, exhausted. How preposterous that someone in Vegas would charge him for a star. This January, after all, marks the 40th anniversary of one of the city’s greatest spectacles, his daring and disastrous motorcycle jump over the Caesars Palace fountain, the event that propelled him to superstardom. He would go on to become one of the most famous men in the world. His motorcycle and riding costume are enshrined in the Smithsonian. A river is named after him, as is a biker convention in his hometown of Butte, Montana. When ABC listed its most-watched Wide World of Sports episodes, Evel Knievel specials placed 1st, 3rd, 7th, and 12th. No wonder he thinks Las Vegas, like everybody else, should pay for the right to use his name.
He is most famous for his death-defying motorcycle jumps and crashes, but mostly he’s famous for being Evel Knievel, the man who invented a sport, and himself. At a time when extreme sports and reality TV are more popular than ever, few remember that he founded both and bled for it as he did so. He was one of the first self-promoted celebrities, the man who, like his friend Muhammad Ali, shamelessly pronounced himself “the Greatest.” He redefined celebrity not as a means to an end but as a goal in itself. He inspired generations of fathers to say to their reckless sons, “Who do you think you are, Evel Knievel?” His godlike status makes it surreal to see him like this now, sucking up oxygen in God’s Waiting Room.“I’m dying,” he rasps. “This may be the last interview I ever do.”
He’s been dying for 42 years, first from his career, then from liver failure in the ’90s, and now from a rare lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. “How much can a human body endure?” he asks. “My immune system’s shot. The doctors gave me three years four years ago. I got this disease that’s so rare there’s no cure. I don’t know of anybody else who had it except Marlon Brando.” Which was always the point with Evel Knievel. He was always unique, and still is, awaiting death with a rare disease few other mortals ever had.
He created his image, and his life, out of the clay of Robert Craig Knievel, a wild kid from Butte, Montana. He was a good high school skier and hockey player, then a motorcycle racer, a bank robber, and—is it true?—a safecracker.
“What do ya mean, ‘is it true?’” he snaps, “I can still crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back. I’m not proud of it. But I was always against society.”
He became Evel Knievel in the mid-’60s when he asked a Norton motorcycle distributor named Bob Blair to sponsor him. Blair said he would, but only if he changed his name to Evil. Not eager to tempt God, he changed the i to an e. From that point forward, not even he would think of himself as Robert anymore. “It’s who I am,” he says. “I am Evel Knievel.”
To help sell motorcycles, he began jumping over “weird things”—a box of snakes, a lion, a tank full of sharks. (For the record: The term “jump the shark” originated with him, not the Fonz.) “I was happy he’d finally found a job he liked to do,” his wife, Linda—surely the most understanding woman in America—once said. When they divorced years later, she said, “He always thought there was something better out there and never stopped looking for it.”
He began looking for longer and more dangerous jumps, too, until, by the late ’60s, he was Evel Knievel, the greatest motorcycle daredevil the world had ever known, a man who was willing to jump over 13 double-decker buses, a 1,500-foot-wide canyon, the moon if he could find a rocket-propelled motorcycle powerful enough. He had balls the size of watermelons, which is why his fans loved him.
“It’s easy to be famous today,” he says. “People pay a million dollars to be recognized, but nobody cares about them. They cared about me because I did things other men were afraid to do. That’s why my fans identified with me. They were mostly working-class.”
His fans were also drawn to him because of the possibility of a crash, broken bones, failure, and death. They sometimes booed when he succeeded, shouting out, “That was too easy!” and cheered when he crashed. “My failures had a lot to do with my fame,” he admits. He once famously said, “I created Evel Knievel, and then he sort of got away from me.”
He meant that he let his fans dictate what he did. “They always expected more,” he says. So he gave it to them. Longer and more dangerous jumps: two cars, then 22 cars. It was said that during the height of his fame, grown men admired him, young boys wanted to be like him, and women wanted to sleep with him. He was tall and handsome in the country way, with prominent cheekbones and a high, swept-back pompadour, like a ’70s lounge lizard. He wore a white leather costume with red-white-and-blue stars and stripes and a flowing cape—a little gay actually, but understandable since the idea came from his friend Liberace.
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