By Pat Jordan
 To redeem himself, Evel set
up a jump over 13 buses in London’s Wembley Stadium before a crowd of
more than 70,000, for which he was paid $1 million. Like the Caesars
jump, he cleared the buses but crashed on landing and suffered
devastating injuries, including a crushed vertebra. Yet he managed to
stand up afterward, wave to his fans, and say into a mike, “I will
never, ever, ever, ever jump again.”
“I never thought I was a
failure unless I didn’t try to get up after a crash,” says Evel today.
“Kids come up to me all the time and say, ‘Once I was going through a
really bad time, and I saw you crash and get up, and it inspired me.’”
Despite
his Wembley proclamation, Evel made one last big jump, then retired. “I
was tired of getting beat to death,” he says. But why did he punish
himself in the first place?
“You can’t ask a guy like me why,”
Evel snaps. “I wanted to fly through the air. I was a daredevil, a
performer. I loved the thrill, the money, the whole macho thing. All
those things made me Evel Knievel. Sure, I was scared. You gotta be an
ass not to be scared. But I beat the hell out of death. It would
all go by so fast, in a blur. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three
Mississippi, four Mississippi. You’re in the air for four seconds,
you’re part of the machine, and then if you make a mistake midair, you
say to yourself, ‘Oh, boy. I’m gonna crash,’ and there’s nothing you
can do to stop it.”
Evel spent the rest of the ’70s drinking,
carousing, chasing women—in general living up to his wild-man rep,
which he bolstered by taking a baseball bat to a former publicist to
settle a vendetta. For that offense he served almost six months in
prison.
“There were always 15 guys standing outside my cell for
autographs,” he says. “I liked all of them. They were just them and I
was just me.”
Once when Evel was on a work release detail with
other cons, he hired 15 limousines to pick them all up in the morning
and bring them back at night. When the warden saw cons getting into
limousines, he had a fit.
“Boy, he was pissed off,” remembers
Evel. “I told him, just because these guys were in jail didn’t mean
they were bad. I was just trying to get them to feel part of the
system. He understood then.” On the day of his release, inmates carried
out Evel’s footlockers for him.
Evel took a financial hit from
the prison episode when he lost endorsements, and he began making
noises about resuming his career, about wanting to jump out of an
airplane at 40,000 feet without a parachute. “The state of Nevada
stopped me,” he says.
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