By Pat Jordan

Evel was dangerous, hard-drinking (his poison: a beer, tomato juice, Wild Turkey concoction called a Montana Mary), and sexual, every women’s bad-boy fantasy, which he embellished. He carried a .44 magnum and a gold-and-ebony hollowed-out cane with a sword in it. People wondered: Who was Evel Knie­vel real­ly? A flimflam artist, a crazy man, or a man of monumental courage? Maybe a bit of each.By the early ’70s, he counted Elvis, Ali, and Steve McQueen as friends. Books were written about him. Three bad movies were made about his life. He’s been featured in countless TV specials, and, Lord have mercy, this year Evel Knievel: The Rock Opera opened in Los Angeles to rave reviews.

Today Evel owns the rights to his name and image and is willing to put them on anything he can sell. He claims to have made $10 million over the past few years. To show me, he laboriously rises from his chair. Trailing his oxygen tube behind him like a tether to life, he shuffles toward his office, then suddenly gasps for breath. “You’re standing on my tube,” he mutters.

The office is a mess. Clothes strewn on a chair. Boxes piled high. Toys. Dolls. Caps. Tchotchkes everywhere. He points to a photograph: Evel in his white leather costume on a motorcycle while a slacker-looking kid in baggy shorts sits behind him, making a funny face, as if this posed picture with this fossil is a joke. Evel looks back over his shoulder, his eyes half-lidded, dismissive, a little threatening.

“That’s Tony Hawk,” says Evel, “the skateboard champion. I know him and Mat Hoffman, the bicycle stunt kid. I’m the father to them all.” He means he is the progenitor of all the extreme sports kids of today, the skateboarders who leap off walls, the actors who crash into walls in the Jackass movies, the contestants on Fear Factor.

“He’s a legend to all of us,” says pro skateboarder Danny Way, who jumped the Great Wall of China in 2005. “We probably wouldn’t have the opportunities we do without him. There wasn’t a lot of history of people doing 100-foot jumps before him. The motorcycles weren’t made for it. The ramps weren’t made for it. And he went out and just did it.”

Breathing heavily in little gasps, Evel shuffles back to his chair. “Things ain’t easy, buddy,” he says, struggling for breath. “It’s a compli­ment to me that all those kids come up to me. I always knew how to draw a crowd.”

Evel drew his biggest crowds with three jumps, all of which failed spectacularly, beginning with his Caesars Palace fountain jump on New Year’s Day, 1968. He cleared the foun­tain, but then his back wheel caught on the landing ramp, sending  him tumbling over his motorcycle, which then rolled over him.

“It was my worst injury,” he recalls. “I had a compound fracture of my left hip, broke my right wrist and left ankle, and had a severe concussion. I was unconscious 30 days. You know, I had a couple hundred jumps in my career, and I made most of them, but the ones they show over and over are the ones when I crashed.”

Which is not quite the truth. His most famous jump, in 1974, was meant to be over a 1,500-foot-wide abyss known as the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. That day would be immortalized on film and in the press as one of the most hyped events in sports—and one of the biggest fiascos. Fifteen thousand people showed up for the jump. People went to theaters to watch it on closed-circuit television. Then three quarters of the way up his takeoff ramp, Evel’s parachute prematurely deployed. He fluttered to the canyon floor below like the white petal of a flower.

He wasn’t hurt, but his image as a fearless daredevil was. The headlines the following day read “Evel Knievel Fails to Die” (right alongside: “Ford Pardons Nixon”). The presumption was, if he was stupid enough to self-destruct, then he was obligated to go through with it.

“The engineer made a mistake, and the chute deployed too soon,” he says. “It was heartbreaking.” When asked about the event’s credibility, he fumes: “I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated! What more do you want?”