We’ve showed you all sorts of Evel Knievel video over the years here on BangShift and when it has been me posting the stuff I have always mentioned (to the large frustration of some) that Evel’s public persona and his private life were to incredibly divergent things. Literal polar opposites. Of course, by the late 1970s it had all come together and the guy dropped off the public radar harder than few others ever have in the modern world. That being said, during his “prime”, Evel Knievel was one of the world’s most famous, outlandish, outspoken, and celebrated people. He was also one of the biggest bullshit artists that as ever walked the face of the Earth and it all came back on him while sitting at a 56-degree angle in a rough looking, stem rocket powered “SkyCycle” that would ultimately become his undoing. Leigh Montville’s book, which was released in 2011 is an absolutely awesome read. It is not a hit piece, it is not a stroke job, it is a jaw-dropping blow by blow account of one man’s rise to international fame through risks, lies, successes, pure fabrication, unadulterated self-promotion, and near crippling failure. Montville pulls no punches while reviewing where Knievel came from and what kind of guy he was but Montville also pulls no punches in celebrating the entire incredible story.

While the salacious parts of the book regarding Knievel’s criminal past and propensity for subsisting on Wild Turkey whiskey are certainly page turners, I found myself most interested in the sections that explored some of the weird duality in his life. For instance, Robert Craig Knievel was a world-class insurance salesman. That’s the truth. Knievel bought into a “power of positive thought” style sales program and set company sales records and essentially digested all of the messages that his corporate overlords were handing down. This would prove an important part of his life because Knievel was able to fall back on it once or twice and ultimately he was able to run a scam against the company to cash in one a bunch of policies he shouldn’t have had in the first place. Sure, that cost his “friend” a job but Evel needed money for Pete’s sake.

The common theme in the book is that Knievel is horrendous when it comes to personal relationships…unless there was something in it for Evel. He scammed, screwed, lied to, and cheated a very large percentage of people that he ran across in life and if his mouth was moving you could pretty much guess that he was running a scam on someone…most likely everyone in the room. And yet, there were more than a few things you could admire about the guy. Seriously.

What could you admire about a guy most everyone that did business with have few good things to say with respect to? Audacity for one thing. He could have been the most audacious son of a bitch who ever lived definitely in the last 100 years. If we went into a crowded bar he’d slip out to a pay phone and have himself paged so he could run feel important. He set up the Caesar’s Palace fountain jump (which ended in disaster but literally launched his star) by calling and pretending to be 100 different people at the casino office. He had no problem telling people stuff that was patently untrue and would be proven so in mere minutes to make a buck or get a point across.

Like all bullshit artists, the roof eventually caves in and a seemingly innocuous comment that Knievel made on a talk show early in his career about wanting to jump the Grand Canyon became this thing that he couldn’t let rest. Everywhere he went he would talk about it. We know how this ends. He never got a shot at the Grand Canyon but nearly died at Snake River Canyon when his steam rocket powered “missile” floated into the canyon and his career went into a shambolic phase that it never recovered from.

Montville does a masterful job of weaving all the stories together from his days as a thug in Butte, Montana to his grand undoing of breaking a writer’s arms with a baseball bat in the late 1970s and the his last years when he again tasted a small piece of that love the world heaved at him in the 1970s. It is a wholly American story about a guy who invented a thing no one even knew that they’d be interested in and who then turned the activity and himself into a worldwide name. It didn’t happen by accident but it sure didn’t happen on purpose but it did happen and you’ll love every word in this account of how the whole thing played out.