Evel Wisdom

By Justin Ringsak, Unfiltered 12-11-07

Writing about Evel Knievel is like dancing about architecture, and, in the wake of his death, there has been a lot of architectural dancing. But Knievel himself was certainly no stranger to diving headlong into projects destined for failure, so on the day after the high-flying wildman was laid to rest here beneath the Richest Hill on Earth, it only seems appropriate to consider the man and the myth.

The myth of Knievel is, like many other modern American myths, one of celebrity, but Knievel’s differs from the pack in the details. He is known perhaps more for his fantastic failures, the wrecks and broken bones, than for his successes. And, despite the stars-and-stripes costume, Knievel never claimed to be a sterling example of idealized American virtue. Instead, he was more indicative of America-as-it-is, a down-to-earth place of complexity and contradiction, where right and wrong are well sensed but little understood.

Knievel made mistakes, he was fallible, he engaged in some minor (and some not-so-minor) criminal hijinks. Here in his hometown of Butte, Montana, he was a divisive personality- people loved him or hated him. But even those who hated him have to respect him, to one degree or another, for what he accomplished, and now for the way he has stepped out.

The boisterous, self-promoting Knievel of legend was celebrated at his funeral in Butte this week by some 2,000 people, along with big names like Smokin’ Joe Frazier and Matthew McConaughey. But beneath the glitz, beneath the celebration of Knievel the myth emerged a portrait of Knievel as a person. Knievel’s friend Gene Sullivan, speaking at the funeral, relayed a moving request from Evel to tell everyone that he had ever offended or wronged or otherwise “Evel-Knieveled” that he was sorry, and that he wanted to be forgiven. It’s a pity that this part of Evel’s funeral has been under-reported (newwest.net carries one of the few Knievel funeral stories to mention it).

His last months found Knievel looking for meaning and finding some semblance of it in religion. He was a man who understood that he was flawed and fallible and made mistakes, and he embraced those human frailties, indeed, even reveled in them. In modern America, where we are obsessed with efficiency and perfection, Knievel reminds us that it is okay, even necessary, to make mistakes, to fail, and to find some wisdom in the failing, to thrive in it. Knievel was all about the experience, not necessarily the result, and in that his approach to life should be respected if not admired.

Knievel was a trickster, a coyote god of mischief, Loki, Pan, Bacchus, coupled with a bit of Hercules and a pinch of Superman. Now the man is gone but the legend lives on, as it always will, the indelible image of a star-spangled superman flying through the air on a motorcycle stamped firmly on our collective subconscious. But the real wonder of his myth is that it is a myth that flies close to the ground. Knievel was real, dammit, and no one was going to make him anything but. Let the myth live on, carrying with it pieces of a complicated, confounding man who reminds us all of our own personal contradictions and mistakes, and that those things are precisely what make us who we are, for better or worse.

Perhaps Knievel’s life, and his appeal to so many of us, can be summed up in a simple bit of wisdom: no one of us is perfect. And that’s just fine.

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