While he was still in formal education, Bobby relied on sports rather than academic pursuits to provide the inspiration for getting out of bed each morning. He enthusiastically played hockey and football and tried his hand at pole-vaulting and most other track and field events, usually with a considerable degree of success. In fact he became so competent at skiing that he went on to win the Class A division of the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association men’s ski-jumping championship in 1957 – his first real, high-profile jumps of any kind and another crucial piece in the jigsaw that was to make up his unique and bizarre career. Years later, Knievel would utilise ski-jump-style ramps for several of his motorcycle jumps when there was insufficient space to reach the required take-off speed.
Further refining the necessary skills for the career path he would eventually choose, Knievel also tried his hand at rodeo riding all over Montana. Again, the physical involvement and danger appealed to Bobby just as it did on the football pitch or hockey rink; he was a natural-born thrill-seeker and those thrills simply could not be found sitting behind a desk listening to a lecture on the American Civil War, much as he enjoyed tales of the Old West. Rodeo riding also happened to be another discipline that would stand Bobby in good stead when it came to muscling a bucking and weaving Harley-Davidson down a landing ramp.
But the sport that most of his childhood friends and sports coaches remember him as being particularly good at was ice hockey, even though he was never noted as being much of a team player as his high-school hockey coach Leo Maney recalls: ‘He was an individualist and he did not learn, at any time we were associated with him, this matter of team play; passing the puck to the other players. He’d get the puck at one end of the ring and away he’d go all by himself.’
That streak of individuality, that preference to rely on himself instead of others and that desire to attract the glory of the limelight for his own achievements were all crucial elements in the making of Evel Knievel. While his grandparents did all they could for him, Bobby was continuously aware that he had been abandoned early in life and that the only person that was going to be able to help him make something of himself
was
himself.
But, much as he would have liked to, Bobby couldn’t spend his entire time at high school playing sports and, when the pressure and boredom of class work finally became too much, he decided to leave school at 16, before graduating, much to the disappointment of his grandmother. Emma Knievel had tried everything she could to make sure Bobby had a solid education which would earn him a respectable job, but in the end his own will was too strong. If he didn’t want to do something, Bobby Knievel simply wouldn’t do it – for anyone or anything. But his lack of education meant there were few options of employment in Butte and it was almost inevitable that he would find himself working down the mines.
Mining for any substance is hard, gruelling and dangerous work but it was even tougher before today’s high standards of safety and occupational health came into being. Apart from the multitude of physical mining accidents, which were all too common, there was also silicosis – or miner’s consumption as it was known locally – to worry about. Caused by breathing in tiny particles of silica, quartz or slate, over time silicosis affects the lung tissue and can ultimately prove fatal. Regardless of the dangers (or more probably because he just didn’t have any other viable options) Bobby Knievel landed a job with the Anaconda Copper Mining Company after leaving school, and worked in the Stewart and Emma mine shafts a mile below the surface of the richest hill on earth as a contract miner, skip tender and diamond driller. ‘I did every job in the mine from the top to the bottom and I remember my first cheque – $57 for a week’s work.’
Apart from silicosis there were other potentially lethal hazards, including the constant threat of cave-ins, fires, floods and the escape of poisonous gases, not to mention the additional and usual hazards of working with heavy equipment in a poorly lit environment where temperatures often soared above 100 degrees. Conditions were so bad that more than 2,100 miners lost their lives in Butte’s deadly labyrinth of mine shafts over the years, 168 of which perished in a single fire in 1917. Knievel soon discovered it wasn’t for him. ‘I could hardly wait to get out. I had many friends killed in the mines [from] accidents; ore dumped on them in the shafts and killed falling to the bottom, and being crushed to death in the slopes. I just wanted to get out.’
Knievel did have one other option open to him apart from working down the mines and that was to work in his father’s Volkswagen dealership, which he had opened upon his return to Butte in 1956. But Bobby, perhaps needing to find his own way in the world or maybe because he still harboured a grudge against his father for abandoning him, declined the offer and stuck with his mining job, however desperate he was to get out of it.
Salvation from the pits eventually came in the form of a driving job for the same Anaconda company. Bobby could escape the perils of the mines by driving his less fortunate colleagues to and from work. It was a safer and more comfortable job but Bobby found it mundane work and often spiced it up by trying to scare his passengers witless, to the point where he claims they refused to ride with him any longer. The final straw in his career at Anaconda came when he reputedly told a colleague to drop a giant boulder into the back of a truck he was driving so that he could perform a ‘wheelie’. According to Knievel, the truck reared up so high that it brought down overhead power cables and led to his dismissal.
Glad to be out of the mining business, an experience he would ‘never forget’, Knievel was nonetheless still short of career options and decided that his physical prowess would be put to better use in the US Army. He joined the 47th Infantry in the late 1950s (most probably 1958, though Knievel himself offers varied dates) for one year’s full service to test the water. As a non-team-player and a young man who did not respond well to authority, the armed forces may have seemed a strange choice, but for Knievel it represented one of the few opportunities to escape the grimness and hopelessness of Butte. He had to give it a try.
Knievel was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington, and although he initially claimed he hated his time in the Army his opinion appeared to have mellowed in later years when he was asked if it was a particularly grim period in his life. ‘Not really. I served two years in the infantry full-time then seven years in the Reserves when I was in my twenties, but it was okay. I even managed to do a bit of pole-vaulting, sky-diving and parachuting.’
Despite becoming proficient in the use of Browning automatic rifles, it would seem that Bobby’s premier contribution to Uncle Sam was in his role as a member of the Army’s pole-vaulting team where he could stand by his own merits – just the way he preferred it. Having already become a proficient ski-jumper, his pole-vaulting prowess (he claims to have been able to clear a bar at 14 feet) seemed to prove that jumping really was in Knievel’s blood, one way or another.
Whatever his true feelings about the Army, he didn’t enjoy the experience enough to sign up for any longer than the minimum term, and after a short period of service he opted out, even though he didn’t have any other immediate prospects.
Once again it was his love of sport that provided the prospect of a possible alternative career. Having attended a summer hockey school at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks in 1959, Bobby saw a glimmer of hope in carving out a career as a professional ice-hockey player.
Perhaps disliking the formal approach adopted by an official hockey school, Bobby claimed to have declined the offer of a full-time scholarship, opting instead to throw his lot in with the semi-professional Charlotte Clippers who were members of the Eastern Hockey League. Yet again he appeared to be restless and easily bored and he quit the team after completing just one exhibition season. By then Knievel felt he had no chance of making it into the professional National Hockey League and, after failing a try-out with the semi-professional Seattle Totems of the Western Hockey League, he headed back home to Butte, a little more worldly but still lacking any real direction in his life.
While he may not have been good enough to cut it on the national scene, Knievel was now armed with the experience he’d gained on his travels and he viewed himself as a big hockey fish in a pretty small pond. He saw a new opportunity of making a living from the sport, and decided to form his own team, the Butte Bombers, which he would not only own but also play for, manage and coach. If he couldn’t cut it solely as a player, maybe a jack-of-all-trades approach would reap rewards. The Bombers established themselves as a semi-professional team and Knievel claims they only lost one game in the two seasons they existed. That game was against the Czechoslovakian Olympic team, whom Bobby had shrewdly coerced into playing his Bombers as a warm-up game for the 1960 Winter Olympics that were being held at Squaw Valley in California.
This may have appeared to be a shrewd move at the time but it soon turned into a farce and threatened to ruin Bobby financially. He had hired the Civic Center in Butte and promoted the entire event himself, as well as still being one of the team players. He stood to make some decent money on the gate and a few bucks more from selling beer and snacks, but when forty Czech players, officials and hangers-on turned up in Butte, all expecting their expenses to be paid, Bobby knew he was in trouble. He had only anticipated an entourage of 20 and immediately realised he was going to lose money, and what was more, it was money he didn’t have to lose. After the game he told the Czechs he couldn’t pay their expenses without receipts (which Knievel later admitted to stealing) and an international incident was only avoided when the US Olympic Committee stepped in to pick up the bill.
The whole event must have left a sour taste in Knievel’s mouth as he finally turned his back on ice hockey and set about looking for other ways to make a quick buck. ‘There’s no money in hockey,’ he later lamented. ‘It was my dream to be a pro-hockey player but there’s just no money in it.’ He certainly needed to make some money somehow because Knievel had by now married his childhood sweetheart, Linda Joan Bork.
Knievel had known Bork from his days at Butte High, and even after he dropped out he still hung around outside the school looking for any opportunity to talk with Linda. Three years younger than Knievel, Bork was caught between her youthful love for the handsome but unpromising 20-year-old and the disapproval of her parents, who saw Bobby as little more than a hoodlum who couldn’t hold a steady job. And if Knievel’s often-repeated tale about kidnapping his future wife is true, then he certainly justified the Borks’ assessment of him. According to Knievel, he became so frustrated by the Borks’ ban on their daughter speaking to him that he kidnapped Linda from the local ice rink. He reportedly dragged her off the ice by her hair and headed for Idaho where he proposed to marry her. Knievel’s grandmother recalled the incident many years later, adding a ring of truth to the story. ‘He did kidnap her of course and they were hunting for them all night long. The police were hunting for them and we were hunting for them but he was not put in jail or anything.’
Driving conditions on the night of the ‘kidnap’ were terrible and the young couple were forced to pull over and sleep the night in Bobby’s grandparents’ car, hoping the blizzard would abate by morning. But, by the following day, word of Knievel’s escapade had got out and the couple were intercepted by a police road-block before they could reach Idaho. Knievel was charged not with kidnapping but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but since Linda did not want to press charges he was merely reprimanded by the authorities.
However, now feeling fully justified in his assessment of Knievel, Linda’s father subsequently succeeded in obtaining a restraining order against Bobby, forcing him to stay away from Linda for a period of two years. Knievel had little choice but to obey – at least in public – but he still never gave up hope of one day marrying Linda Bork. His patience paid dividends and that day finally came on 5 September 1959 when the pair tied the knot having eloped with the help of a $50 loan from Knievel’s grandmother and the use of the family car. Linda had only managed to elope because her father was away on a fishing trip at the time of the marriage and by the time he discovered the truth there was nothing he could do to change matters, no matter how furious he was.
A married man he may have been, but Bobby Knievel was still without gainful employment and the only money he was bringing in to the caravan he and his young wife were staying in was from a number of petty criminal activities. Knievel had long since realised that most of the people he saw in Butte with money had gained it on the wrong side of the law and he wanted a piece of the action, having seen the benefits of a life of crime. ‘All that you can desire in life or want to be is what you can see immediately around you,’ he explained, ‘and what I saw immediately around me was a pimp with a shiny pair of shoes and a ‘49 Mercury. In Butte, if you weren’t a pimp or a thief you were nothing. And I needed a few bucks to get out.’ It was all the incentive Bobby needed; if he couldn’t earn an honest buck, he’d earn some dishonest ones.
Knievel had long been used to the wrong side of the law, having been involved in several fights and charged with petty theft, but that was not exactly out of the ordinary for young men in post-war Butte. He was no stranger to dreaming up scams to make money either. One particular favourite was stealing hubcaps from cars to sell on as replacements or as scrap metal, a technique he perfected while still at school but one which escalated over time to almost industrial proportions. ‘One time the police caught me and another boy with about three hundred hubcaps. I sold them for about a buck apiece. Christ, I needed a few bucks to go out. I could steal a guy’s hubcaps when he was sitting in the car. You know, those ore trains go by, make a lot of noise. A guy’s sitting in his car, I didn’t care whether he had the radio on or not, I’d just steal the hubcaps right off his car. Every kid in town knew I could do it. But I moved on to bigger and better things.’