Pure Evel....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGGCVE2lKY -Las Vegas Jump!!!

EVEL Knievel, he was my childhood hero! The hard-living, death-defying adventurer who went from stealing motorcycles to riding them in a series of spectacular airborne stunts in the 1960s and '70s, has died. He was 69.
Knievel had been in failing health for years with diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung condition. In 1999 he underwent a liver transplant after nearly dying of hepatitis C, which he believed he had contracted through a blood transfusion after one of many violent spills.
Only days before his death, he and rap artist Kanye West settled a lawsuit over West's use of Knievel's trademarked image in a music video.
Knievel amazed and horrified onlookers in 1968 by vaulting his motorcycle 45 metres over the fountains of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, only to land in a bone-breaking crash.
He continued to win fame and fortune by getting huge audiences to watch him roar his motorcycle up a ramp, fly over 10, 15 or 20 cars parked side by side and come down on another ramp. Perhaps his most spectacular stunt, another disaster, was an attempt to jump an Idaho canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle in 1974.
Knievel's showmanship, skill and disdain for death were so admired that he became a folk hero.
Performing stunts hundreds of times, Knievel repeatedly shattered bones as well as his bikes. When he was forced to retire in 1980, he told reporters that he was "nothing but scar tissue and surgical steel".
He underwent as many as 15 major operations to relieve severe trauma and repair broken bones — skull, pelvis, ribs, collarbone, shoulders and hips. "I created the character called Evel Knievel, and he sort of got away from me," he said.
His health was also compromised by years of heavy drinking; he said at one point he was consuming half a bottle of whiskey a day, washed down with beer chasers.
Robert Craig Knievel was born in the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, and raised by grandparents.
As he told the story, he acquired the name Evel as a boy. Arrested for stealing hubcaps, he was taken to jail, where the police were holding a man named Knofel, whom they called "Awful Knofel".
They decided to call Robert "Evil Knievel". The name stuck, and some years later, Knievel legally took the name Evel, changing the "i" to "e" because he thought it looked better.
A star athlete at school, he volunteered to be an army paratrooper in the 1950s and made 30 jumps. Afterwards he played hockey with the Charlotte Clippers. Then he took up motorcycle racing until falling and breaking bones in a 1962 race.

At 27, he became co-owner of a motorcycle shop. To attract customers, he announced he would jump 12 metres over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes and continue on past a mountain lion tethered at the other end. Before a thousand people, he did the stunt but failed to fly far enough; his bike came down on the rattlesnakes. The audience was in awe.
"Right then," he said, "I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff."
He hit the big time in 1968 with his jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace. "It was terrible," he said afterward. "I lost control of the bike. Everything seemed to come apart. I kept smashing over and over and ended up against a brick wall, 165 feet away."
The accident left him with a fractured skull and broken pelvis, hips and ribs. He was unconscious for a month. But soon after his recovery, he jumped 52 wrecked cars at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
In 1974, Knievel decided to jump almost 500 metres across the Snake River canyon in Idaho. Before thousands of spectators , he took a rocket-powered motorcycle up a long ramp at 560 km/h and soared some 600 metres above the canyon. But his parachute opened prematurely, and he and the cycle drifted to the canyon floor, leaving him without serious injury. He made $US6 million.
He also made a great deal of money the next year when he jumped over 13 double-decker buses in London. He crashed there, too, breaking pelvis, vertebrae and hand.
In Chicago, he soared over an aquarium tank containing 13 sharks but skidded on the exit ramp and fractured his right forearm and his left collarbone.
In 1986, he was fined $US200 in Kansas City, on charges of soliciting an undercover policewoman for immoral purposes. And in 1995, after leaving his wife of 38 years and living with Krystal Kennedy, a younger woman, Knievel was charged with assaulting her. Kennedy ultimately declined to press charges, however, and married him in 1999.
Evel Knievel once described himself as "the last gladiator in the new Rome".
"I am a guy who is first of all a businessman," he once said. "I'm not a stunt man. I'm not a daredevil. I'm" — he paused — "I'm an explorer."

"I'm an explorer!"

■ Knievel played himself in the 1977 movie Viva Knievel! The plot featured a rival trying to kill Knievel and use his 18-wheel truck to smuggle cocaine. George Hamilton portrayed him in a 1971 film and George Eads played him in a 2004 television movie.
■ Among Knievel's notable feats were clearing 19 cars, sailing over 13 Mack trucks and jumping 13 double-decker buses in London, as well as a failed attempt to leap the Snake River canyon in Idaho on a rocket-powered motorcycle.
■ A jailer in Montana was responsible for Knievel's nickname. As a youth, Knievel had several run-ins with police and the jailer dubbed him "Evil Knievel". In order not to be perceived as a bad guy, Knievel later changed the spelling to "Evel" as his daredevil career took off.