‘Toughest SOB You Ever Met’

The breakfast interview ended, the hero stuck out his hand, the reporter gladly shook it.

The hero had something else in mind.

“Help me up, would you?” asked Evel Knievel.

*

He was more than a daredevil, more than a crazy man who drank Wild Turkey and rode fast bikes.

For the children of 20 years ago, he was a vision, dressed up like the flag and flying through the air and being a doggone American inspiration when nobody else wanted the job.

Sitting in a restaurant booth Friday morning, black leather jacket on his shoulders, diamond rings gleaming, he is a vision still.

A living testament to how those fearless times did not come free.

Evel Knievel, at 59, doesn’t look a day over 70.

“I’m the toughest SOB you ever met in your life,” he says.

He has to be, just to get around with that metal walker while recovering from hip replacement and pelvis reconstruction.

He suffers from a staph infection that last year nearly killed him.

He has an esophagus condition that, if he ever dares drink alcohol again, causes him to vomit blood.

He has liver trouble that he says causes his body to swell up with fluids.

His arms have been so badly broken, he requires help to put on his own belt.

Thirty-five broken bones, more than 3 1/2 years in hospitals, yet he was still able to board a plane at his Florida home and fly here to promote this week’s Southern California Boat Show at the Convention Center.

Tough? As ever, though time has changed the context.

The risks taken by Evel Knievel these days are mostly with his words, leaps over busloads of political correctness, still long and dramatic.

“I will bet Wilt Chamberlain $100,000 that he never slept with that many women, it’s impossible, he’s a liar, I should know,” he said Friday morning.

Sitting alongside him, 26-year-old fiancee Krystal Kennedy glared.

“I once bet buddies that I could sleep with seven women in a 24-hour period, and I ended up with eight, but it’s tough,” he said. “Even six women in one day is tough.”

Kennedy stood up, excused herself.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. “I doubt I’ll miss anything important.”

She walked away, and Knievel laughed.

“This women’s liberation stuff, it’s BS, it’s sickening,” he said. “Women go to work dressed as sexy as they can, then when men don’t make passes at them, they sue the men. I know how it works.”

Ten minutes later the interview ended, and his fiancee was still missing.

Knievel was last seen shuffling his walker through the hotel lobby, calling her name.

It’s not easy being Evel.

A man recently challenged him to an arm-wrestling match, wanted to brag to his friends that he whipped the greatest daredevil ever, but the great one declined.

“My arm hurts,” he said.

He recently taped a series of commercials promoting ESPN’s daredevil Winter X Games, then felt like a bad father.

“I watched the tapes, heard myself talking to these children to go for it, and had second thoughts,” he said. “I wish I had said something else. I didn’t feel comfortable telling them to risk their lives.”

Has it really been 30 years since he went tumbling across the concrete while trying to clear those fountains at Caesars Palace?

Twenty-four years since that parachute opened on his rocket over Snake River Canyon?

Eighteen years since his last jump?

“When you were growing up, America was on its butt,” he says to the reporter, to anyone who remembers breathlessly watching him clear 13 buses on “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” “I came along at the right place, the right time.

“You wanted to see somebody do something for real. You wanted to see somebody do something American.”

Or maybe we just wanted to see somebody really die on TV. Whatever, everyone watched, and when he disappeared from the public into a retirement of hard living and high rolling, we knew we would never see anything like it again.

“It’s like Elvis Presley or Muhammad Ali,” he said, smiling crookedly behind yellow-tinted glasses. “There’s something to being first.”

And there’s something to hanging around. Today, with renewed popularity of disco music and ‘70s celebrities, Evel is cool again.

There are plans to re-release the popular Evel Knievel doll. There are plans for another movie about his life.

He even has his own crash-filled Web site, consistently voted among the best on the Web.

“W-w-w-dot-Evel-Knievel-dot-com,” he says proudly, and you laugh, unable to hide your shock at hearing those words come from that man.

He is also, in his own way, again trying to carry the flag for American values.

He hustles golf.

With a cart, of course.

“I can’t believe Arnold Palmer,” he said. “If he ever had to use a cart in his life, he wouldn’t be saying that Casey Martin shouldn’t use one. I can’t believe him.”

He tells the story of playing a round at Myrtle Beach for $100,000 . . . and getting an eagle on the first hole while whipping another poor sucker.

But he also tells the story of last winter, walking to his ball in the rough, falling down a ditch, then being unable to move for two weeks, causing him to finally have that hip surgery.

Always these days, there is another story.

He brags about his grandmother living until 103. Yet he despairs about the last time he was affected by the staph infection, resulting in a 104-degree temperature, teeth chattering, an ambulance ride and a prayer.

“I was saying, ‘Please God, don’t let me die,’ ” he said.

He brags that once this hip heals and he can walk again, he will feel better than ever.

But when asked about the words he wants chiseled into his tombstone--maybe something about a daredevil leaping to God?--he surprises again.

“Under my name I want it to read, ‘See, I told you I was sick.’ ” he says, laughing.

You are thinking about that as you grab his hand and carefully pull him to his feet.