Evel Knievel Was a Daredevil at Golf, Too

by Mulligan Stu on Nov 30, 2007 7:52 PM EST Comment 0 comments

evel knievel golf Evel Knievel was an American icon. Which says something about Knievel, and probably more about American fascination with celebrity. But that's a rumination for another time (and another place).

Knievel died today at the age of 69, and the wonder is that he ever made it this far. Not just because of his sometimes spectacular, frequently foolish and always dangerous stunts, but because he lived as dangerous out of the spotlight as in it. He lived fast and hard, and I imagine he played golf that way, too.

In 2005, Golf Digest ran a "My Shot" feature with Knievel, introduced with the sentence, "For America's greatest living daredevil, golf was the most dangerous game of all." (The photo, by Dom Furore, is from that piece, and in it Knievel is wearing an oxygen tank for his round of golf.)

Knievel's first "shot" of the article was this story:

I'd make a jump on a motorcycle before I'd jump with a golf cart again. In the mid-'70s I played a lot of golf at Rivermont in Alpharetta, Ga. The 17th hole there is a par 3 that's steeply downhill. The path has a series of hairpin turns, and if you ignore them you'll just keep going over a huge ledge. The guys I hung out with down there pointed out that if you gathered enough speed you could go over the cliff and land where the path resumes farther down the hill. For days they dared me to make the jump, and when I came to the hole in a foul mood one afternoon--I wasn't playing well--I just went for it. Halfway down the hill I realized I'd made a mistake. You have no idea how unstable a three-wheel golf cart is when it becomes airborne. By the grace of God I made a perfect three-point landing, but the tires were like basketballs, and the cart bounced like an SOB. When I got the thing stopped down near the green, I immediately got a royal chewing out from my wife. I couldn't blame her. She'd been in the passenger seat the whole time.

How many of Knievel's stories are true - and which ones - is probably open to debate. Something he shared with his sometime-friend, sometime-foe, Amarillo Slim Preston.

Slim talked about Knievel in his book, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People, and Knievel talked about Slim in the Golf Digest interview.

On Slim's own ranking of his greatest bets, No. 11 is "Beating Evel Knievel in golf with a carpenter's hammer..." Knievel says in "My Shot":

I was making a jump in Dallas one year and hooked up with Amarillo Slim. Now there's a man who knows how to gamble. Slim bet me that I couldn't break 80 at Preston Trail the next day. I was a good 6-handicapper and had played the course, so I knew I had a good shot, and I bet him $10,000 I could do it. When I woke up the next morning, there was three inches of snow on the ground. There was no getting out of the bet; Slim had been careful to stipulate "tomorrow," with no questions asked. I paid up, and had no problem with it whatsoever. If you're going to be a sucker, be a quiet one. Nothing's worse than a guy who loses fair and square and then whines about it.

Knievel also lost a bet that weekend to Slim that was one of Slim's favorites. When Slim was in a crowded room, he liked to take bets on whether anyone in the room shared a birthday with anyone else. "One of Slim's favorite tricks was to bet that two of any 25 people chosen at random would have the same birthday," Knievel said. "He always won that bet - the math was huge in his favor."

It's very counterintuitive, but if you're in a room with 29 other people, there's a 70-percent chance that two people in that room with share a birthday. No, it has nothing to do with golf, but that's a good piece of knowledge to have. I can't explain the math, but in probability theory it's known as the "Birthday Paradox." Once you get 57 people in a room, the odds are 99 percent that two of them will share a birthday. There, go win some bets.

Anyway, when I was a kid I owned an Evel Knievel doll ... ahem, I mean action figure ... red, white and blue jumpsuit, motorcyle, the works. And so I wanted to note his passing.

One more excerpt from Evel, talking about Arnold Palmer:

Arnold gave me a great lesson once. We were at Bay Hill, and I suggested that we play for some cash. He put his arm around me and said, "Evel, I've got a lot of money, and I don't need any of yours. On the other hand, I don't want you to have any of mine." That taught me something about gambling with friends: Keep it friendly.