By 1968 Evel Knievel had become, if not yet the best-known name in motorsports, prominent enough to command national media attention when he announced that he would attempt to jump over the ornate fountains that fronted Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. The jump was thrilling. Knievel soared high over the gushing water spouts, clearing the fountains, but then, as a national audience looked on, something went terribly wrong. Knievel lost control of the bike, and slid down the landing ramp, tumbling end over end across the pavement like a rag doll, breaking his back and his pelvis.
"I got hurt real bad at Caesar's Palace. Landed on my head. That was the most serious of all. I remember the whole thing-every tiny bit of it. There was a little six-foot safety ramp, and I landed right on top of it. It was just a piece of steel sitting on a van.
Knievel is candid, if not particularly expansive, on the topic of the Caesar's jump.
"I just wasn't going fast enough. It was a horrible jump and I was unconscious for 29 days. My wife was there when I came out of it. She was sitting alongside of me, she'd been with me the whole time. I don't remember what she said. Probably something like, 'Finally wakin' up, huh?'"

The Caesar's jump was a harrowing example of how much punishment could be inflicted on a human body, but it also raised Evel Knievel's stock, turning his into a household name even as he lay comatose in a bed at Sunrise Hospital.
When Knievel finally regained consciousness, he heard his name invoked as the punchline in the acts of Vegas comics and during Johnny Carson's monologues. As little as the public knew about Knievel the man, his image was ingrained within their collective psyche as that nut with balls of iron who went by an impossibly unforgettable moniker. As Knievel became more famous than even his wildest imaginings, he began infusing his successive jumps with enough showbiz hokum to satisfy the media circus he courted.
Knievel grew his sideburns into mod chops, added a cape and wide bells to his white, red and blue costumes and carried a bejeweled walking stick with a big gold fob. Knievel basked in the mythos of the daredevil gunfighter who laughed at death for not having what it took to bring him down. Wild rumors swirled around Knievel, who did little to deny or dissuade the stories, perhaps the most audacious of which was that Evel Knievel was planning to jump the Grand Canyon. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon and released a quickie biopic starring the decidedly un-Evel-like George Hamilton, who at that point would have likely been the despised son-in-law of Lyndon Johnson had it not become known that he had pulled some strings to avoid serving in Vietnam.

Evel's subsequent jumps were held in packed arenas like Houston's Astrodome and the Ontario Motor Speedway in California, and his fees grew proportionately. After successfully clearing 13, and then 19, cars, he might have begun to believe in his own invincibility a bit too fervently. He crashed in an attempt to clear 13 Pepsi trucks in Yakima, Washington.
It's been rumored that Knievel had a premonition that Yakima was going to result in disaster, but Knievel dispels that notion. He claims that it was a jump in Nevada that actually put the nagging doubt in his head, "that I might miss it."
Referring to the Yakima jump, Evel claims, "That wasn't the one. The one that I missed that I knew I was gonna miss was in Reno. It was over some trucks. I didn't have enough room. It was at the Carson City Speedway, a small little racetrack. And I remember it was the first time my mother had ever seen me jump. And Liberace brought his whole musical crew out just to watch me, and really, the grandstand was sold out. I just didn't feel that I could make the jump."

Another collision with the pavement followed a year later at the Bay Area's Cow Palace. After recuperating for the better part of the next year, Knievel returned on February 18, 1973 and cleared a three-tiered stack of 52 flattened cars at the L.A. Coliseum. Eighteen months later he cleared 13 Mack trucks at the Canadian National Exposition, and Knievel seemed firmly back in the saddle, ready to soar to even more rarefied heights of derring-do or die.
He was now jumping with a Harley-Davidson XR-750, a dual carburetor racing bike described as fast and light, which may have been just a bit too aerodynamically unstable for Knievel's purposes. Even so, Knievel's reasons for making the switch seem all too practical, given his hard-won preeminence within a highly-specialized profession.
"Triumph didn't want to pay me anything to ride their motorcycles," Evel explains. "So Harley-Davidson stepped in. I signed with Harley-Davidson for eight years and they treated me wonderfully. They were a first class company. And the Harleys and the Davidsons are wonderful people.
"They had been so good to me all through the years. They kept their word with me, they treated me right, and they stood behind me. Harley-Davidson really didn't build any motorcycles that were competitive in the '70s, so they chose to go with me and we did have a wonderful relationship."

Not everyone who came to see him was enthralled by his perceived showboating, however. As the mass media began to milk headlines out of the motorcycle subculture, Knievel found himself at odds with some of the scene's equally newsworthy-and more maligned-elements. Asked why he chose the white leather jumpsuits Elvis appeared to later adapt for his stage look, Knievel replies, "I just thought that was a classy set of leathers to wear, and I hated black leather."
The reason for Knievel's dislike of what people normally think of as traditional biker gear stemmed from his self-instigated conflict with the outlaw biker/chopper contingent in general, and with the Hells Angels in particular.
"I had a real run-in with 'em at the Cow Palace in San Francisco," Knievel says of the Angels. "One of them threw a tire iron at me out of the grandstand when I was ready to make the jump. So I made the jump anyway, but when I came back in he was standing in the middle of the floor giving me the finger, and I knocked him on his ass with my motorcycle."