I
don't really tend to compose those lists of 100 or whatever things about myself, but if I did, one of the items on it would be my childhood fascination with Evel Knievel. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. But for those of you who were unfortunate enough to miss some or all of the 1970s, EK is arguably the first in a long string of late twentieth-century extreme sports figures.
My memory is mostly a blur of U.S. flags fashioned into clothes (like the cape featured at right), but the blur is at least partly attributable to the fact that EK tended to be in motion. Like flying through the air, stuffed in a rocket or barely hanging on to his motorcycle handlebars kind of motion.
I'm pretty sure that I owned some sort of Evel Knievel action figure or else had a friend who did, because I have tactile memories of making him sail across legos and such, only to crash and lose his helmet, limbs akimbo.
Evel's last years weren't so hot. For one thing, there's the lawsuit he humorlessly filed against Kanye West for this:
In any event, Evel died yesterday, and so it seems more than appropriate to resurrect my "old school" tag in his honor.
