Iconic Daredevil Evel Knievel Dies at 69
By MITCH STACY – 49 minutes ago

CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) — Evel Knievel, the red-white-and-blue-spangled motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over crazy obstacles including Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho's Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 69.
Knievel's death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Krysten Knievel. He had been in failing health for years, suffering from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs.
Knievel had undergone a liver transplant in 1999 after nearly dying of hepatitis C, likely contracted through a blood transfusion after one of his bone-shattering spills.
Longtime friend and promoter Billy Rundel said Knievel had trouble breathing at his Clearwater condominium and died before an ambulance could get him to a hospital.
"It's been coming for years, but you just don't expect it. Superman just doesn't die, right?" Rundel said.
Immortalized in the Washington's Smithsonian Institution as "America's Legendary Daredevil," Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980.
"I think he lived 20 years longer than most people would have" after so many injuries, said his son Kelly Knievel, 47. "I think he willed himself into an extra five or six years."
Though Knievel dropped off the pop culture radar in the '80s, the image of the high-flying motorcyclist clad in patriotic, star-studded colors was never erased from public consciousness. He always had fans and enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years.
His death came just two days after it was announced that he and rapper Kanye West had settled a federal lawsuit over the use of Knievel's trademarked image in a popular West music video.
Knievel made a good living selling his autographs and endorsing products. Thousands came to Butte, Mont., every year as his legend was celebrated during the "Evel Knievel Days" festival, which Rundel organizes.
"They started out watching me bust my ass, and I became part of their lives," Knievel said. "People wanted to associate with a winner, not a loser. They wanted to associate with someone who kept trying to be a winner."
For the tall, thin daredevil, the limelight was always comfortable, the gab glib. To Knievel, there always were mountains to climb, feats to conquer.
"No king or prince has lived a better life," he said in a May 2006 interview with The Associated Press. "You're looking at a guy who's really done it all. And there are things I wish I had done better, not only for me but for the ones I loved."
He had a knack for outrageous yarns: "Made $60 million, spent 61. ...Lost $250,000 at blackjack once. ... Had $3 million in the bank, though."
He began his daredevil career in 1965 when he formed a troupe called Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils, a touring show in which he performed stunts such as riding through fire walls, jumping over live rattlesnakes and mountain lions and being towed at 200 mph behind dragster race cars.
In 1966 he began touring alone, barnstorming the West and doing everything from driving the trucks, erecting the ramps and promoting the shows. In the beginning he charged $500 for a jump over two cars parked between ramps.
He steadily increased the length of the jumps until, on New Year's Day 1968, he was nearly killed when he jumped 151 feet across the fountains in front of Caesar's Palace. He cleared the fountains but the crash landing put him in the hospital in a coma for a month.
His son, Robbie, successfully completed the same jump in April 1989.
In the years after the Caesar's crash, the fee for Evel's performances increased to $1 million for his jump over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium in London — the crash landing broke his pelvis — to more than $6 million for the Sept. 8, 1974, attempt to clear the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a rocket-powered "Skycycle." The money came from ticket sales, paid sponsors and ABC's "Wide World of Sports."
The parachute malfunctioned and deployed after takeoff. Strong winds blew the cycle into the canyon, landing him close to the swirling river below.
On Oct. 25, 1975, he jumped 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island in Ohio.
Knievel decided to retire after a jump in the winter of 1976 in which he was again seriously injured. He suffered a concussion and broke both arms in an attempt to jump a tank full of live sharks in the Chicago Amphitheater. He continued to do smaller exhibitions around the country with his son, Robbie.
Many of his records have been broken by daredevil motorcyclist Bubba Blackwell.
Knievel also dabbled in movies and TV, starring as himself in "Viva Knievel" and with Lindsay Wagner in an episode of the 1980s TV series "Bionic Woman." George Hamilton and Sam Elliott each played Knievel in movies about his life.
Evel Knievel toys accounted for more than $300 million in sales for Ideal and other companies in the 1970s and '80s.
Born Robert Craig Knievel in the copper mining town of Butte on Oct. 17, 1938, Knievel was raised by his grandparents. He traced his career choice back to the time he saw Joey Chitwood's Auto Daredevil Show at age 8.
"The phrase one-of-a-kind is often used, but it probably applies best to Bobby Knievel," said U.S. Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., who grew up with Knievel. "He was an amazing athlete... He was sharp as a tack, one of the smartest people I've ever known and finally, as the world knows, no one had more guts than Bobby. He was simply unafraid of anything."
Outstanding in track and field, ski jumping and ice hockey at Butte High School, Knievel went on to win the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men's ski jumping championship in 1957 and played with the Charlotte Clippers of the Eastern Hockey League in 1959.
He also formed the Butte Bombers semiprofessional hockey team, acting as owner, manager, coach and player.
Knievel also worked in the Montana copper mines, served in the Army, ran his own hunting guide service, sold insurance and ran Honda motorcycle dealerships. As a motorcycle dealer, he drummed up business by offering $100 off the price of a motorcycle to customers who could beat him at arm wrestling.
At various times and in different interviews, Knievel claimed to have been a swindler, a card thief, a safe cracker, a holdup man.
Evel Knievel married hometown girlfriend, Linda Joan Bork, in 1959. They separated in the early 1990s. They had four children, Kelly, Robbie, Tracey and Alicia.
Robbie Knievel followed in his father's footsteps as a daredevil, jumping a moving locomotive in a 200-foot, ramp-to-ramp motorcycle stunt on live television in 2000. He also jumped a 200-foot-wide chasm of the Grand Canyon.
Knievel lived with his longtime partner, Krystal Kennedy-Knievel, splitting his time between their Clearwater condo and Butte. They married in 1999 and divorced a few years later but remained together. Knievel had 10 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

"I think my songs reveal whatever they reveal, they say certain things about who I am, whereas Will Smith singing "Gettin' Jiggy With It" reveals certain things about how he is. Like for one thing that he doesn't mind singing a senseless song." - Elliott Smith

I saw this coming a mile away-

Gyllenhaal tapped for Namath film
'Zodiac' star to play Hall of Fame quarterback
By MICHAEL FLEMING


Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath was the first football player to find rock-star status.Universal Pictures will turn the life of Joe Namath into a feature film, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the Hall of Fame quarterback.
David Hollander will write the script once the writers strike is over. Mad Chance's Andrew Lazar will produce. Jimmy Walsh, who runs Namanco Prods., exec produces.
Walsh said he and Namath OK'd the movie after a long pursuit by Lazar, a strong take by Hollander and the belief that the athletic Gyllenhaal was the right actor to play him.
While other quarterbacks racked up bigger lifetime stats, Namath became the first football player to achieve rock-star status. The pic will tell the story of how the golden-armed kid from Beaver Falls, Pa., became Broadway Joe, the New York Jets quarterback who became a '60s cultural figure.
When Namath emerged from Bear Bryant's football program at the U. of Alabama, the upstart American Football League was the stepchild to the powerhouse National Football League. Sonny Werblin, who'd left MCA after the Justice Dept. broke up Lew Wasserman's company, knew the value of star power and was determined to use it when he bought the Jets. He outbid the NFL, paid Namath a record $400,000 salary and turned him loose on New York. The handsome nonconformist became a sensation, on the field, in nightclubs and on Madison Avenue as the first star to become a magnet for commercials.
After backing up his guarantee that the Jets would beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, Namath put the AFL on equal footing with the NFL, paved the way to a merger and helped establish football as a TV sport. He accomplished all of this on knees so bad that draft board doctors refused to send him to Vietnam for fear that they would give out on the battlefield.
"Most of the stuff you saw in 'Forest Gump,' Joe lived through all of it," said Walsh, who first met Namath on the Alabama campus and has worked with him ever since. They witnessed the struggle for civil rights in Alabama, the sexual revolution and Vietnam.
Gyllenhaal, who is coming off "Rendition" and "Zodiac," is currently shooting the Jim Sheridan-directed "Brothers" with Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman and will follow that by teaming with Doug Liman on an untitled project at DreamWorks that revolves around a moon expedition.

Dogs Still Bite MenA new poll shows a dramatic shift of opinion about the Iraq war, the Associated Press reports:

People are evenly split over how well the military effort in Iraq is going, with 48 percent saying it is going well and the same number saying it isn't, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In February, shortly after [President] Bush announced he would send additional troops to the country, only 30 percent said things were going well. . . .
While 16 percent of Democrats said in February that things were going well, that figure has grown to 33 percent. . . .

Overall, 43 percent said the U.S. is making gains against the insurgents, up 13 percentage points from February. The percentage of people seeing progress reducing civilian casualties has more than doubled to 43 percent, while the number seeing results in preventing civil war is 32 percent, almost double the February level.

But the headline reads "Poll: Public Still Favors Iraq Pullout," and the AP leads with this non-news:

The public increasingly believes the U.S. is making military progress in Iraq but still wants President Bush to remove American troops from the country as quickly as possible, a poll showed Tuesday.

The "narrative" is everything, isn't it?

CNN's senior business correspondent Ali Velshi had an interesting question for viewers this morning.
Before telling viewers that consumer confidence is at the lowest level in two years, Velshi asked if the media have anything to do with it.
"Do you think we're feeding this thing? Do you think we're fueling this sort of misery?" asked Velshi on "American Morning" November 28.
A question for Newsbusters readers: How would you answer Velshi's question?

The Business & Media Institute has found that the media certainly don't reinforce the soundness of the economy when things are going well. BMI's "Bad News Bears" study that looked at one year of reporting, found that 62 percent of network (ABC, CBS, NBC) economic stories focused on negative news. Those stories were also given more airtime.

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Auburn University’s Foy Information Line, 334-844-4244

Students at Auburn University in Alabama, armed with the Internet and, as a last resort, reference books, will answer any question you can conceive of, 24 hours a day, Monday to Thursday (during the school year). The hot line started in the 1950s as a resource for students at Auburn who were trying to locate campus services and find information about grades or course schedules. Over the years, it has evolved into a no-holds-barred information database. It is one of the nation’s longest-running services of its kind. It’s technically the “Foy Information Line,” named after the Foy Student Union building that the phone service operates from, and it is free for anyone to call. They’ve gotten questions from callers as far away as Australia, about questions ranging from how many Oreos it would take to circle the globe to what’s the longest nontechnical word in the English language? It’s perfect for when you can’t get to Google. The hot line operates 24 hours during the week and until 9 p.m. on weekends.