The show was called “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers.” The date of the broadcast was set for January 31, 1977, a Monday night, 8:30 to 10:00 p.m. on the East Coast, Knievel’s first jump on prime-time television. A number of daredevils were scheduled to perform their sundry death-defying feats. Knievel would finish the night “by attempting to jump over the world’s largest indoor saltwater pool, which will be filled with man-eating killer sharks,” according to a press release.
Man-eating killer sharks had been the American demon of choice for the past three years since the publication of Peter Benchley’s surprise best-seller, Jaws, in February of 1974. The book went to the top of the New York Times fiction list for forty-four straight weeks, eventually selling over 20 million copies. This led to the Steven Spielberg movie, starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, which was the box-office hit of the summer of 1975 and earned over $470 million worldwide. The ominous theme from the movie had become part of an ongoing sketch starring Chevy Chase as “the Land Shark” on the hit television show Saturday Night Live, now in its second season, and a Jaws 2 sequel soon would begin filming, and on and on it went. Shark chic was everywhere.
The Knievel jump was a heavy-handed attempt to carve out a slice of this public fascination. A commercial scheduled to run in the days preceding the telecast would paint a picture of the battle between the fearsome sharks and the familiar daredevil in his white leathers. The announcer would describe Knievel’s leap and the trouble that lurked below and warn that, “if he doesn’t make it, water wings won’t work.”
The attempt would take place at the old Chicago Amphitheater, a place where he jumped before, famous as the site of the protest-filled, riot-filled 1968 Democratic Party Convention, a hulk of a building located on the edge of the now-closed stockyards on the South Side. The independent producer would be Marty Pasetta Productions, credited with six Oscar awards telecasts, seven Grammy telecasts, plus the Elvis Presley comeback special, Aloha from Hawaii, that was bounced off the satellite on January 14, 1973, to the largest worldwide television audience in history. The hosts would be Telly Savalas, the actor who played the top-rated private detective Kojak on television, and actress Jill St. John, famous as a James Bond girlfriend in the movie Diamonds Are Forever.
Marty Pasetta himself would be the executive producer. Michael Seligman, a rising star in the specials business, would be the producer. The show would have that mashed-together television buzz of an awards show, a halftime at the Rose Bowl, a true made-for-the-medium event. The ratings would be unbelievable. Sequels would follow. Everyone would have fun, make money.
Or maybe not. Seligman was the first to realize that a potential disaster lay ahead. He went to visit Knievel a few weeks before the jump in Fort Lauderdale.
The two men had met once before in Los Angeles at Dino’s Lodge, the bar owned by singer Dean Martin at 8524 Sunset Boulevard. Still a stop on any Hollywood tour because it had been the site of the opening credits for the hit television series, 77 Sunset Strip (1958 to 1964), the bar was built on the side of a hill. While the famous entrance was at street level, the back of the building dropped two flights lower.
That was why Knievel dared Seligman to jump out the back window. First night they met, just talking, drinking cocktails, that was the challenge: jump, do it now, go ahead. There was no predicting how far a man might travel before he landed in the dark, not to mention what the conditions might be for that landing.
“You should do it,” Knievel said. “If you’re going to work with daredevils, you should be a daredevil yourself.”
“I’m a Jew,” Seligman said. “Jews don’t jump out of windows. We hire people to jump out of windows. We hire our daredevils.”
Knievel laughed. Seligman laughed. They seemed to get along. Seligman’s wife was pregnant with his daughter-to-be. Knievel suggested the daughter-to-be should be named Evelette. Everyone laughed again.
Now that the producer had to visit the daredevil in Florida to work out details of the telecast, it seemed natural to accept an invitation to stay for the night aboard the Evel Eye 1, even though he also could stay with his parents, who lived in Fort Lauderdale. The night sounded pleasant. He and his parents could go to a large dinner with Knievel and his family; then he could go back to the yacht with Evel.
“The dinner was fine,” Seligman said years later. “Nothing was out of the ordinary. Then we got back to the boat. He’d been drinking. I went to bed, and he started beating up his wife and his children. It was terrible. I didn’t see it firsthand, no, but I heard all of it. I heard the yelling, and I heard the slaps, and then I heard the crying. I heard his wife, Linda, crying. I heard the kids crying.”
In the middle of the night Seligman quietly gathered his things and left the boat. He went to stay with his parents.
Nothing was funny now. From the moment the show was conceived, it had contained an inherent possibility for trouble, the chance that any of the live acts could draw an instant cloud over the proceedings with a bad result. Scenarios had been created for what to do in each case, how to handle hospital situations, how even to handle death. (The first move in all fatalities would be to switch to a commercial or a string of commercials.) Now there was the additional worry that the star of the show, the guy whose name was in the title, was a time bomb. Evel Knievel was seen again as a jerk. The shark tank people had come to the same conclusion as the Snake River rocket launch people.
“He was just an awful guy,” Michael Seligman said.
A press conference was held on January 25, 1977, six days before the event, in the Beverly Room of the Conrad-Hilton Hotel in Chicago to start the publicity buildup. A miniature tank that contained thirteen plastic man-eating miniature sharks had been installed in the room. A miniature Knievel, the Ideal Toys version, built to scale, sat on a miniature motorcycle on a miniature plastic ramp next to the tank. This way the real Knievel could explain the jump to the reporters in the packed room, move the model of himself and the motorcycle over the models of the fearsome sharks with his hand, land safe on the miniature other side, and … never mind.
The real Knievel did not appear for the press conference at the scheduled start time. No one knew where he was. The guess was that he was somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and the Conrad-Hilton. The guess covered a lot of the United States.
Everybody waited. Time passed.
“We were in contact with him all day yesterday,” Joey Goldstein, brought in from New York to handle the public relations, said. “We lost contact with him last night.”
Everybody waited. Time passed.
“He is what he is,” Marty Pasetta, executive producer, said, taking the podium, trying to make unpredictability a virtue. “Knowing Evel, he could very well come walking into this press conference or he could very well not come walking into this room.”
Time passed …
Pasetta tried to press ahead, detailing the other acts that would appear on the show. Karl Wallenda, the most familiar name on the list, would appear from Miami, where he would walk a wire stretched between hotels, from the Eden Roc to the Fontainebleau. Dave Merrifield, also in Miami, would perform on a trapeze that hung from a helicopter, his act providing incredible background shots of the city. Ron Phillips, Knievel’s buddy from Butte, would drive a skimobile off a ski jump in Lincolnshire, Illinois, watch out below. Orval Kisselburg, a daredevil who had known Knievel almost since the beginning, would blow himself up with an act called “the Russian Death Chair” at the same location. Finally, “Jumping Joe” Gerlach would jump off the roof of the Chicago Amphitheater itself, an eighty-four-foot drop, to a three-foot sponge on the street.
The media crowd, grumpy now, began laughing. Each act seemed more bizarre than the previous one. The possibility of Jumping Joe Gerlach jumping off the roof of the Amphitheater into a three-foot sponge on the street sounded more silly than terrifying. The entire show sounded silly. Dark humor.
Time passed …
Pasetta, at the end of his presentation, was handed a note from a messenger. The note, read aloud by the producer, said, “This is a more dangerous jump than Snake River Canyon or any of my other jumps. Signed, Evel Knievel.” No one believed it was real.
Knievel never appeared.
The grumpy people went home.
A reporter called Joey Goldstein the next day to see if the press agent ever did contact his client. Goldstein said he had. Knievel was still in Fort Lauderdale. The reporter asked what the daredevil’s excuse was for missing the press conference. Goldstein, fed up with Knievel for the second time in his life after his experiences with the Snake River tour, went contrary to normal press agent procedure: he told the truth. He said Knievel told him, among other things, “I’m sick and tired of dealing with Jews.”
Maybe Knievel had said it only for Goldstein’s benefit, a personal ethnic dig. Maybe it was no more than an insensitive joke. Maybe, too, he meant it. Whichever the case, printed in a Chicago newspaper the next day, along with the previous Snake River quote about the three things in life he hated most—“lawyers, New Yorkers, and Jews”—it read like he meant every word of it.
The star of “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers” was left to scramble longdistance in denial. He said he had received ninety-one phone calls from people who were upset with him. He said he never said the words. Never would. He had a wisdom tooth that was giving him hell. That was why he didn’t go to the press conference. He had a lot of friends who were Jews. He made a list, including Howard Cosell, and said he owed all his success to these people. He said he himself was probably a Jew because he “believed in life.”
“If any son of a bitch in Chicago says I’m anti-Semitic,” he said, “I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”
He said he was on his way to Chicago.
A couple of problems also had developed with Knievel’s opponents in this venture. That would be the sharks.
The first problem was that local animal rights people were worried about possible injuries to the animals. The city’s Commission on Animal Care and Control said it might have to stop the show. (“What do we do if he falls into the tank and the sharks attack?” David R. Lee, executive director of the commission, asked. “To save his life we may have to destroy all these creatures.”) The animal rights people were waiting for any legal missteps, ready to call a halt to the proceedings in a moment.
The second problem was whether there were going to be any proceedings. The people in charge of catching the sharks in the Florida Keys were worried about whether or not they could find enough sharks, and then if the sharks would look fierce enough. The press releases promised thirteen man-eaters in the tank.
“We’ve got four acceptable animals, maybe five,” shark expert Gerrit Klay reported to Red Smith, columnist at the New York Times, from the Shark Quarium in Marathon, Florida, a week before the event. “The weather’s been terrible.”
The sharks were going to be far from man-eaters. The biggest boxes Klay had for shipping the animals to Chicago were eight feet long. He was hoping to catch lemon sharks or blue sharks, but pretty much was looking for anything with a dorsal fin. There would be no white sharks, like the killer in the movie Jaws. White sharks can be as large as thirty-six feet long. There also would be no danger.
“If Evel Knievel should fall in,” shark expert Klay said, “he’d spook these animals right out of the pool.”
The Smith article was syndicated across the country. Marty Pasetta was forced to scramble again. He described to reporters the size of the saltwater pool that was being built, ninety feet by fifty feet, four feet deep. For the animal rights people, he described the care that would be taken with the sharks, the twenty-five thousand pounds of salt and the varieties of chemicals that would be put into the water to create a familiar environment. For the potentially bloodthirsty viewers, he described the dangers involved. The sharks definitely would be lemon sharks. They all would be at least ten feet long. They wouldn’t have been fed for three days before the jump. They would be “mean.”
“Jacques Cousteau,” Marty Pasetta said, “assured us that lemons are mean.”
Knievel finally appeared in Chicago on Friday, did the local Phil Donahue Show, did AM Chicago and other television. He said again that he was not anti-Semitic. He promoted the jump, did his job. The sharks finally appeared on Saturday and were released into “the world’s largest indoor saltwater pool.” They definitely were a long way from home. Chicago was in the midst of a record forty-five-day stretch when the temperature would not move above 32 degrees. The temperature outside two days earlier was a record –13 degrees, the coldest day in the coldest month in Chicago weather history. The wind chill was –60 degrees.
The chill now extended to the show itself. Who wanted to come out of the house? Pasetta’s staff was distributing free tickets to Chicago high schools in an attempt to draw any kind of a crowd. Ticket sales were almost nonexistent.
“This time the sharks are going to be the good guys,” sports columnist Robert Markus wrote in the Chicago Tribune.
Ever since Peter Benchley wrote “Jaws,” sharks have been painted as the heavies, certainly an unfair picture.
Sharks are like everyone else. There’s good and bad in all of them, Personally, I never met a shark I didn’t like. But I’ve met some people I didn’t like.
One of them is going to jump a motorcycle over a tankful of teeth in the Amphitheatre on Monday night. His name is Evel Knievel and everyone I know is rooting for the sharks.
The play-by-play announcer assigned to the jump was thirty-eight-year-old Brent Musburger. He had become CBS’s prominent sports voice, front and center for the past two years as the anchor of NFL Today, the pro football show that dominated the Sunday ratings with a cast that also featured former Miss America Phyllis George, former Philadelphia Eagle Irv Cross, and Jimmy the Greek. Musburger was a Montana native, grew up in Big Timber, which was located between Bozeman and Billings, so he found a measure of acceptance from Knievel.
“We always could talk about Montana, it was an easy entrée,” Musburger said. “I’d met him at some kind of event a few years earlier in New York. Maybe when he announced that he was going to jump the canyon. I didn’t know him well, but I had memories of Butte from when I was a kid. We could talk about Butte. There were some good restaurants in Butte. I’d go there with my parents.”
Gary Deeb, the television critic for the Tribune, wrote a column that killed the idea of the Death Defiers (“So now it’s CBS succumbing to the sleazy lure of Knievel in a mad effort to boost prime-time numbers”) and lamented the presence of Musburger, a serious voice in this unserious project. Musburger was not chagrined. He had appeared in a number of unserious projects.
“It was the era of trash sports, baby,” he said. “It was like the Wild West. I’d been to Rio de Janeiro to broadcast Steve McPeak’s walk on a tightrope over a canyon. I’d been to the Mojave Desert to see this guy, ‘the Human Fly,’ walk on the wings of a jet …
“The Human Fly. They put me up in a cherry-picker for that one. I’m up there, trying to see what he’s doing as the plane comes closer to the abandoned airport where we were. I can’t see anything. I’m just making shit up. The UCLA band was down on the ground. They’d been brought out just for this. They were in a formation that said, ‘GO FLY.’ He comes by, does what he was supposed to do. I shout, ‘Nice run, Fly.’ I have no idea what I’m talking about. I read later that the UCLA band sued because it hadn’t been paid.”
To Musburger, this event promised to fit into the same book of off-the-wall trash memories. How do you broadcast this thing? “Heeeerrre he comes … the sharks look hungry!” Marty Pasetta promised that paramedics and scuba divers would be on hand in case they were needed. An ambulance would be on the premises. If, perchance, Knievel did land in the tank and the sharks began to tear him to pieces, a special camera had been located underwater to record the action.
Musburger, the day before the show, looked down into the tank. He was surprised. He thought the sharks looked like minnows. He did not feel afraid. This was the challenge? Maybe, with the right camera angle, it would look better. He hoped so. He went back to his hotel to get ready for the big night ahead.
This was a mistake. He missed the action. Evel Knievel crashed and landed in the hospital before the event even began. Even the Human Fly hadn’t done that.
“I wasn’t there in the afternoon,” Musburger said, “but I guess the director wanted Evel to do a practice run. He went to the trailer, where Evel was drinking Jack Daniel’s with another guy. They’d been drinking for a while. The director said he wanted Evel to do the practice run. Evel told the guy to go to hell. The director said if Evel didn’t do the practice run, there would be no show. So Evel punched the director, just whacked him, sent the guy spinning out the door of the trailer, right down the stairs.
“Then he put on his helmet, said something like, ‘You want a practice run? I’ll give you a practice run.’ He went over to the bike, kicked the starter, jumped into the saddle. Cameramen scrambled to get to their equipment. And he just took off. And he crashed. Went over the side. He was drunk, and he crashed the motorcycle. It was something straight out of Hollywood. They carried him off to the hospital.”
Musburger’s account of the events was backward. Other accounts flipped the scene 180 degrees: Knievel wanted to do a practice run, the producers didn’t. He was drinking, drunk. There was an argument. According to Michael Seligman, Knievel pushed Marty Pasetta against the wall of the trailer, said something like, “I don’t care what you want, I’m doing a practice run.” Pasetta was left in pain in the trailer. Knievel stormed off, jumped on the bike, crashed, landed in even more pain than Marty Pasetta.
“Thank goodness we were ready for anything,” Seligman said. “We had all the cameras in position. We were rolling. We had all the angles covered except from the cameraman Knievel crashed into.”
A third version of the argument inserted Sandy Wernick, part of the production staff, into the role of the pushee in the trailer. Wernick, according to this story, tried to convince Knievel not to take a practice jump because it would jeopardize the prime-time show. The two men argued. Knievel finally asked Wernick if he was a Jew. Wernick said he was. Knievel pushed him, went out, and crashed.
Wernick, over thirty years later, now the manager of comedian Adam Sandler, refused to talk about the moment. Pasetta, retired, also refused.
“He has never talked about the Death Defiers show,” his spokesperson said. “And he never will.”
The result of the incident—and everyone agreed there was an incident that involved a push, anger, then the crash—was the same in all of the stories: Knievel was in the hospital. This was different from any of the crashes he had suffered in the past. The easy jump, no more than ninety feet in the original plan, the distance in baseball from home plate to first base, had been made easier when he pulled a safety deck into place that shortened the distance to sixty-four feet, roughly the distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound. The idea that he could not make that jump was almost inconceivable.
Yet he crashed.
He easily cleared the pool of sleeping, docile sharks, but seemed to turn the handlebars in midflight. He hit the landing hard, tried to correct his path, and overcorrected. He took a hard right off the elevated ramp, went through a barrier, clipped a twenty-nine-year-old cameraman from Arlington Heights named Thomas Geren, who was filming the jump and had no idea what was coming. The motorcycle flipped, and Knievel went flying as it went upside down, everything out of control, and landed on concrete.
He was taken to the Michael Reese Medical Center on the South Side, where he was diagnosed with a broken clavicle, broken right forearm, wrist and leg contusions, and bruises. (Geren also was taken to the hospital, but released with minor injuries.) Somewhere on the ambulance ride, or perhaps in the emergency room while he was having his injuries treated, Knievel figured out an explanation for what had just happened. He figured out a doozy.
He wasn’t drunk. He was a hero! He had crashed in the afternoon to save innocent people, paying customers, who would be in the crowd at night. He had decided a day earlier that a crash was inevitable because the setup in the Amphitheater was too confined, too cramped, not right. Simply to get enough room to gather enough speed, a hole had been made in the Amphitheater wall. He would have to fly through the hole, onto the ramp, over the sharks, and then land on a ramp that went upward again, over some seats. It all was crazy. Rather than force the promoters to make the jump safe or for him to decide not to jump at all, back out of his contract, he took things into his own hands.
“I knew there was going to be an accident, and the show couldn’t be canceled,” he said from his hospital bed. “So I decided to take what was coming to me, and I didn’t want to see anyone else hurt. I made the practice run before an empty house so no parents or children would be hurt.”
He not only removed all blame from himself, but turned himself into Audie Murphy, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, jumping on a ticking hand grenade to save the rest of the platoon. This was grand, audacious stuff.
“I knew when I saw it all squeezed together yesterday that it wasn’t going to work,” he continued. “When we put it all together, the tank, the ramp, and the ski slope, it was too cramped. I fell Sunday when I took a practice run up the ski slope. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was too steep to climb.
“I’m not placing the blame on anybody or anything. It was a combination of pressure and faulty, hasty preparation. Because of the ski jump construction, I felt someone would have been killed. It was my obligation to make it safe, and there was a misunderstanding between the production company and myself.
“The show had to come off, but I couldn’t take a chance with people’s lives. So I told the cameras to roll and took the run.”
He was treated at the Michael Reese Center by Carlton West, a thirty-three-year-old black orthopedic physician. West had been put on alert, told that business might be arriving from that Death Defier show at the Amphitheater. He still was surprised when the emergency room began to fill with hubbub.
“I didn’t have time to think about Evel Knievel as a celebrity,” he told Jet magazine. “I guess I started to think about it after all the reporters and the cameras came.”
The angle for the Jet story, the magazine part of John H. Johnson’s African American publishing empire based in Chicago, basically was Black Doctor Treats Famous White Man, still seen as news in 1977. The reporter wanted to know if Knievel had mentioned Dr. West’s race. Dr. West said he certainly had.
“His comments regarding that were actually complimentary,” Dr. West said. “But I think my youthful appearance was more striking than my color.”
“I’ve been accused of being an anti-Semite by some newspapers, but that’s not true,” Knievel told the magazine. “When I was a little boy, the only man I wanted to be like was Joe Louis. I think he’s done more for race relations in this country than anybody.”
So there.
Left without the main attraction for “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers,” Evel Knievel, Marty Pasetta Productions, and CBS were forced to improvise. There were no thoughts of cancellation, but adjustments certainly had to be made. The film from the different camera locations was edited in a hurry, a package prepared for the show. A camera crew was sent to the Michael Reese Center to be ready for live updates and an interview with the injured star from his hospital bed. Telly Savalas and Jill St. John were briefed, told they had to ad-lib a lot.
Pasetta, who hoped that news of Knievel’s premature crash would not be known until showtime, ordered that the press be kept from the Amphitheater until the last minute. Since the general public and the press could be confused for each other, the general public also was kept from the Amphitheater until the last minute. Since the general public in this case mostly consisted of high school kids with free tickets, and since the temperature outside was well below freezing, an unruly situation quickly developed. The first riot outside the Amphitheater since the 1968 convention became a possibility.
“Let ’em in,” management decided after some angry moments.
The show that followed was a mishmash of mistakes, an artistic disaster. Savalas and St. John struggled. They looked like they were a weekend replacement anchor team at a small station in the Midwest, unprepared, off stride from the beginning. All dialogue was stiff. The film of Knievel’s crash was shown. The daredevil was interviewed a number of times from the hospital. Savalas kept saying, “It’s only orthopedic,” about Knievel’s injuries. Whatever that meant.
With Knievel out of action, the Death Defiers took on added importance. They were the live action. This became another mess. The first Death Defier scheduled to perform live was Wallenda, walking the tightrope between the two hotels in Miami. The problem was that he hadn’t even arrived at the hotels on time. He was caught somewhere on the streets of Miami in a traffic jam. He would perform later in the show, but the schedule had to be ripped up again. Savalas and St. John kept ad-libbing. Commercials came at strange times. Everything was strange.
“I was at the top of the ski jump, waiting with my snowmobile,” Ron Phillips said later. “It was so cold up there, waiting and waiting. All the snow around the base of the snowmobile had turned to ice. I didn’t know that.”
Wired for sound, able to hear the broadcast through a plug in his ear, able to talk into a little microphone, Phillips received word that he should go. He had made a few practice runs earlier, no problem, but now when he started moving and stepped onto the footpegs to lift himself, one leg slipped on the ice that had formed on the footpeg. That caused him to let off the throttle, and by the time he was able to give the machine more gas, he knew that he would not be traveling fast enough, which was fifty miles per hour, when he hit the edge of the ski jump. He knew he would crash.
He went off the edge of the jump. He bailed. He went one way, the machine luckily went another. He landed lucky, on his back. Sort of lucky. Nothing had been broken, but the air in his body had been expelled by the force of his landing. He couldn’t talk.
“Are you all right, Ron?” Jill St. John asked in his ear from Chicago.
No answer.
“Was that the practice jump we just saw, Ron? … Ron? … Was that the practice jump?”
The air came back into Phillips’s body.
“You gotta be shitting me,” he said from the ice and snow.
The Russian Death Chair was another problem. Kisselburg was receiving only $5,000 from Knievel for his act, but now he was the star of the show, the grand finale. He was very nervous. After all of his time on tour, all of the stunts, this was his first time on national television. This was also his first time in a tuxedo.
“Orval always dressed as a clown when he performed,” Ron Phillips said, “but Evel told him this was national television and he couldn’t dress ‘like a fucking clown’ and had to wear a tuxedo. I don’t think he knew what a tuxedo was when Evel said it.”
Phillips took Kisselburg to a tuxedo rental establishment, told him to say if anyone asked that he was going to a wedding. Fitted, dressed for the big night, he added another extra for his performance. In his normal act, he blew himself into the air with three sticks of dynamite. For national television, he decided to add a fourth stick for a bigger blast, a record.
The trick was to place a fifty-pound bag of cement over the dynamite. As part of the finer print in the laws of physics, a cone of silence, maybe two feet by two feet, exists over the exploding dynamite. Stay inside the cone, put something in your ears to absorb the noise, fly into the air, and be all right.
Kisselburg always put cotton in his ears. He had been told that ear plugs could be blown straight into your brain by impact, so cotton seemed to be a better choice. As everybody hurried on this night, though, schedules out of whack, he had forgotten to put the cotton in his ears. He realized this … five, four, three … as the countdown came and he girded himself for the blast.
“Here was this guy, in the middle of a field in Skokie, Illinois, or wherever, strapped to a chair with three or four sticks of dynamite strapped to the seat,” Musburger, who now had to broadcast this part of the show, said. “He was going to blow himself up. It was a challenge to broadcast. How do you do play-by-play of something like that? ‘There he is, ladies and gentlemen, his finger is moving closer to the button …’ What if it all goes wrong?”
The four-sticks-of-dynamite explosion was bigger than the three-sticks-of-dynamite explosion, bigger than Kisselburg had imagined it would be. He went flying, ten feet, fifteen feet, twenty feet into the air. The fifty pounds of cement, in addition to absorbing a bunch of the concussion, split open to cover the scene with a gray dust that covered everything. Including Orval Kisselburg.
He was knocked silly, stretched out on the cold ground, and his hearing was gone. Phillips and the EMTs on duty ran to him and finally got him to his feet … “He’s alive!” Brent Musburger exulted on the broadcast from the Amphitheater … and tried to get him to get inside an ambulance. Kisselburg, uninsured in the daredevil business, refused. He figured his hearing would return as soon as the ringing stopped.
The only other problem was that rented tuxedo.
“It looked like shredded wheat,” Phillips said.
He and Kisselburg zipped the suit into the handy carrying case, took the carrying case back to the rental place, and left in a hurry. Never heard from the people again.
The reviews of the show were terrible. Joan Ryan of the Washington Post said, “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers now must be considered the worst TV program ever” (against a lot of stiff competition). The worries of the animal rights people were justified as half of the sharks died. Only twelve sharks, in the end, had arrived for the show, not the unlucky thirteen that were advertised. One died before the show, so that left eleven in the tank when Knievel shot off the ramp and crashed. One died when the pool was being drained, another died from bites it had received in the tank from another shark, and three died in transit to their future home in Boston at the New England Aquarium.
“I’ll tell you, I’ll never work with TV people again,” shark expert Klay said, angry that he’d had only three days to prepare the water for his clients instead of the promised ten to fourteen days. “They went back on their word.”
The final verdict on the show came, however, in the weekly Tuesday meeting at CBS headquarters in New York that autocratic network chief William S. Paley held with his department heads. Careers, lives, were known to change in an instant in these meetings. Bob Wussler and his people at CBS Sports were terrified. They suspected they could be fired.
Paley, according to one account, went through some other business until he reached the Death Defiers. He looked at the Nielsen ratings numbers and said something like, “Pretty good. If we can improve our production qualities the next time, perhaps Death Defiers II can be even better.”
The numbers were everything.
“That’s television,” Michael Seligman, who has produced the Oscar awards show since 1979, the Emmys since 1996, said. “It’s all about the numbers.”
“Your act was sensational!” Seligman and Pasetta wrote in a co-signed letter to Orval Kisselburg a month later. “As you know, the show had the highest ratings on CBS this year, a 50 share.”