The Man Who Broke the Lights

Long before he became a star-spangled fixture of the American spectacle, Robert Craig Knievel was a drill operator in the copper mines of Butte, Montana. It was a town of hard edges and underground hazards, though Knievel’s own brand of chaos stayed above ground. His mining career ended the day he tried to coax a massive earthmoving machine into a wheelie and drove it into a main power line. The short circuit blacked out the entire city for several hours—an early, untelevised preview of his talent for turning a private miscalculation into a public event.

Butte shaped him. In the mid-twentieth century the place was a "Gibraltar of Unionism" wikipedia.org, a densely packed vertical city where a man worked underground and drank in bars that never closed. Raised by his grandparents among the open-pit mines and barroom brawls, Knievel acquired a thief’s nerve and a con man’s patter. He spent some nights as a self-appointed "security specialist," charging local businesses for protection and robbing the ones that turned him down newyorker.com.

His move from petty criminal to professional gladiator ran on equal parts boredom and money trouble. Life, he liked to say, was a bore without the possibility of disaster. He swapped his jail-cell nickname—handed to him by a guard who bunked him with a cellmate called "Awful Knofel"—for the white leather jumpsuit that became his uniform. His failures had an honesty the movies couldn’t match: visceral, documented, replayed in slow motion. Tumbling across the asphalt at Caesars Palace or drifting to the bottom of the Snake River Canyon, he let an audience watch a man actually pay for his audacity. He stayed, to the end, the boy from Butte who couldn’t resist seeing how much gravity he could defy before the lights went out.