Do you remember when you were a kid and you spent your summer days riding your bike around the neighbourhood? When I was a kid, Evel Knievel was king. It seemed that the sole reason that ABC’s Wide World of Sports was produced, besides showing the Harlem Globetrotters and Muhamed Ali’s fights, was so that the world could see Evel’s next jump. Who can forget the spectacle of Evel launching his Harley over a new record number of buses, or his attempted crossing of the Snake River canyon strapped in a homemade rocketcycle. Of course these feats were inevitably capped off with images of Evel cartwheeling down the runout at 60mph, looking like a ragdoll. There was always a follow-up interview the next week from his hospital bed. "Kids, don’t try this at home". What were people thinking…of course we were going to try this at home.

We would find a piece of plywood or scrap of 2x6 board and look for something to prop one end of it up with. A brick, a stack of 2x4s that would topple when you hit the ramp, until you scrounged up some nails to join them together. Then we would race our Western Flyers down the alley screaming, "I'm Evel Knievel!!!'' -- feeling free and brave and unbound by mere laws of gravity, just before hitting the ramp and crashing into the cement at 30 miles an hour, painfully ripping the flesh from our arms and snapping our bones as if they were rotten sticks. The ramps got progressively higher, the speeds got progressively faster, the crashes got progressively bigger, all in the search for the longest distance.

We loved the guy.

While waiting for his jumps, we watched his TV movies, ate from his lunch buckets, played with his action figure and collected his bubblegum cards (which, fittingly, we could attach to the spokes of our bikes).