He was a childhood hero of mine. A man amoungst men that's for sure.
RIP

 

Me too. I saw him jump 13 cars in warm up, then a worlds record at IIRC 17 cars. this was at SIR (Pacfic Raceway) sometime in the early 70's.
Robert

 

with all the dumb **** he did as a young man i cant believe he almost make 70. he def is the godfather of stunts, and jumps that we see today. look at the old footage of some of those bikes , very little suspension movement.

 

Can you imagine what he could of done with modern tech? They say he had two tractor, trailers to haul his stuff. One for his bikes and one for his *****.

 

^^^^lmao

 

Might be just me, but read up on his wiki (I know it isn't always the best, but closest thing out there to read than going to the library for a book) and it seemed like he was kind of a jackass irl and the only reason he did his stuff is just for the money.

 

Yea he was kind of a dick but that occured later (for the most part) in his career when he came to the realization that people didn't care if he lived or died as long as he did the crazy stunts for thier entertainment. I saw an interview the other night and he laid it all out and even blamed the snake river failure on the engineers that did the parachute for the rocket. Some people believe that he got scared and pulled it prematurely. He seemed real bitter about his life in general IMO.

 

He got a little bitter I suppose when he realized people were only excited when he crashed. For the money, hell yes he wanted to be paid. My guess is the chute failure saved his life. I mean look at the angle of the take off ramp. What angle was he going to come down at? Got to a point though when he realized he could die do it and then it scared him to do it. For the money, sure I can see that. You go with what you know and everyone needs to make a living.

 

The dude was an absolute stud. what he was doing on an old Iron head Sportster with little shock travel and a bike that prob weighed around 450/500 pounds... the sissies doing it today are on mega light bikes with 30 inches of shock travel. The guy did what he said, and lived life very hard. A man's man.
Robert