Robbie Knievel is joining the Gotti family and “Dog the Bounty Hunter” on A&E in a new series.
Yes, the second-generation daredevil and son of Evel, leaper of cars, canyons and such, is the star of “Knievel’s Wild Ride,” premiering at 9 p.m. Tuesday.
He smiles broadly, laughs easily and seems to thrive on the attention brought his way by the show.
“Yeah, they just follow us around,” he said. “We don’t do anything special for them. They want this to be real, and it is real, if you saw it.
“There’s a lot of bleeping.”
Indeed, the unscripted conversations, one in particular after a biker bar scrap, are nothing if not long strings of bleeps.
It’s all part of a pageant that stretches all the way back to the gladiators, Knievel said. “Men needing to prove themselves. The cowboys in the old West too. It’s all part of the same thing.”
And he can’t imagine doing anything else. “I’ve had those hard-labor jobs. No thanks.”
He laughs, then sobers at the thought of his dad, from whom he has been estranged but recently reconciled: “I look at him sitting on his bus before an appearance. He’s in pain, he’s doing oxygen (the elder Knievel has a debilitating lung disease), and I ask him, ‘Dad, why do you keep doing this to yourself?’ He says he just loves his fans.”
It’s not about the mechanics or the engineering or even the achievement, the younger (fortysomething) Knievel said: “They talk about technology today, but things can still go wrong. You can still black out from G-forces, and it only takes a few seconds. No, it’s about the people, and the more the better. I like it when it looks like an ocean of heads. It makes it easier to perform.
“My little girl (18-year-old Krysten Knievel; you meet her in Episode 2) has got a taste of it, and she’s hooked too,” but not on speed and danger. She sings the national anthem at her dad’s performances.
Knievel says people always ask him if he considers himself a daredevil. “I grew up with a pretty wild father–did my first jump when I was 10 because I just wanted to live up to the name.
“I don’t have a death wish, but if I die, I don’t want it to be from liver disease.”
Knievel will have close to 10 chances to tempt fate this year, most of them on “Wild Ride.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
