Celebrity Deaths and my hour (or so) with Evel Knievel

Evel Knievel passed away yesterday.

I have a bit of a morbid fascination with celebrity deaths since I can't really understand why people get so worked up about a death of someone that they have never met...but that is just me.....and that being said I wasn't really effected when I learned about Evel even though we spent an hour together chatting many years ago.

Some people are magnets for the opposite sex (or sex in general) but I am a magnet for celebrity interactions.......and here is my Evel Knievel story.

Many years ago I made my first trip to Las Vegas. I think I was 18 or 19 and tagged along with my parents for a trade show. I spent a week in Vegas and I was pretty bored by day 5 (I have been back many times and keep my trips to under 4 days so I don't get stimulation overload) and spent a lot of my evenings in the sports book of Caesars Palace watching the Baseball playoffs (Yankees vs. Mariners while Randy Johnson was still a Mariner). In the Sports book was a guy who looked as bored as me and was sitting drinking pop and completely unaffected by the surroundings so we got to talking. Me being a street proofed kid kept waiting for him to invite me up to his room but that invite never came...instead we talked about motorcycles and baseball and after an hour he said he had to go.

My attention went back to the baseball game and a waitress came over and asked how I knew Mr. Kneivel.

Me thinking this was a trivia question, answered that I knew him from watching Wide World of Sports.

She then explained that I had just been talking to him in real life and I probably had no idea.

...and I hadn't!

Said in your best Paul Harvey voice "AND NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY"



-saul