Super Joe
Super Joe
Chapter Two In The Ever-Ongoing Motorcycle Run, Jump And Shuck Story.
DAN HUNT
IF SOMEONE told you his name was Joseph Einhorn, you wouldn’t be impressed. And if your name was Joe Einhorn and you were in show business, you’d consider changing it.
Joseph Warren Einhorn therefore took the most expeditious way out. He added “Super” to the front, dropped Einhorn, put it plus the claim “world’s greatest stuntman” on his calling card, and set about proving it. Super Joe. My, my. How quaint. Not creative very very. But quite comic book in style.
His bag is jumping motorcycles. Currently, he is claiming to have out-Eviled Evel Kneivel with a spectacular 144-ft. ramp-to-ramp leap at San Jose’s Race of Champions last fall.
After spending some time with Super Joe, I can tell you that he’s a nice guy. An everyday sort of guy. Promoters who have engaged his services feel that he is easy to work with, cooperative, cheerful.
He’s a tall dude at 6 and 1, but doesn’t seem tall. He wears sideburns and mod, lavish lapeled jackets, but somehow doesn’t strike you as very far out.
When he talks about his chosen profession, he doesn’t get very excited, nor does he excite. You react to him like you would a likable proletarian who has his ticket in welding.
Super Joe lives only five blocks from where he was born. And that fact alone will tell you how controversial his conversation is.
Such a happy, bland demeanor could, however, kill Super Joe’s act before it ever got started. Distance jumping is more than distance. It is delivery, poise, vectored emotion, demagoguery and violence rolled up into one.
While Super Joe may have jumped the longest, his prototype Evel K., still has Joe beat for shuck power.
At the mike, Evel croons a crowd of bloodthirsty onlookers into sentimental anticipation. “It’s a pleasure to be in your fair city once again...and if I survive this afternoon, I hope in all sincerity that I may...blah, blah.”
Evel’s words aren’t those of an athlete, but of a revivalist/politician. You aren’t going to see a ramp-to-ramp jump, which is a rather stupid thing to drive 20 miles to see anyway, if you look at it analytically.
You are going to see Evel walk the water, jump the canyon, lower taxes and heal the sick. There’s the Grand Canyon, folks. Now you see it, now you don’t.
You are polarized by Evel’s arrogance. You hate him for claiming that he’ll jump the Grand Canyon or Snake River. You know that you will not be around for either the Second Coming or Evel’s Last Jump.
But, in hating him and detesting his charlatanry, you are drawn into discussion with him, and you’ve got to go see him jump.
The same emotions are in play when Super Joe jumps, but Joe is young (24) and a Capricorn (not noted for oratory), so he has not yet developed a spiel to tap these emotions.
But he is learning.
At San Jose, the learning process was accidental. Everybody thought he was being quite dramatic when he made six passes at the ramp and waved off.
Waving off, of course, is an excellent crowd baiting technique. After three or four wave-offs, the crowd is ready to run you out of town. They want to tear you apart.
So, if you make the jump after six wave-offs, the mass emotion, so tightly sprung in negative ill will, rebounds in adulation an equal amount. The fans bound en masse over the fences to carry off their savior.
Super Joe’s six waveoffs, however, were not exactly planned. After the usual first two passes, he was scared, plain scared.
“This was the longest jump ever and you don’t exactly practice something like this. I had a rough idea of how fast you had to go to make 140 feet. It’s about 94 or 95 mph.
“Somehow I felt the bike wasn’t getting up to speed fast enough. All I had was a single-carb TR-6 and it wasn’t that fresh.
“So I kept making trial runs. The crowd started booing me. Boy, they really get nasty.”
The result, recently broadcast on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, was the best possible.
Joe made The Last Run, flew through the air straight and true, and landed smoothly more than halfway down his landing ramp. Room to spare.
His record accomplished, he started cleaning up his act.
ITEM ONE, under “Superlatives,” make claim that “I can jump a motorcycle farther than Joe Namath can throw a football.”
ITEM TWO, make insinuation that No. 1 is really No. 2, and vice versa! “It’s funny, I was brought up on Evel Knievel and now I’ve beaten his (129-ft.) record. It’s strange now to see him over the hill. He’s 34 years old!”
ITEM THREE, make flamboyant gestures. Joe’s consisted of a news conference at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, where he displayed, with the help of the Brinks boys, a tableful of $25,000 in cash.
It was in acceptance of Evel Knievel’s come-one-come-all $25,000 challenge match jump, winner take the 50 Gees.
Naturally, Super Joe is making sport of the fact that Evel has been slow to respond.
A confrontation between these two is highly unlikely and would be a deadly show anyway. Can you imagine the pacing? Two death defying leaps punctuated by hours of boredom as the ramps are moved, ton by ton, to the longer (and longer and lo...) distance.
ITEM FOUR, make impossible plans. Evel Knievel promised a shot at the Grand Canyon, which was fortunately delayed by a cooperative tribe of Indians, who acted all upset at the thought of a vertical Twin flying over their wigwams. At least, that’s what we were told.
Meanwhile, while Evel was avoiding The Last Brink, the publicity from such an obviously ridiculous claim was so profitable to him that he was able to buy a piece of the Snake River and switch his venue. And his starting time.
...And his starting time.
Super Joe, still a stripling, is on to Evel’s game. He’s a bit vague yet, because that’s the mark of his generation. Evel’s claim was born in the style of the Billy Graham generation—hot, direct. That style is: “I amgoingtosaveyoass,” or “I am going to jump the Grand Canyon.” Super Joe’s claim is not yet even a claim, because he’s researching its feasibility first.
Super Joe’s claim is in fact a mumble. But it has to do with a Bonnevilletype streamliner and two ramps set up on the Utah flats at some absurd distance. But his plans are so far from final that they aren’t even preliminary yet.
Super Joe’s background is much like his delivery. Plain. But there’s something about certain plain people who ride in the shadow of Richmond Hill, overlooking Oakland Bay. This trailscarred molehill, by squatter’s rights a playbike area for several decades, has spawned some interesting talent.
Bugsy Mann played on Richmond Hill, and look at him now. AMA No. 1 plate. Joseph Warren Einhorn played on Richmond Hill and look at him now. (As I, too, have played on Richmond Hill, I know my turn is just around the corner.)
Like Bob Knievel, Joe dabbled in racing and actually achieved some stature in AFM production racing. But his weekday gig was run-of-the-mill, a warehouseman.
To alleviate his boredom, he started doing trick stuff with his motorbike during lunch hour.
Naturally, when you mess around that way with your buddies at lunch, the show’s got to improve or it gets stale. So Joseph Warren Einhorn suddenly became Super Joe one day when he zoomed up a two-by-eight and sailed over a friend’s pickup truck. You might call this his first professional performance, as a hat passed around netted him S20.
(Continued on page 133)
Enter The No-Ramp Flyer; Bob Gill
BOB GILL, an accomplished ex-pro racer on the Pacific Northwest circuit, does his jumping without the aid of a landing ramp. Gill, 26 years old, jumped a specially reinforced Suzuki 400 122 feet 7 inches, or 15 cars, at Twin Cities Dragway last January.
The Florida Flyer, as he calls himself, seems much busier than either Eve! Knieve! or Super Joe. In 1971 Bob traveled more than 50,000 miles, put on 64 performances and earned $80,000. As this average is only barely over $1200 a jump, you might call him the cut-rate jumper, compared to Eve!, who has pulled up to 10 Gees an appearance. But his overhead is less, and he seems to get hurt less than Evel and Joe.
Gill's worst accident was caused by an over-eager photog who lay down on the last car in a line of cars he was jumping. The bike clipped the photog's arm on the way down, Gill crashed and spent 11 weeks in the hospital with ruptured spleen, broken pelvis and collapsed lungs.
Wisely, Gill figures to retire when he's 30. That makes two guys who are smarter (in principle) than Knievel.
A New Twist: Hiding From Your Audience
CHESTER PEEK must be shy and retiring, for during the most exciting part of his act, you can't even see him. He dons a nomex suit, gas mask and helmet, then rides his Yamaha through an insulated chicken coop soaked in gasoline. The clincher is that this coop is 60 feet long and
burning furiously. This stunt was photo graphed at Puyallup, Washington. Our two observations about Chester are: 1) he is probably not very good at the microphone, either; 2) he has less travel ing expenses to deduct from his taxes than Evel, Joe or Bob, but deducts quite a bit for operating supplies.
From there one thing led to another. He built himself a ramp, lost his job when the bosses heard about his lunchtime shows (“I was getting bored with it, anyway”), and practiced for six months on an abandoned airstrip near Pittsburgh (Nowhere), Calif.
He made his public debut when he could jump 10 cars. At this point he had about $3000 invested in jumping ramps and transport.
Einhorn debuted at the Cow Palace in March 1971, capping a 14-car jump my tritely but effectively jumping through a huge paper banner, a la that tiresome Shell gasoline commercial. Rip. More mileage. Rip. Fourteen cars! Get it?
Since then he has broken his back (Sept. 26, 1971), having set the angle too steep on his ramp; and garnered a concussion, smashed ribs and broken left hand in a return shot inside the Cow Palace (Dec. 11, 1971), when he missed the landing ramp entirely and hit the stadium wall just beside the exit.
Super Joe now has about $10,000 wrapped up in equipment. He is just emerging from a slow period caused by his injuries. The story is similar to that of his prototype. Knievel’s bad time, I recall, was in 1966, and at that time CYCLE WORLD used to receive plaintive letters from a near-broke dude who plied the county fairs and promised he was back on the road to recovery.
Whether Super Joe will bounce back in as grand a manner as Bob Knievel did remains to be seen.
But for now, Super Joe can claim to have jumped farther than Evel—almost half the length of a football field. “Evel is taking it pretty well, considering. He sure was slow to admit it at first.”
Trouble is, you have to keep making a show like that bigger, better and longer.
Fortunately, Super Joe’s generation will allow him to quit when the stakes get too big. Jumping is just a job.
You believe Joe when he says he wants to be a better jumper than anyone else. But you know he’ll be smart enough to split when he can’t be anymore.
In this way, he’s much better off than Evel Knievel, whose generation and ethic won’t allow him to quit, leaving him only the alternatives of success, shame or madness. [Oj
