By Nate Nichols Evel Knievel is truly one of a kind. Yet he's no different from all great mystics, charismatics, miracle-makers and popular heroes. His motorized ministry has crossed many lands and he has converted many disciples. That runs the spectrum from beer-guzzling, Howard Cosell-assisted couch jockeys to some of the greatest Daredevil Stuntmen of the Next Generation. Even guys who riff on Evel's legend as comedians have a place in the Legion of Evel. Hollywood Five-O is proud to cover Evel's 2003 Comeback Quest and Ultimate Event every step of the way, from the grand opening this year of his all-new gaming and recreation center at State Line, NV to the not-yet-announced forum where one night in the near future, the incomparable 64 year-old King of the Daredevils will return to the skies aboard a big-ass, screaming mean, V-Twin mega-cycle to test the limits of Danger & Destiny once and for all. Evel is one of a kind - yet he's by no means alone. So as we cover the Big E's journey this year, whether his charted course converges on Death or Glory, we pay tribute also to those who travel in the footsteps of the King - profiles of American Men and Women of Action, inspired to lay their bodies on the line at high speeds and high risk in the challenge that forges champions and often destroys them. So strap yourself inside a boss leather superhero suit, activate your nitrous burners, make your peace with the On High and get ready to rocket over the wall of ordinary human endurance. This is Daredevil Alley. Super Joe Reed "Proving Doubters Wrong - That's What Every Daredevil Loves To Do." First thing you should know is that Super Joe is a Super Nice Guy. Super Tough, Super Dedicated, Super Experienced and maybe, just maybe, a little Super Crazy - but that's no surprise when it comes to a battle-tested veteran of Daredevil Alley. I met Joe Reed, 44, last June at Galpin Ford in North Hills, CA during Evel Knievel's comeback announcement event. Evel's return to active duty was a whirlwind of activity - he signed autographs for some 3500 fans, introduced his new custom Galpinized Ford F-150 Gladiator Truck, told the story of how a last minute liver transplant saved his life, recommended the President A-bomb Afghanistan, and danced the Evel Boogie with three hot showgirls. It was a big day, but after the dust cleared I took a look at the publicity packet I'd received demonstrating what Joe Reed and Super Stunts International had to offer. I learned that Joe Reed took up the banner of "Super" to honor his mentor, Super Joe Einhorn, a lesser known yet significant contemporary and rival of Evel's who jumped Triumph cycles out of San Jose. For years he set records and threw down challenges to his Montana rival, until he suffered massive injuries in a 1977 crash that resulted in severe head injuries and the end of active duty. In the wake of defeat rose an avenger: Super Joe Reed was called to action (Reed and Einhorn continue their long friendship to this day). Reed then produced and performed many stunt shows and spectacles. His specialty? Screaming over whirling helicopter blades on dirtbikes in teams - "The Vortex" 'copter shot. He hit the national airwaves in 1983 on "That's Incredible!" - launching with partner Rick Schuster and successfully avoiding being served up as daredevil daquiris for families across the USA. Through the '80s Reed took Evel's game and played the same basic concept, but with power in numbers. For one promotion he broke 24 jumping records in 24 hours, a record in itself. No warm ups, no practices. When I talked to Joe Reed late last year he was in post as writer, producer and editor on a six-hour TV miniseries on the History of Stunts. For his research, Joe was aided by several all-stars in the field, including Robert Craig "Evel" Knievel, who referred him to racetracks, managers and key players from his own 35-year career. So in addition to being a daredevil, you can call Super Joe a bona fide stunt scholar. Besides the Bionic Man from Montana and Super Joe Einhorn ("Unicorn," perfect appellation for a Daredevil), Reed had a third major mentor: Bob Gill, The Florida Flyer, the third point on the Bermuda Triangle of '70s Cyclejumpers, and the other key rival trying to steal back Evel Knievel's popular crown. Gill was the first guy to jump a dirt bike and land it without a ramp. Literally just drop the bike out of the sky and nail the landing like an 80-mph gym vault on wheels. A paragon of his no-ramp style, Gill's legendary 1972 natural canyon jump record measured 152 feet. This record stood for over ten years until Super Joe, with the blessing of his mentor, went 153 feet. That's the record standing right now (it doesn't count when you fall off, but I loved Robbie Knievel's "Grand Canyon Jump" all the same - more on the Super Joe/Robbie rivalry shortly). Still, showmanship is more than counting feet and inches. It's character. On this count too, Super Joe proves himself to be True Daredevil material. He's a character - not of Evel Knievel's mega-gravity, which I consider on par with Rooster Cogburn-era John Wayne, but it adds up this way: Reed is a guy with heroic ideals driven to inspire people even at the risk of his life. Considering he is a good father and family man, this is serious business. Super Joe is also a vocal advocate of Equal Daredevil Rights. He speaks with conviction about the few female daredevils in the game, whether the ones he's worked with, like Jumpin' Jamie Pamintuan and Heidi Henry (who jumped 87 feet over a canyon in January 2001), or others he admires, like Debbie Lawler (who sometimes paired up with Evel Knievel for shows in the 1970s) and Texas-bred Janet Ward (aka Janet Lee). In a mostly macho-man industry, Reed stands out when he says, "There's no other form of sport or entertainment in the world that is as level a playing field - I invited these ladies to dare the devil and they accepted the challenge." But there's more. In 1988, Reed invented the building-to-building jump, also known as "The One-Way Jump." Sounds good and dramatic, right? It should. Because it means there's no way out. There's no veering harmlessly off to the side before you hit the ramp, in case of trouble on the approach. There's no practice runs past the ramp to get the feel before you pull the trigger. It was as fatalistic a scenario as any warrior of the fantastic could ever dream up. Super Joe opened a new chapter in the Daredevil Bible when he launched over Ogden Street, nailing a famous jump on the Original Strip near Binion's Horsheshoe. In July '98 Super Joe did it again. He pulled the trigger atop downtown L.A., a 100-foot jump over 5th Street at a height of 14 floors. His partner Jumpin' Jamie successfully followed him over the top 25 minutes later. The previous year she and Super Joe successfully performed the first "team" jump (male and female) where both rider and driver were blindfolded (not sure if they had cigarettes - probably not). You may remember in 1999 on Fox TV, Joe Reed's natural rival, Robbie Knievel, nailed a very sharp 11-story building-to-building jump, but Joe makes sure to point out that his own 100-foot record still stands. And I couldn't help but notice that Super Joe's publicity material was full of challenges promising better stunts than a certain Kaptain Robbie Knievel. I figure it's sort of like the league rivalry (Cowboys/Redskins, Raiders/Jets) - both men disciples of Evel, one the blood-heir to greatness, a champion jumper in his own right facing all the complications of a volatile paternal relationship; the other a committed competitor who has to do a little more, make a little more noise, try that much harder to win his hero's blessing. Like everyone who's stone serious about his business, Reed knows the risk. In February 2000, Super Joe was producing and performing a stunt show in Las Vegas. During a warm up, he took a standard 30-foot jump that failed. He got caught short. His front wheel smashed the ramp and drove the front fender into Joe Reed's face. He shattered 18 bones in his face instantly. Today he is in the later stages of rehab, with much of the damage repaired. At Galpin, he just looked like a guy who'd been fitted with braces, which of course happens to non-daredevils all the time. After I learned the braces were part of reconstructive surgery, I told him no one who hadn't known would know any better. "I'm a perfectionist," he answered. "I see everything that's different from what it used to be." It reminded me of motorcycle crasher Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker, whose scars were written into the script for "Return of the Jedi" (he was smacked by a razor-clawed yeti on Ice Planet Hoth). "No one would want to walk a day in my shoes," Super Joe says of the catastrophic aftermath. Sixty m.p.h. of motorcycle wheel impacting his head caused several teeth to grind to dust. He now shelters four titanium plates and 28 screws in his head. This was the end of the invincible period. What was the invincible period? I learned quickly as Super Joe began to confide to me his childhood mandate for daredevil supremacy. A mystical experience convinced him that his family's ultra-tough genetics made him invulnerable. Reed's dad was a USAF flyer who did two tours and 100 missions over 'Nam. His mom was an athlete and the kind of indomitable figure who could survive a catastrophe like the one that shaped Joe Reed's life and destiny as Super Joe. Boise City, Lousiana, the late 1960s. Mrs. Reed was cruising down the road in the family station wagon when two kids on bikes broke out of the bayou on a collision course that would have meant two dead kids. Mrs. Reed, who was 7 months pregnant, swerved so hard she flipped the station wagon onto its side at the mouth of a bridge, whereupon the bridge railing started harpooning through the car's interior, striking Joe Reed and his brother in the head and injuring both - they were in the back seat with the family German shepherd. As the wheels spun to a stop on the upside-down car, Mrs. Reed woke up, helped her kids out of the wreck and two months later successfully gave birth tied to a machine with steel rods anchoring the fused joints in her back. Says Joe: "After that event, there was nothing on this earth that scared me. My whole life until then I had nightmares. I never had another nightmare again." But something was left in the nightmare's place, episodes of lucid dreaming that he believed held the key to powers of a kind of sorcery. To invincibility. As I envisioned this uncanny superhero origin story, it brought to mind Evel and his plan for an ultra-high speed jump. Namely that he wanted to fly 65 feet farther than the Caesar's Palace crash that would have killed any ordinary man. I was a little taken aback. Somehow Evel's assurances that "At Caesar's Palace I didn't have enough speed" didn't completely pacify my analytic mind. I ask Joe Reed. His response: "First of all, you have to remember, Evel used to do his daredevil show 2-4 times a week. He only missed 1% of his jumps. That's 14 crashes in over 1400 flights." Still, "I'm a little concerned about what he's planning to do. I'd like to talk to him about it. He's talking about a low-arc jump at 220 feet. Thetrouble is, as you go faster and further, the target gets smaller and smaller. Even with a digital speedometer, any variation can mean missing the target by 15 feet." "As a fan, as a friend I would prefer him not to do that. He could do a wheelie show and a shorter jump over a 'copter." At that moment, Joe Reed seems like a grounded realist, taking an analytic, physics-driven approach to the proposed jump, not depending purely on mystic visualization. That's what has me worried about Evel's Big Jump. You can't be a daredevil without mystic visualization, but then again it didn't go so well with, say, the rocket ride over Snake River Canyon. Then, on the subject of that infamous flight, Reed relays that when he was 16, in 1974, he made himself a promise in response to Evel's close call: to build a 6-solid rocket booster craft with a nested cycle inside - and to launch it in "The Revenge of Snake Canyon." All of a sudden in a flash the physics-driven realist is M.I.A., and the Mystic Visualizer is working the room. Reed describes his motto for the project: "Help A Legend Across The Canyon, Become An Instant Legend." Super Joe says he's got backing for a six million dollar prototype of the Snake River Revenge Rocket to test at State Line, near Evel's new casino. "I will build a rocket bike that will cross Snake Canyon and I'm going to invite Evel to go along and hit the big red button. It will be with Jet Propulsion Lab and NASA engineering, an F-15 Rocketbike built for two." Suddenly I have questions. Has Evel ever done a "shared stunt" like that before? Would he ever? And Snake Canyon? Evel only settled for it because his dream of rocketing over the Grand Canyon he couldn't get clearance on. Meanwhile, there's Robbie, who as son you'd expect to be doing the avenging. He made a deal with a tribe in Arizona and in 1999 took a good long jump over a Wile E. Coyote-size canyon plenty Grand enough to get him killed. The Kaptain hit too deep on the landing ramp, got bucked off and walked away (assisted by Dan Haggerty, TV's "Grizzly Adams") with some relatively minor daredevil damage, the hero for avenging his dad's dream of Jumping the Grand Canyon. And of course in 1989, Robbie successfully jumped the fountains, erasing the Curse of Caesar's Palace, the site where Evel crashed so violently he was in a coma for a month. That's the same distance Evel wants to outperform later this year by 65 feet! So yes, I had questions. But I decided not to get into it. Just like I've made peace with Evel doing his Ultimate Jump: if he's got a feeling about this, about making it, considering everything he knows and everything he's done, then that's good enough for me. I'm backing him up all the way down the line. I'll be there when it happens and I'll get the story to the people. Same thing with Super Joe, who is getting together a stunt show for pay-per-view this year, complete with his trademarks: multiple jumpers, new ideas (including cyclejumping up off of skateboard half-pipes onto elevated platforms), and multiple broken records. Super Joe's one of the top daredevils in the world - he has a plan, and I know he is the kind of guy who isn't just talking. He's like his hero, a man of action, on a quest to test his limits. I wish each of them (or possibly both together) nothing but success as they tangle with the devil on two wheels.