Unlike pigs, time does fly; or, unlike Travis Pastrana, Johnny Knoxville does not backflip. Yes, unbelievable though it may seem, 10 years ago, maybe not to the day but close enough for idiomatic horseshoes and hand grenades purposes, our fearless leader rose to the Evel Knievel occasion and, well, fell considerably short, you could say. But not only did he fall short, a motorbike basically fell on his crotch in the stunt gone rightly wrong process. Typically this would be considered gold—at least in the footage sense—but it also resulted in a lot of blood as well. Not just any blood, mind you, but dick blood! Jesus. What a horrifying thing to type, much less happen for real, but happen it did and thus did Knoxville supply the closer to an oddball release that supplemented the kick-off of the unfortunately short-lived "jackassworld" site in 2008.
If you're unfamiliar with anything I'm talking about, it all began in very late 2007, when BMX legend Mat Hoffman pitched the idea of a “Tribute to Evel Knievel,” where a bunch of guys came together to break all sorts of hairball records with daredevil panache. Since this couldn’t be done live in New York City during the coordinated 24-hours-of-bad-ideas-on-MTV launch of jackassworld.com, a separate production company was hired to film a pre-taped special all unto its own on location in Oklahoma with Mat, Travis Pastrana, Trigger Gumm, Allen Cooke, Scott Palmer, Midget Mike, Mini-bike Spike, and a few others hell bent for bike leathers.
Of course Knoxville is never one to sit idly by on the sidelines of fun, so it wasn't long before he was getting a crash course on how to backflip a motorbike. The one thing Pastrana sternly advised him NOT to do under any circumstances, though, was to let go of the bike. But that’s exactly what Knoxville did once he finally made it to the dirt jump. Up, up, up the bike went, and then down, down, down it came straight onto his pee-pee. One pair of scary bloody long johns later, he was taken to the hospital with a torn urethra and rewarded with his very own piss-bag and catheter combo. And boy oh boy did he have lots of fun with that in the weeks (and years!) to follow, perhaps more fun than one man with an injured penis ever could… or should? Anyway, it was from this fateful accident that the wheels were set in motion for what would eventually become Nitro Circus, or at least the Dickhouse-partnered version that would leave one hell of a carbon footprint on MTV throughout 2009.
Want to know more? Buy the book! Or for pennies on the dollar you can own the DVD.
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