IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Push the Button. Remembering Evel Knievel and his Snake River Canyon jump 50 years ago:

Imagine being in such a situation as Knievel was then, knowing that the X-2 would likely fail—it had failed its two tests—and going through with it anyway. He had created an epic around his canyon jump, built a whole career on it, really, and now it was time to face the deed. He’d even gotten Bob Arum, the boxing promoter managing the event, to agree to a ruse: posing at a press conference with a fake check for $6 million, supposedly Evel’s purse. (In reality, his guarantee was only $225,000, plus a cut from the gate, but the bluster worked again, both short-term and long: in its 2007 obituary for Knievel, the New York Times uses the $6 million figure.) If he cancelled now, he would spare his life but lose everything else. The expression “a fate worse than death” exists for a reason. Better to explode into eternity, with the consolation that all you have created will live on after you—now shrouded in the mystic—along with a slim alternative hope that, just maybe, something would happen and you would get lucky.

Something happened. He got lucky—so lucky as to be almost inconceivable. The X2 blasted off as intended in a roar of white steam, but the parachute deployed almost immediately, far earlier than it was supposed to. It’s generally been regarded as a system malfunction, though it can never be known for sure whether Evel himself might have prematurely pulled the latch to deploy the parachute.

Whatever happened inside the cockpit, the rocket, with its parachute out so early, soon slowed—helped by 20-mile-an-hour headwinds that blew it backward. A rarely seen angle from ABC’s postmortem coverage shows the Skycycle poised to clear the canyon when it slows up, dragged by the parachute; it drifts backward, back out over the canyon, and then begins a nosedive, its white steam now replaced by reddish smoke, like something out of the Batman television series of the late sixties. POOF! Except now Evel seemed headed for a SPLAT! as the rocket drifted downward to the canyon floor—and the Snake River.

He missed the river, Montville says, by a few feet. If he had landed there, he would have drowned; they wouldn’t have been able to get to him in time. Instead, the Skycycle, after colliding with the canyon wall on its way down, came to rest in some brush, out of view of the overhead cameras. Maybe the cushion on the Skycycle’s nose really was effective, though it’s hard to conceive of how the X-2, which looked about as sturdy as a discarded canister from an amusement park ride, could crash-land without breaking up and killing its passenger. Never mind: somehow, Knievel was soon visible again, riding on a rescue craft, waving to the crowds. He hadn’t achieved the goal, but he had gone through with his impossible try—and lived to tell. A life defined by dares had climaxed by carrying out the grimmest, gravest dare of all.

That wasn’t how the media saw it. They derided Snake River as a fizzle, and some who had paid to watch it called it a “rip off,” a term that already resonated with 1970s youth culture: Vietnam, Watergate, the end of many illusions. A rip-off it was definitively not. For one thing, the X-2 could launch only when Evel pressed a button in the cockpit that would release 5,000 pounds of steam pressure. He pressed it. Some may have been dissatisfied because the event offered so little pleasure for the eyes—and wallet, with $10 charged at the closed-circuit theaters and $25 at the canyon site itself. There was enough, though, if you knew where to look: like the stomach-grabbing moment when Evel is lowered into the cockpit, snug as a screw drilled into hardwood; his body settles into the tiny slot in a way that makes it seem like he can never get out.

Figuratively, he never could.

Knievel’s self-created myth, and desire to keep topping his own exploits led him to an impossible place. But for a while, he was a dominant part of American culture in a decade where the nation itself seemed determined to crash into a brick wall. In other words, he was perfect for the cynical decade of the 1970s.