Other Small cap news...
San Leon shares boosted by oil frontier venture
San Leon shares boosted by oil frontier venture
- San Leon Energy (SLE) announces a joint venture to look for oil in Iraq.
- The joint venture is with Al Meinaa Oil Services Limited and takes San Leon into one of the world's most promising frontier regions.
- San Leon is proposing a merger with Irish oil company Island Oil & Gas. This ambitious oil company is one to keep an eye on.
Knievel’s life could be measured in statistics. The 500 prostitutes in the hard-drinking mining town of Butte, Montana, where he was born. The 2,000 women with whom Knievel claims to have slept.
Then there’s the 14 Greyhound buses over which he and his motorbike leapt at King’s Island, Ohio in 1975. The 90,000 spectators who filled Wembley Stadium to watch him fly his Harley-Davidson over 12 buses before crash-landing on the thirteenth. The 29 days he spent in a coma after failing to clear the fountains outside Las Vegas’s Caesar’s Palace Hotel. And the three years he spent, in total, in hospital recovering from the many broken bones.
The king of the risk-takers
But numbers cannot describe the essence of the man, or account for why he routinely took extraordinary risks fully aware that the consequences could be fatal. His most audacious jump of all was in a steam-powered rocket across the Snake River Canyon. He said good-bye to his wife and family, and but for fortuitously crash landing on a ledge above the waters of the canyon, he would never have seen them again.
Several times as a performer he cheated death, and did not stop when his motorbike stunt days were over.
In 1999, aged 61 and in hospital waiting for a liver transplant, he lost hope that a donor would be found and was taken to spend his remaining 48 hours at home. Halfway down the Florida highway his mobile phone rang.
A young man had just died in a car crash and his blood group matched that of Knievel. Knievel’s wife did a u-turn, the operation was a success and Knievel went on to live for another eight years, during which time nostalgia for the 1970s saw his fame enjoy a revival.
Knievel was no saint. He started out as a small-time crook, failed to pay his taxes and to a writer who had dared to pen a less than flattering account of his character, he exacted retribution in the form of two broken arms.
Despite making a point of preaching the virtues of good living, he drank heavily, gambled his money away and never allowed his two marriages to stand in the way of having a good time.
No doubt because of, and not in spite of, these flaws he was immensely popular. At a time when the US was going through a spell of introspection and doubt, he showed what a man could do with his life if he only had the will and the courage.
Knievel was fearless. He described anyone who was frightened of death as a fool. Yet he was properly nervous before any of his daredevil performances, and he came to rely on powerful pain killers to douse the aches of his many injuries.
An invaluable lesson for every penny share investor
But his spirit was indomitable. He knew that the only true definition of failure is a failure to attempt something in the first place – a lesson that every successful penny share investor must learn. He was a tremendous self-publicist. He was well aware that it was the very chance that he might have an accident that attracted the crowds.
He spent his money as fast as he made it. Alongside the fleet of sports cars at one time he had 11 boats and claimed that he bought a second LearJet just so that he could fly it alongside his first one and admire his name painted on the side.
He made outrageous claims, blurring the line between fact and fiction so that the legend spread. He delivered a good line, too. On marrying for the second time, to a woman 31 years his junior, he said “She’s a little young for me but what the hell – if she dies, she dies.”
And he summed up his philosophy on money with these words. “All the money in the world can’t buy your way into heaven and it can’t buy your way out of hell – it was meant to be spent right here and I’m going to have the best clothes, the best boots, the best diamonds, the best cars, the best motorcycles, booze and women on the face of the earth just as long as I keep going.”
So I don’t think Evel would have made much of an investor. He never held on to his money long enough for that. But of one thing I am certain. If he had been an investor he would have gone for the riskiest, high-stakes gamble he could have found. More than anybody, Evel Knievel knew that fortune favours the brave.
Good investing,
Tom Bulford
For The Penny Sleuth
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