Daddy Was a Daredevil: Top 5 Father-Son Action Duos

Share on Facebook posted 06-20-09 by John Freeman Gill

It’s an action junkie’s ideal childhood, right? You grow up on a nude beach in California, urged on by your daredevil, ex-FBI-agent dad to surf waves of surpassing gnarliness and attempt ever more dangerous athletic feats. Well, for Norman Ollestad, a second-generation thrill seeker who actually grew up in this unusual manner in the ’70s, the experience was something of a mixed bag. Raised at Topanga Beach, where Ollestad’s father hung ten with his infant son strapped to his back, Norman often bridled at his father’s coercive, adrenaline-fueled approach to child-rearing. Yet, as the younger Ollestad relates in his new memoir, Crazy for the Storm, it was the lessons of physical courage beaten into him by his hypercompetitive father that allowed the 11-year-old Norman to escape with his life after surviving the plane crash that killed his dad in the San Gabriel Mountains.

While father and son were flying to a ski event in 1979, their small plane crashed into a snowbound mountainside at an altitude of more than 8,200 feet. The only survivors were young Norman and his father’s girlfriend, who died trying to reach safety, leaving the boy to fight his way through the blizzard alone. Miraculously, Norman survived, thanks to a childhood of goading and coaching that singularly prepared him for that day. As the boy, his frostbitten hands all wrapped in bandages, told television reporters at the time: “I never gave up. My Dad taught me never to give up.”

While a proclivity to live life dangerously is not always inherited, a survey of some famous thrill-seeking father-son tandems shows that even those sons who think they are striking out on their own tend to have a hard time escaping Dad’s shadow.

Evel Knievel and Captain Robbie Knievel

Evel Knievel & Robbie Jump Cesars!!!

What warms a father’s heart most? When his beloved son loves risking his life to show off for crowds every bit as much as Dad always did. In 1968, Evel Knievel suffered a motorcycle crash of world-class gruesomeness while attempting to jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. After smashing his head into the concrete, Evel proceded to roll head over heels again and again, until his apparently unconscious body was little more than a bag of bones tumbling at high speed. All told, he broke half the bones in his body.

Twenty-one years later, demonstrating the timeless male tendency to learn absolutely nothing from one’s most formative experiences, Evel was back in the spotlight at Caesars, publicly congratulating his offspring, Robbie Knievel, for giving the hazardous jump another shot.

“I am not the greatest daredevil in the world,” the proud papa declared to an adoring crowd just before Robbie’s attempt. “I am the father of the greatest daredevil in the world.”

Indiana “Junior” Jones and Prof. Henry Jones

If there’s one thing that upsets Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones more than snakes, it’s probably being called Junior or Henry by his dear old dad, played to impish perfection by a white-bearded Sean Connery in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The bickering affection is what makes the relationship between these two head-strong grown men so priceless. When Indy explains ruefully that he ran away from home as a teenager because his dad didn’t even talk to him until he was 16, his father retorts: “You were just getting interesting.”

The Last Crusade came out in 1989, the same year that Evel Knievel watched Robbie do his lunatic motorbike jump at Caesars, and by an odd coincidence, the movie also included a high-speed motorcycle sequence. Unlike Evel, however, Prof. Jones got to ride in a sidecar, at times enjoying the high-octane chase with the tweedy nonchalance of a dignified codger out for a Sunday drive. Best moment: when dad’s expression goes from quizzical to impressed as Indy breaks off a pointy pole and uses it as a lance to “unhorse” their Nazi enemy from his motorcycle.

“Luke, I am your father!”

OK, let’s just say that this father and son have a few issues. Heavy-breathing Dad tells self-righteous kid he’s the boy’s father, cuts his hand off (bummer). Self-righteous kid learns space kung fu from wizened green Muppet on swampy planet, confronts heavy-breathing father and cuts his hand off. People, people, now couldn’t this all have been avoided if heavy-breathing dad and self-righteous son had used their (sadly, now amputated) hands to toss a football around the yard now and then? Can’t we all just get along?

Even played by tiny Lego figures, Darth and Luke appear to have some pretty major shit to deal with. And as an aside, I think it’s pretty clearly the case that Little White Lego Man is a considerably better actor than Mark Hamill.