While resting his arms, Knoxville commented appreciatively on the weather and the view of sandstone cliffs. He seemed pleased to be in the sun, pleased to be in the water, pleased to pee in his wetsuit. Occasionally, he zoned out, gazing far into the distance and dropping out of conversation. “Sorry,” he said after one zone-out. “Sometimes I go to Tijuana for a moment.”
When a set rolled in, Knoxville aimed unhesitatingly for a hefty wave. He windmilled past the surfer we’d admired from shore, who backed away in fear of carnage. The wave pitched. Knoxville popped up and flew a hundred yards toward the beach, as easy as a kid on a zipline. At the end of the ride, he dismounted, turned, and got creamed by an even heftier wave. His board shot skyward and vanished into a gyre of foam. His silvery head was lost in a tumble. All went quiet as the wave expended itself toward the shallows, and then the hush was broken by a hoot.
Those who know him best are baffled by Knoxville’s—well, nobody agrees on what to call it. Daredevilry? Foolishness? Insanity? Compulsion? Damage? Courage? Masochism? “I don’t know exactly how to describe it,” Spike Jonze, who has produced every installment of “Jackass,” said. “It doesn’t come from outside. It’s an inner quality.” Knoxville’s cousin Roger Alan Wade, who has known him longer than most people alive, was equally stumped: “He’s got a golden heart and a soul to match. The great mystery is what’s going round and round inside that carnival brain.”
Knoxville’s whatever-it-is topples the logic of moviemaking itself. Bankable leading men are not meant to imperil their lives by performing unrehearsed death-defying stunts. Medics on “Jackass” sets are instructed to hold back as much as possible, to avoid ruining good footage. “You’re supposed to insure the leading man in a Hollywood feature film, keep him intact,” the cast member Stephen Glover, alias Steve-O, said. “It makes no sense.”
It made no sense to Knoxville’s family and friends after the first broken bone, and they’re no closer to understanding it now. He has won fame and fortune and critical acclaim for his stunts, but he might have finagled those things without sustaining quite so many traumatic brain injuries in the process. He has three children, a wife, and an extended family whom he loves. Nobody forced him to get in the bullring or turn a gun on himself. So why does he do it? What makes Johnny run?
For clues, it’s best to begin with his Tennessee home town, from which he lifted his stage name. Born Philip John Clapp in 1971, Knoxville has unmistakable Southern origins. He has lived in Los Angeles long enough to have dropped “sir” and “ma’am” from his sentences, but the honorifics are still implied. Doors are held open, “please”s and “thank you”s delivered promptly. He is polite to the point of inefficiency, seeing to it that everyone within reach is comfortable and hydrated and has a ride to wherever they are headed next.
Knoxville’s parents, Phil Clapp and Lemoyne Houck Clapp, attended rival high schools in Knoxville. Phil was a star athlete and a ham. Lemoyne was movie-star beautiful and made sure everyone knew it. The family lived in a split-level house with a double carport. There were woods in the back, rosebushes in the front, and a pony named Bo Diddley in the yard. Phil ran a tire company that he’d inherited from his father. Lemoyne baked black-bottom pies and managed the household. The neighborhood was close-knit; when Bo Diddley escaped his pen, the whole block fanned out to track him down.
Knoxville is the baby of the family, born seven and ten years, respectively, after his older sisters, Krisden and Lynne. It was an unplanned pregnancy. As an infant, Knoxville was voluptuously plump. At mealtimes, he ate so rapidly that it took a pit crew of Clapp females to refill the boy’s Infa Feeder with purée. Other than feeding Bo Diddley, Knoxville was exempt from chores. “He never mowed the yard,” Lynne said. “We babied him real bad.” To spare their brother the trouble of walking, the girls carried him from place to place. When he was threatened with a spanking, they hid him from the parental hand. “It was like having a pet monkey,” Wade, Knoxville’s cousin, said. “All they needed was an organ-grinder.”
