For a man who considers himself a positive and optimistic fellow, the events of Feb. 8, 2017, shattered Nik Wallenda’s spirit. It even caused him to contemplate something he had rarely considered before: his relationship with fear.
The self-proclaimed “King of the High Wire,” Wallenda has 11 Guinness World Records for high-wire acts, all of them sans safety net. A seventh-generation member of the Flying Wallendas and great-grandson of the legendary Karl Wallenda, in the last decade, Nik Wallenda has become known for a series of one-upping-himself TV specials. The list includes being the first person to walk on a tightrope across Niagara Falls in 2012; crossing the Little Colorado River outside Grand Canyon National Park in 2013; walking wires between three Chicago skyscrapers in 2014, including one blindfolded; and walking a 1,300-foot wire atop Times Square in New York City in 2019, highlighted with a mid-wire crisscross with his sister Lijana, doing the walk in the opposite direction.
And then there was Wallenda’s most recent feat: walking across the Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua March 4. That was the longest time he has spent on the high wire for one performance.
“Nik is certainly one of a kind,” said his manager, longtime music producer C. Winston Simone. “There isn’t anyone else like him, and I’m willing to bet real money there never will be.”
For Wallenda, walking the wire is a family business. Known as the Great Wallendas, his family’s performance history dates back to the 1780s in Europe. His ancestors, back then, dabbled in a little bit of everything circus: animal training, acrobatics, juggling, and being clowns.
The first Wallenda to make the wire the focus of his performance was Karl Wallenda, born in Germany in 1905. He was performing in shows by the time he was 6, and soon after that, he was handling handstands on stacked chairs. When he was a teenager, Karl Wallenda began recruiting people for walks on the wire. One recruit, Helen Kreis, would later become his wife.
A major turning point happened in the 1920s. That’s when, during a live show, Karl Wallenda and three others created a complicated pyramid of two men on bicycles on a tightrope holding a bar, with Wallenda on the bar in a chair and Kreis on his shoulders. The act especially impressed someone in the crowd: John Ringling. The circus impresario invited Karl Wallenda and his family to move to the United States and perform for American crowds. They soon relocated to the states, and Karl Wallenda, as Nik later would, constantly tried to outdo himself with more chairs, more people, greater heights.
In the middle of Nik Wallenda’s rise to global prominence, meanwhile, there was the 2017 incident. That’s when eight acrobats were practicing in their Sarasota, Florida, hometown for another record: an eight-person pyramid atop a steel cable, 28 feet above the ground. The feat would beat the previous eight-person pyramid world record, set in 2001 by other Wallendas, by 3 feet.
During that 2017 practice session, five of the eight people on the steel wires fell to the ground, including Lijana Wallenda and Nik’s cousin, Rietta Wallenda. Nik Wallenda, now 41, was one of three people able to hang on to the wire. And though the five who fell recovered from serious injuries and have all since gotten back on the wire, for Nik, the experience, if not a physical pain, was mental anguish. Something more than three years later he describes as a sort of undiagnosed PTSD.
“It was so real. I remember going to my wife and telling her I don’t think I can get on the wire anymore,” Wallenda recalled in a June interview with the Washington Examiner between training sessions for his latest performance, Nik Wallenda’s Daredevil Rally Drive-In Thrill Show. (The show debuted June 12 in Sarasota, and a national tour is in the works.) “It has been a lengthy, tedious process to get past this.”
Long enough that more than two years after the fall, Wallenda, in a Facebook post, talked about it in a public setting. That post came the day a newly surfaced video of the 2017 accident went viral. “I know I struggled with having to relive that accident and actually struggled with fear for the first time ever,” Wallenda said in March 2019.
That fear is now Wallenda’s muse. It’s also the subject of a forthcoming memoir, Facing Fear: Step Out in Faith and Rise Above What’s Holding You Back, written with journalist and author Don Yaeger. Yaeger, in interviewing his subject, said he learned that fear had actually long been an essential part of Wallenda’s life, almost a genetic trait. Only the high-wire star’s version of being afraid wasn’t like most normal people’s. “For Nik and his family, fear was a reaction to being unprepared,” Yaeger said in an interview. “You can’t be a person fear can own and do what he does.”
Over the past few years, with the accident leading the way, fear has also morphed into something different for Wallenda, something more akin to borrowing worry. On the ground and away from the wire, too, his mind races with not only fear, but a crisp list of what-could-go-wrong thoughts. “Negative thoughts are like a weed,” Wallenda said. “If you don’t take out that weed, if you don’t do something about it, that weed will overcome the whole garden. And our minds can be controlled by negative thoughts like that.”
Turning that around, said Wallenda, combined with his post-accident experiences, led him to write the book. (Having some 10 weeks to be virtually inside, it turns out, also helps write a book.) And, now past 40, Wallenda said he’s evolving to understand himself better.
But despite Wallenda’s new, vulnerable outlook, it’s not as if fear, worry, and anxiety have no place in his life. The Wallendas are no strangers to tragic accidents. Two family members were killed in an accident in 1962 in Detroit when a seven-person pyramid collapsed. Nik Wallenda’s great-uncle Mario Wallenda was paralyzed from the waist down after that fall. Karl Wallenda, then 73, fell to his death during a tightrope walk between two towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1978.
Nik Wallenda thinks about his ancestors often, though growing up, what happened in Detroit and San Juan were rarely topics the family talked about. When it did come up, says Wallenda, it was in the context of lessons learned. One lesson, he has said in interviews, is to never get complacent. Treat every walk and performance like it’s the Super Bowl. “Every time I get on the wire, I have fear,” said Wallenda. “It is how I let fear affect me. Having fear and how I deal with fear are two different things.”
Getting ready for the Daredevil Rally — like any good performer, he teases that even after this show, he has something more planned — Wallenda admitted he has another kind of fear. This one is financial.
Up until this show, for most of his performing life, Wallenda said agents and producers have financially supported the back end of shows. Wallenda, of course, is paid well for his feats — by some estimates, he has earned $500,000 for some of the top ones. But one of Wallenda’s goals is to be a producer, too, the kind of entrepreneur who “makes money in his sleep.” “My money isn’t always working for me [right now], but I’m working for my money,” he said.
For the Daredevil Rally, Wallenda put his money where his feet are. He invested into the mid-six figures of his own money as lead producer on the show, which had 12 scheduled performances. Wallenda and his wife, Erendira Wallenda, performed at the show, including riding a motorcycle on a 65-foot-high wire. David Smith, a Guinness World Record holder for human cannonball feats, and motorcycle rider Johnny Rocket also performed during the Daredevil Rally shows.
Three days before the first show, Wallenda admitted he was afraid. “What if no one shows up?” he wondered. “What if the pandemic scares people away?”
But it is not simply fear that drives him to outdo himself constantly. Like most other highly successful people, Wallenda is motivated by a can’t-sleep desire to prove doubters wrong. “If someone tells me it can’t be done, that makes me want to do it that much more,” he said. “If someone says no, then proving them wrong becomes my passion.”
Simone, his manager, sees that passion regularly. “He has entered the GOAT period of his life,” Simone said. “You could argue that this is similar to Michael Jordan, similar to Muhammad Ali. The dedication is there. The results are there. The confidence is there. And the talent is definitely there.”
Simone, who also managed the career of the late actor and magician Ricky Jay, said the question he gets asked the most about Wallenda is, “What kind of guy is he?” He tells people Wallenda isn’t some “tattooed daredevil.” Instead, both Simone and Yaeger said Wallenda is sincere and genuine. That starts with his Christian faith, which the performer talks about often, both in interviews and on the high wire. Wallenda is a dedicated father, too, raising three children with Erendira, who also comes from a performing family. “You can’t separate Nick from his faith,” Yaeger said. “His faith is a huge part of his life.”
And Simone, like the millions who have watched Wallenda perform, marvels at Wallenda’s presence of mind. “What’s amazing about Nik,” Simone said, “is he can be on the edge of something so unbelievable and just keep saying to himself, ‘I can do this.’”
Wallenda has done it over and over — fear be damned.
Mark Gordon is a reporter and editor in Sarasota, Florida.
