by Mark McDermott
It was the last wave of the day.
Nathan Gocke had to get to work, and anyways he was shivering a little bit after a great, two hour session – three to five foot barrels, tube after tube. He and his buddy, Brendan Simmons, had enjoyed an almost perfect early morning session that day – March 29, 2008 – surfing their local break, 33rd St. in Hermosa Beach, where they surfed most mornings.
Gocke had just started paddling to shore when he noticed a nice little peak setting up behind him and decided to catch one last wave.
“I thought I’d grab it and ride it in,” he recalled.
He paddled into the wave, but as he got up on his board his feet slipped off either side. He knew immediately he was in some trouble.
“The wave flipped me,” he said. “I mean, it barreled over the top of me, so the board shot up between my legs like a nut cruncher…I was upside down and I thought, ‘This is going to be bad.’ But I didn’t think it was going to be this bad. I was thinking I was just going to get hurt.”

“Floating” directed by Richard Yelland and produced by Curtis Birch.

The wave pile-drove Gocke headfirst into a sandbar. Simmons quickly sensed that something was amiss. He was about 100 yards away – he had paddled over to the break in front of the Neptune guard tower – but after catching a wave he’d paused inside to check out his buddy’s ride.
He kept looking at where Gocke had gone down.
“It was nothing, not like a bad wipeout or anything, but he didn’t seem to be surfacing and I was like, ‘Something is not right, I better hang out and watch this,’” Simmons said.
Gocke remembers everything that happened with utter clarity.
“I hit the bottom and it was just like a twang, like a snap, and then everything was just like rubber,” Gocke said. “Nothing. There was no feeling, no movement. When you bail, right away you move your hands and legs and make sure you’ve got everything. I tried to do that, but there was nothing. I couldn’t feel or move anything and I thought, ‘This is it. Either I’m going to drown right now or I’m going to live the rest of my life…you know.”
Simmons now knew for sure that something was badly wrong.
“I didn’t see him pop back up right away, and then I saw the board come up, and then I could just see his head come up,” he said. “Normally when someone wipes out, you see arms flapping, like to catch their breath for a second…But he was just lifeless. No movement at all.”
He took off paddling as fast as he could. By the time he got there, Gocke had gone under again. His board bobbed on the surface. Simmons unleashed himself, shoved his board towards the shore, and dove down.
“He was just below the surface, so I was able to pull him up,” Simmons said. “At the time, he wasn’t even speaking – just, like, his lips are moving and he’s almost got like a fish kind of look, just opening and closing his mouth, like I think he was trying to speak but nothing was coming out…I’m like, ‘Are you alright? Are you joking?’ Then he started speaking. ‘I’m dying. I’m dying.’ I’m like, ‘You are not going to die.’ So I just started swimming.”
He couldn’t reach to unleash Gocke’s board, which was dragging like an anchor against the current, because he didn’t want to chance losing his friend underwater. When a wave would come, he would tell Gocke to hold his breath, and they’d submerge and come out gasping together. Gocke, despite his state of shock, kept his wits about him, and methodically, slowly, they made their way to shore. Another surfer arrived as they neared the shore and helped pull Gocke in through the shallows.
Simmons ran to the guard tower, where an empty LA County Life Guard truck was parked. He reached inside the truck and tried to use the radio, but it was lifeless. Finally he rushed up into the tower, rifled through some drawers, and found a radio.
“We are at Neptune tower and got a surfer down, possible broken neck,” he radioed.
“Alright, we are on our way,” came the immediate response.
Before he’d gotten to the bottom of the tower he could see the lights of guard trucks converging rapidly from both north and south. A truck reached Gocke before Simmons made it back to his friend. Lifeguards strapped Gocke onto a gurney and lifted him to the bed of the truck, then drove up the beach to 1st Street to a waiting ambulance. As they took him to Harbor UCLA Hospital, Simmons took the boards back to his house on 33rd St., found Gocke’s cell phone, and called his family to let them know what had happened. He reached the hospital before anyone else. He found his friend in the emergency room. There was sand on the floor, and Gocke still had crusty hair from the beach.
“They are saying I’m paralyzed,” Gocke said.
“Well, maybe it’s just temporary,” Simmons said.
But it wasn’t. The doctors had already done X-Rays. Gocke had broken his spine between the C5 and C6 vertebrae, just below his neck. A fragment had punctured his spinal cord. He was now quadriplegic.
The next week was the worst. Gocke underwent surgery to fuse his spine back together. As he lay in the Intensive Care Unit, unable to talk because of all the tubes and life support apparatus, the expressions that flashed through his eyes were a mixture of anger, bewilderment, and listlessness. When the tubes came out, some of his fire returned. He told hospital staff he didn’t want painkillers, that he would rather fight the pain with his mind than be caught in a hallucinatory haze.
But the true Nathan Gocke fully returned about a week after his accident. Simmons arrived one day with a photo that showed Jesse Billauer surfing a big wave. Billauer lay on his board because he’d suffered the exact same injury as Gocke – a C6 fracture. He was quadriplegic, too.
Gocke came to a quick conclusion: he was going to surf again.
“He was on a bitchin’ wave,” Gocke said. “I think it was Cloud Break in Fiji, and I saw at that instant – I totally broke down. I just knew, alright, cool. I can still surf. Awesome. That is it. That is the point I knew I was going to surf again.”
“I think that was the first time I ever saw him tear up a little bit, or not even tear up, but kind of look like, ‘Ah, I can still do stuff,’” Simmons said. “‘Look at that. It’s not done yet.’ You could see all of a sudden a switch go off in his head as soon as he saw that picture.”
And there was something else. Gocke decided that he had absolutely no regrets.
“I got tons of barrels,” he said in an interview this week. “It was an incredible day. So I don’t feel so bad about getting all busted up.”
Those close to him – particularly Simmons, whom he’d known since junior high – also decided something: Gocke wasn’t going to be alone in this.

Skate kid
They met in a hallway in Sinaloa Junior High in Simi Valley.
“He was on the payphone placing a prank call on the 1-800-DENTIST number, looking for a dentist that impersonates Elvis,” Simmons said. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ We got to hang out.”
Gocke was a skate kid. There was something unusual about him. He had an nearly imperturbable sense of calm, and he did things his own particular way. His attitude was why walk down a sidewalk when you can blast down it?
“Always,” he said. “What can you do to make something cool out of it? Skate it.”
Gocke moved around after high school. He and Simmons lost touch. Simmons went to school at Morepark College. Gocke worked for a grocery chain. He moved to Vegas for a year, then South Pasadena, then Silver Lake. He got into mountain biking during this time. Some friends asked him if wanted to come to the mountains one day and he was immediately hooked.
Soon he had his own suspension mountain bike and was into “fast, downhill stuff, kind of nuts.” Around the same time he bought the first of a series of cars that he’d customize into racers – a BMW 225, then a SAAB turbo 900, then another BMW 320, all which he gave added suspension and engine modifications. He described himself as “a wannabe race car driver.” But it was never, he said, about adrenaline, or speed, or risk. It was about performance.
“I like to take what I have and push it to the limits,” he said. “I like living on the edge because it’s fun. Yeah, I could just drive a car from Point A to Point B, but wouldn’t you rather have a race car and have it be a lot more fun in between Point A and Point B? Instead of going the highway route, maybe go through the mountains. That’s what life is about – it’s about quality of life, not just living, but enjoying it. I mean, that is why we do anything we do.”
Gocke got tired of his job after a few years and quit, then moved to Hawaii for a while. He returned after spending part of a year there and arrived in LA looking for work.
One day eight years ago, Simmons walked in to Baja Sharkeez in Manhattan Beach to find Gocke sitting at a table. They hadn’t laid eyes on one another since high school.
“I walk into a bar one day and there he was, like nothing had happened,” Simmons said. “He was sitting there with two girls on this side, and two girls on that side. I thought, ‘This is the table to be at.’”
They drank beer. Simmons had worked for the Fox television network through college and climbed the ranks, from running errands to becoming an engineer overseeing the network’s live sports coverage. He said maybe Grocke could find work there.
“I think I gave him my phone number, like, ‘Oh, just give me a call, and I’ll give you the right numbers to call,” Simmons said. “Then the very next day he’s calling me. ‘You told me you’d be getting me a job!’ Oh shit, the things you say when you are drunk. You never expect people to take you up on it.”
Gocke visited Fox and was hired on the spot. He agreed to work the night shift. He was a tape operator, digitalizing video tape onto a server for network playback.
“It’s funny,” he remembered. “When I was young I’d sit around and watch a lot of TV and I remember thinking, man, if could just get paid to watch TV that would be great. Lo and Behold, here I am getting paid to watch TV. It kind of worked out.”
Gocke loved the work, and he loved the money. He bought a series of motorcycles that he customized – first a BMW Dakar, a dirt bike with lots of suspension, and eventually a Yamaha street bike he stripped down into a Harley-style chopper. Later, he bought a true sports car – a Lotus Elise – and basically lived life to the hilt, fast and fun and full of zip.
And then one day he found his ultimate ride. It was a surfboard.

FUEL
Gocke was a surfer before he ever surfed. The very first wave he ever took he stood up on. He understood it.
The strange thing was that although he loved board sports – he’d taken up snowboarding after starting at Fox, too – he had never surfed. Simmons had surfed avidly all through high school, driving to Ventura almost daily from Simi Valley. A year or so after Gocke started working at Fox, the two friends finally went surfing together.
Gocke knew right away. It was like finding his natural element. Simmons sold him an old longboard on the cheap, and soon Gocke was surfing every day. It wasn’t just a sport. He’d found a way of life.
“Anyone who surfs can understand, but to explain, it’s kind of strange,” he said. “It’s like an addiction, a drug, or just like you wake up and take breath – it’s as natural as breathing. You know, it’s just what you should be doing. Sure as you are walking down the street, you might as well be surfing down a wave. It’s like if you go a week without it, you are not contributing to life – I feel like a bad person, like I’m doing something wrong. It’s that ride you get. It gets you and carries you high. You go in the water one way, and come out a completely different way.”
Simmons marveled at his friend.
“The guy could go two or three or four days without sleep, so when he started surfing, he’d be working the overnight shift, going out surfing all day, then going to work another overnight shift, then get out to go surfing again,” he recalled. “I’m like, ‘You gotta sleep at some point.’ Then he’d sleep for like a whole day straight, like 18 or 19 hours. He’s a very unique individual.”
Gocke had advanced quickly at Fox and become a technical director, one of the more trusted positions on the technical side of things. He monitored outgoing feeds before they were beamed out of the Fox facility to a satellite.
“He was one of the best ones in that role for sure,” said Mark Senter, a manager of broadcast operations at Fox. “He is the last set of eyes before it leaves our facility.”
He was also one of the few people in his position who took an active interest in a fledgling Fox channel called FUEL TV, which was devoted entirely to action sports. When the opportunity came, about four years ago, he volunteered to serve as a technical director for FUEL, which he felt wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.
“Fox brought it over to our lot, and we took it and put all we had into it,” Gocke said. “We had all the bitchin’ equipment, all the great technology and stuff….and I mean, they got rad shows on FUEL.”
It meant that his work was now completely aligned with his life.
“I’d be watching surf vids, watching guys surf and putting some technique to reality,” he said. “You watch surfing before you go surfing and get super-motivated…You see guys busting airs, and you are like, shit, I can bust airs? And then you go and you bust airs.”
Gocke was living the dream. He moved down from Mar Vista to Redondo Beach. He and Simmons took surf trips up and down the California coast, to Spain, France, and Mexico. No longer working nights, he woke by dawn most days, hoping for a swell. He’d been surfing virtually non-stop for five years now. He was all surf, all the time, right up until that day in March last year when his feet slipped off his board.
Gocke admits that there were a couple days as he lay at Harbor UCLA hospital amid all the machines and tubes and worried looks when he was pretty sure he’d caught the last wave he’d ever catch. He was having trouble getting his head around what had happened.
“Oh my god, you have no idea,” he said. “Because you don’t know left or right…You don’t know if you are going to bounce back….but what they showed me from the X-ray, and told me what happened, I pretty much figured that would be it – I might get a couple little things back, but I pretty much figured by the look on everyone else’s faces and the way they were talking I was pretty much down for the count.”
He wasn’t down long. And when he got back up, it was because of a wave.

The Wave
Jesse Billauer was 17 years old and on the cusp of becoming a professional surfer when a routine wipeout broke his spine and landed him in a wheelchair.
It was 1996. Nobody showed him a photograph of a quadriplegic surfer as he lay in the hospital, because none existed. But all he could think about, even in his darkest days, was the ocean. He missed the waves. So he chose to pursue what was, at the time, a seemingly impossible goal: he would surf again. It took him three years of rehab, of preparation, of daunting anticipation and persistent hope, but he got back in the water. He still remembers that first day back like it was the beginning of another life.
“You get that sense of freedom and independence,” Billauer said. “Just the water hitting your face, the wind, the smell of salt water, all of it together – it’s amazing.”
Billauer founded an organization called Life Rolls On to help injured surfers get back on the water. Simmons, only days after Gocke’s accident, went to the Life Rolls On offices in Culver City to learn everything he could about spinal injuries. They gave him the photo of Billauer surfing Cloud Break to take back to the hospital.
Everything changed for Gocke the moment he laid eyes on that photo.
“It’s like life started again,” he said. “It started back up. There was something to go for.”
Word of Gocke’s accident hit FUEL TV hard. Those who worked at FUEL were, like Gocke, a different breed. There are only 75 employees, most who are surfers themselves or otherwise embedded in the culture of action sports. They are cut from a different cloth than most people in LA’s entertainment industry, a small tribe unto themselves.
“We are like, ‘What doesn’t fit in this picture, in the Hollywood space?” said Shon Tomlin, a FUEL TV vice president who is also an El Porto resident. “If you took a snapshot of our workplace you’d have no idea we work in TV.”
They rallied around Gocke like a fallen brother.
“When you heard about it, it was yeah, it’s one of our guys,” Tomlin said. “It’s one of us. You immediately connect because you immediately realize – it could have been me, it could have been anybody. It didn’t really have to do with skill and ability. It’s just all part of the game.”
Along with his family and other friends from the South Bay, there was almost always a group of people at the hospital from Fox and FUEL. Weeks later, when he left the hospital and went to the Casa Colina rehabilitation center in Pomona, his tribe followed him. They also immediately started raising funds. Gocke had insurance, but most of the expenses – the reconfiguring of an entire lifestyle – are not covered. There were FUEL TV bake sales, and early on, the South Bay surf community rallied together for a benefit and art show hosted by Spyder Surfboards.
“You find out who your trues are,” Gocke said. “And it just so happens that I am one lucky son of a bitch. I have a lot of true friends who have really been there.”
But there was something else going on, too. The way Gocke responded to what had happened inspired everyone who came in contact with him. He wasn’t falsely cheerful; he was just calm and steady, like he’d always been.
“Just try to stay positive, you know?” Gocke said. “If you run across a person who is feeling crappy, it kind of projects on you, and I don’t want to do that. I want to project positively on everybody and keep the good vibes going. Life is what you make of it, it truly is – it’s our decision.”
From those very first hospital visits onward, people have walked away from Gocke feeling oddly lifted.
“I surf,” Senter said. “I had to be honest with myself – I don’t think I could have been as instantly positive as he’s been. It’s such an achievement on his part to remain in that state. He’s a special guy and he’s never lost that karmic feel…You know, to be honest, we are lucky, too – to know him.”
Tomlin hadn’t really known Gocke before his accident. But as he came to know him, he felt changed.
“I kind of really had this heart to heart with him one night,” Tomlin recalled. “I had always told myself if something like that happened to me, I would do myself in – I didn’t think I could go on. This is the first time in my life…there was something in what Nate said, and the spirit about him, that I realized, you know what? That is a silly thought. Yeah, you can go on. Nate is just a strong guy…There are those people in life if we kind of get in tune with them, we can learn a lot, and hopefully help steer our own lives in the right direction, whether its finding a little more peace and perspective or living through tragedy. He is leading by his actions.”
What Gocke was doing was riding this wave. Getting injured this way certainly wasn’t what he’d expected – not quite, anyhow – but he quickly adjusted to his new reality.
“Not all waves are the right waves you were looking for,” he said. “And they may not always look makeable. But there is a way through it.”
As he told Tomlin, he had zero regret.
“You’ve got to commit,” Grocke said. “I knew what I was messing with. I thought I would break my neck on a motorcycle. I never thought it would be the ocean. That was kind of interesting, but I pretty much live on the edge and I know the risk involved with everything I do… It was live my life, man – if you are alive, you might as well live life. You might as well do something. You can’t just lay around. If you are just laying around you are just wasting away. Just do something.”
What Simmons noticed was that his friend was, deep down, utterly unchanged by the accident.
“His mind is the same as always,” he said. “The ocean may have taken his legs, but it didn’t take his soul away at all. He is still going strong at everything.”
A week into his rehab, Gocke had a special visitor. Billauer showed up at Casa Colina. He just wanted Gocke to know that he would be there for him. He gave him his phone number so if he ever had any questions along the way, he’d have somebody who’d been down that path to ask.
“We were just kind of talking like two people, just kind of friendship stuff,” Billauer said. “When something happens…you’ve got to let people ask questions and make them feel comfortable.”
Every day, Gocke trained. Every day, he grew a little stronger. He spent almost six months in rehab, and his mind never wavered. He was thinking about one thing: surfing again. Every so often, Billauer would show up, just to check in. Eventually, Gocke moved in with his aunt and uncle in Oxnard, where he is still training and preparing to eventually return to the South Bay. He wants to return to his friends and to his home break.
On May 3, he took a big step in that direction. At a Life Rolls On event at Bolsa Chica, Gocke did what he’d been dreaming of doing for more than a year. He surfed again. He was in the water about 20 minutes and caught only four or five waves. But he was finally back where he belonged.
“It was the best, man, just like being right back where I am supposed to be,” he said. “It was just little two-footers, but just to be on the face of a wave – everything fell into place. It just all seemed right.”
Simmons, who joined him in the water, said it felt like the world was right again, looking over and seeing his surf buddy on a wave.
“It’s a feeling that is really hard to describe,” he said. “It was just so special to be there when he got back in the water. I definitely have missed him. It’s like, ‘Ah, that’s my buddy.’ All of sudden, there they are, right by your side.”
On May 31, his friends will help him take another step in the direction of coming home. A benefit at Patrick Malloy’s from 8 p.m. to 12 p.m. Sunday night will raise money to help him continue along his journey back to the water, and back to some semblance of independence. But more than anything, it will bring him back to his community.
“There are good things that have come from this,” he said. “Bringing people together – I mean, I have had these two events, I’ve seen the way people support me…I don’t know, it’s horrible to say, but tragedy does seem to bring people together, to bring them closer. It amazes me that a tragedy that happened to me has brought a lot of people around me closer, and for me, that is huge. I feel so stoked that so many people have supported me and are still supporting me.”
“It seems like a party,” Gocke said. “I’m all for partying.”
Tickets to the May 31 event are available at Patrick Malloys and Spyder Surfboards. $10 in advance (recommended) and $15 at the door. The event will feature live auctions (including Donovan Frankenreiters signature ukulele and guitar) and a surprise musical guest. See www.supportnathangrocke.com for more info about Nathan’s ongoing progress. ER

Thank you to Casa Colina Rehabiliation center and the Life Rolls On Foundation .