Paralyzed stunt jumper Godfrey still living on edge

When you jump over stuff — and through stuff — in the motorized mayhem that is the Nitro Circus, you know it’s not “if” but “when.”

When you are going to get hurt.

When it happens, you hope it’s only a collarbone.

With Tanner Godfrey, it wasn’t a collarbone. It was a broken spine that essentially has left him unable to walk without the use of canes, that essentially has left him paralyzed from the waist down.

It hasn’t, however, essentially prevented him from jumping over stuff.

On Friday night during the big Mesquite Off-Road Weekend near the Eureka casino, the 23-year-old former high school wrestler from Utah with the positive attitude, grim resolve and brass, um, fortitude will attempt to break the record for the longest jump in a tricked-out dune buggy (now called Utility Terrain Vehicles, or UTVs), which is 47 feet.

The Eureka casino will donate $25 for every foot that Godfrey jumps to the Wounded Warrior Project and match all of the pledges that fans make on the day of the jump.

Forty-seven feet might not sound far. But the vehicle in which Godfrey will be leaping that distance in a single bound looks sort of like one of those rigs the Banana Splits drove around on Saturday morning, if you can remember that far back. It’s not exactly made for leaping a distance in a single bound.

Plus, 47 feet is about 27 feet more than Tanner Godfrey can walk. So there is a degree of difficulty here.

Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, when he was 18, Godfrey was hurtling uphill during a motorcycle race in Mesquite when a hole launched him over the handlebars.

The desert terrain can be brutally unforgiving when one is launched over handlebars. Godfrey hit with such force that multiple vertebrae in his back exploded.

“When I hit, everything was tingling,” he said. “It felt like a truck had hit me in the chest.”

The broken ribs at first bothered him more than the tingling. But the tingling meant his legs were paralyzed.

It has taken him five years of therapy to learn to walk 20 feet without his canes. It takes a lot of effort. Even after just 20 feet, Godfrey breaks into a sweat. It wears him out. And then it’s like he’s back on the wrestling mat.

The doctors say being a high school wrestler probably saved Godfrey’s life. He developed thick neck muscles lifting weights, and maybe those thick muscles prevented him from breaking his neck and dying right there on that hill with the unforgiving terrain.

With wrestling it was always one on one, you against the other guy. Now it’s one on one, Godfrey against his shattered spine.

“I wasn’t anything special,” he said of his wrestling skills. To which his younger brother, Gavin, who was bent over a bowl of soup at Panera Bread and hadn’t spoken a word, immediately called, uh, nonsense.

Gavin Godfrey, who also races and jumps bikes, said his big brother finished third in the state as a senior, and you should have seen how he did it.

“I was down 13-2 with 30 seconds left in the third period,” Tanner Godfrey said. “This kid was beating me; I was on the bottom. But I wanted it. I got back on top of him, got him in a cradle and pinned him.”

So when he goes to therapy and tries to walk, it’s 13-2 again. Then when he sees those who have it worse — the ones who have suffered strokes and can’t move even a finger — it’s only 7-2 or 5-2.

The doctors said he’d live a nice life in a wheelchair, to which Tanner Godfrey immediately called, uh, nonsense.

Except for taking brisk walks, he lives a normal life. He swims, he tubes, he rides mountain bikes. “They duct tape my feet to the pedals and push me down the hill,” he said.

He has a job, mowing grass and removing snow in wintertime from the 50 acres surrounding his family’s trucking compound. He doesn’t have enough movement in his legs and feet to use the brake in the backhoe, so he just shifts into a lower gear. He hasn’t put the backhoe on its side. Not yet anyway.

As for the other family business — the Nitro Circus is collateral of his Uncle Gregg’s fertile and warped imagination — he doesn’t feel trepidation or angst when he jumps over stuff anymore.

“I get more nervous talking to girls than I do this stuff,” Tanner Godfrey said.

One of the promotional photos for Saturday night’s Nitro Circus Beyond Pro exhibition in Mesquite shows a bunch of guys inside a dune buggy with two more on the roof, and the dune buggy crashing into this giant plastic ball thing while another guy wearing a helmet goes flipping over top of the giant plastic ball thing. As the dune buggy goes careening into a lake.

Crazy Uncle Gregg.

His nephew recently spoke at a medical conference where he stressed to those wearing lab coats the importance of giving those who suffer debilitating injuries the hope to exceed dire prognoses and worst-case scenarios.

That sometimes it’s OK to tell a guy to go take a flying leap, provided that’s what he’s into.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.