After being attacked by a great white, losing his brother, and watching the world title slip through his fingers, Mick Fanning should be a broken man. Yet somehow he’s managed to find peace in the chaos.
In Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts, the book’s central character is stalked by a “Ludovician,” a giant conceptual shark that swims through his psyche, attacking unexpectedly, devouring great chunks of his memory, leaving him to piece his past life back together while he waits for the beast to strike again.
Ever since his fateful encounter with a great white at Jeffreys Bay last year, Mick Fanning has had sharks—both metaphorical and very real—stalking his quiet moments, circling him in his sleep, and following him into the ocean. The malevolent dream fish began taking huge chunks out of his life—his marriage, his brother, a world title—a lifetime’s worth of outrageous misfortune and tragedy all crammed into a single year. It was a year that felt like black satire for Fanning as he walked a gossamer tightrope between his own earthly mortality and a place among surfing’s immortals.
Whether Mick Fanning was lucky or unlucky at Jeffreys Bay on July 19, 2015, depends on your existential view of the world.
Unlucky? Sure he was. Out of all the surfers in all the oceans, that shark went for him. We’ll never know why, of course. The brain of a great white is a Precambrian mystery—2 feet long, shaped like a slingshot, and hardwired in ways we’ll never understand. As Fanning’s shark took its leisurely Sunday swim up the coast, the big palooka could’ve picked off a weekend surfer down at Mossel Bay, chomped a leathery old swimmer at Magnatubes, or simply inhaled a seal. Instead, this shark had a sense of theater. He swam into J-Bay, waited for the final to start and the cameras to roll, and lined up the champ.
Esta historia es de la edición November 2016 de Surfer.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 2016 de Surfer.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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60 Years Ahead
We had a whole plan for this year. Funny, right? Surfer's 60 year anniversary volume was going to be filled with stories nodding to SURFER’s past, with cover concepts paying homage to the magazine’s most iconic imagery. Our new Page One depicts something that’s never happened in surfing before, let alone on a prior SURFER cover. And our table of contents was completely scrapped and replaced as we reacted to the fizzing, sparking, roiling world around us. In other words, 2020 happened to SURFER, just like it happened to you.
A Few Things We Got Horribly Wrong
You don’t make 60 years of magazines without dropping some balls. Here are a few
THE LGBTQ+ WAVE
Surf culture has a long history of marginalizing the LGBTQ+ community, but a new generation of queer surfers is working to change that
For Generations to Come
Rockaway’s Lou Harris is spreading the stoke to Black youth and leading surfers in paddling out for racial justice
Christina Koch, 41
Texas surfer, NASA astronaut, record holder for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman
END TIMES FOR PRO SURFING
By the time the pandemic is done reshaping the world, will the World Tour still have a place in it?
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
After decades of exclusive access to Hollister Ranch, the most coveted stretch of California coast is finally going public
What They Don't Tell You
How does becoming a mother affect your surfing life?
Four Things to Make You Feel A Little Less Shitty About Everything
Helpful reminders for the quarantine era
The Art of Being Seen
How a group of black women are finding creative ways to make diversity in surfing more visible