Year Of The Shark

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.

- Sean Doherty

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.