National Geographic: The Fox and the Shark

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December 8, 1963 a day like any other.

At Alldinga Beach,

the annual South Australian

spearfishing championships

are set to begin.

a life insurance

salesman from Adelaide,

and former champion,

takes to the water.

He sets his sights on

a large reef fish.

Little does he know that

he himself is being stalked...

By a great white shark.

Through a series of near miracles,

Rodney Fox arrives at Royal Adelaide

Hospital in under an hour.

The vascular surgeon there

has just returned

from an international conference

with the very latest

in surgical techniques.

They go to work on the mutilated body

delivered to the operating theater.

The shark has punctured his left lung,

left clavicle, and diaphragm.

The jaws have bitten

through all his ribs,

gouged skin and muscle

from his left side,

and exposed several major organs.

According to one surgeon,

had Rodney arrived five minutes later,

he would have bled to death.

Sewn back together with

over 450 stitches,

he lies bedridden for

two months with the pain,

and the awful memory.

Do you hope to continue

skindiving one day?

I'll get in the water

somewhere sometime,

but I don't know whether I'll go

in this gulf here where

there's been two or three

attacks in the last few years.

That was Rodney Fox then...

And this is Rodney Fox now.

Seldom has a single event so

radically transformed a person.

I n a way,

the great white shark that attacked him

but gave him another.

I n three decades, Rodney Fox

has grown from a fearful shark victim

into a shark champion and protector.

I think that sharks

and the shark world is

really beautiful and interesting.

The shark gets a raw deal,

and people just hate it

because they don't understand

and they fear it.

I love to see them flying and

gliding through the water,

and I think that most people

would really enjoy it too,

if the realized they weren't

going to be eaten alive.

This from a man who was

himself nearly eaten alive.

Rodney's life since the attack

has been a continuous challenge

to overcome his fear by facing it.

Today, documentary filmmakers

and marine scientists

from all over the world

travel to Australia to go

looking for sharks with Rodney.

His knowledge of living

sharks is unparalleled.

Marine biologist Eugenie Clark

People who hear about

Rodney's shark attack go,

wow, he's an ordinary man like

one of us

and yet

he's had such a terrible experience,

and on top of that,

he's telling us that

sharks aren't dangerous,

they're good, we should preserve them.

So this is what's so

wonderful about Rodney,

the someone who suffered through such

a terrible incident

can now defend the animal

that attacked him.

It wasn't always that way.

Reliving the shark attack story

has been a continuous epic in my life.

So many people want

to hear how I survived,

how I stuck my fingers

in the shark's eyes,

how I put my arm around it

so it wouldn't bite,

and how I went up to the

surface and it followed me.

And after about eight or nine

years of telling the story,

I read the original

Readers' Digest First Person Award the

I had written immediately afterwards,

and I found that I had

changed the story a little.

I was telling people

what they wanted to hear,

and not necessarily the truth.

Time often affects memory.

Here the story is only two days old,

and not nearly so heroic.

All I remember is this big thing

pushing me through the water,

and it seemed to let go a bit

when I pushed my hand up at it,

and it still wouldn't let go.

The pressure of the water might

have been holding me in his mouth.

And I managed to

put both arms right around him

and I was looking for his eyes

with my fingers and after awhile,

he managed just to let go and

I managed to get to the surface.

Very luckily there was a boat just

coming over to see what was going on

because there was so much blood

and disturbance in the water.

And they quickly rolled me into the

boat and I had to keep both arms

just like this so they

wouldn't rip my arms off.

As they came to shore on this

incredibly rough area there,

they drove the boat up onto the shore.

And they loaded me onto a

bit of a stretcher, and a car,

the only car in the whole area

that had been in this beach

for about four or five years

was available,

and they drove it out over the reef

with 10 or 20 guys lifting it

over the big lumps

and the rocks through here.

Loaded me in the back of it,

took off toward Adelaide.

It was an absolute miracle,

especially when they unloaded me out

of the boat.

As they did, my wetsuit slid open

and my stomach,

actually, loops of intestines,

came out which seems funny now.

I've got a good friend who actually

tells me every now and again

that he stuffed them back

in with his fingers.

They bunched me up.

Rodney's wife Kay.

I didn't know how bad it was

for many days afterwards,

but by then he was up and

breathing and talking and so,

you know, it's only later

when they tell you all the things

that were wrong

that you realize just how close it was

But everybody in the hospital thought

he was dying

but I knew he wasn't.

His attack drew worldwide attention.

Rodney became a sensation

almost overnight.

The public notoriety would set

his life on a brand new course.

Three months after the attack,

escorted by Kay,

Rodney began his return to the sea.

But it wasn't easy to

forget his attack.

The fear of the sharks when I went

back in the water was huge.

M y first time my head went underwater,

I imagined in my mind sharks running

in from all directions and I said,

"stop it, you've got to control that."

Things would never exactly return

to normal for Rodney.

His love of the sea was now

overshadowed by a terrible fascination

with his old nemesis the shark.

I n 1965, he organized the first

expedition to track the great white.

The adventure became a docudrama.

But danger in the

unknown makes man himself the quarry

of the most savage hunter of the deep

the great white shark

the white

great white death.

Come on you bastard, attack.

This is some of the first footage

ever shot of a great white under water.

Coming in

now!

That doesn't taste

so good, that wire mesh.

The theme is revenge a crusade to

rid the seas of evil sharks.

Death and the battle's almost over,

a second maneater who's jaw will never

again menace an unsuspecting swimmer.

I n those days, people feared sharks

because they knew very little

about them.

They thought that every shark was

a bad shark

and there was a big saying

at that stage that the best shark

was a dead shark.

The first film

was followed by a second.

"Attacked by a Killer Shark" is about

Rodney his attack and recovery.

Again, it shows Rodney wielding

a speargun, bent on revenge.

Time out to reload.

The cartridge inside the

head explodes on contact.

The tremendous concussion

is transmitted into the body,

killing instantly.

But it does twist

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