Sir Tom Jones has said that divine intervention helped guide him back to shore and save his life when he was struggling to swim in shark-infested waters.
The singer, 80, explained how while he was working in America in the late 60s he took a trip to Acapulco, Mexico, and went to a beach BBQ where he got into trouble.
Speaking on Alan Carr on his Life s A Beach podcast, Tom detailed how he d usually keep his jewellery in a man bag but had left his cross chain necklace on for the dip in the water that day.
Close call: Tom Jones has said that divine intervention helped guide him back to shore and save his life when he was struggling to swim in shark-infested waters off Mexico
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“I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall - the opening song [to the album Surrounded By Time] and my wife - God bless her - when she knew she had lung cancer and it was incurable, and I said: ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
“Because it happened pretty quick,” The Voice UK judge commented. “And she said: ‘Don’t fall with me. I’ve got to go, I’ve got to leave, but you’ve got to carry on here.’
“And she said to my son Mark and myself, she said: ‘You two have got to mentor one another no. You’ve got to carry on’.
Despite cheating on his wife with scores of women, Sir Tom always maintained that Linda was his soulmate.
From the day they met at school in Treforest, Pontypridd, he claimed to have known she was the one for him.
Sir Tom described her as “the most important thing in my life” and an “unbelievable woman” in a 2006 Daily Mail article.
But a decade later, Linda died after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, at the age of 75.
Her death was roughly one-year before Sir Tom and Linda would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
Tom Jones and wife Linda were married for 59 years before she died in 2016 (Image: GETTY)
Sir Tom and Linda were school sweethearts and would regularly sneak off to a phone box at the end of her street to kiss as teenagers.
Decades later, when the council planned to remove the phone box, Sir Tom had it shipped and installed by his swimming pool.
After making the 5,300-mile journey from Treforest, Pontypridd, to Los Angeles, US, Sir Tom had a working phone fitted inside.
The couple tied the knot at 16 years old after Linda became pregnant and she gave birth to their son Mark Woodward, a month later.
Sir Tom’s rose to fame in 1965 after the release of It’s Not Unusual and shortly after went to the US to perform.