Sam Docherty on football after cancer and life after football: ‘I was a frontman for something bigger’

The former Carlton co-captain on the hardships that took him to ‘rock bottom’ and the ‘obsession’ that helped him carve out a 13-year AFL career

Sam Docherty always thought it would be his body that would tell him it was time to call it quits. He’d had two bouts of cancer, three knee reconstructions, more than a dozen epidurals and serious injuries to a toe, shoulder and even an eye. In his final AFL game, Hawthorn’s Calsher Dear accidentally kneed him in the nose. Docherty played the rest of the game with a tampon up one nostril to stop the bleeding.

But it was his mind that got him in the end. His final year with Carlton was exhausting. He was dropped twice. The team was hopeless. The coach Michael Voss was under siege. Docherty was told by senior people at the Blues that he needed to come into the club in a better mood. He felt disrespected, detached, angry and confused. Just before he announced his retirement, the club told him they wouldn’t be offering him a new contract anyway.