{"id":555923,"date":"2026-07-23T15:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T15:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/555923\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T15:58:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T15:58:10","slug":"sam-docherty-on-football-after-cancer-and-life-after-football-i-was-a-frontman-for-something-bigger-afl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/555923\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Docherty on football after cancer and life after football: \u2018I was a frontman for something bigger\u2019 | AFL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Docherty always thought it would be his body that would tell him it was time to call it quits. He\u2019d 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<\/a> game, Hawthorn\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But it was his mind that got him in the end. His final year with Carlton<\/a> 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\u2019t be offering him a new contract anyway.<\/p>\n

A year on, Docherty doesn\u2019t miss the internal politicking and the spotlight that comes with playing at a big club like Carlton. He doesn\u2019t miss being in constant pain. He doesn\u2019t miss asking himself whether it\u2019s safe to lift his kids at swimming classes, or to go to the pub on a Friday night. But there\u2019s an adjustment, almost a void, that\u2019s familiar to recently retired sportspeople.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat process-driven, elite-athlete lifestyle, with clear goals, and with everything mapped out \u2013 it could be all-consuming at the time,\u201d Docherty tells Guardian Australia. \u201cBut it\u2019s also something I find myself missing in retirement. And I miss that really clear purpose, that overarching picture of who you are and where you\u2019re going when you\u2019re a sportsperson.\u201d<\/p>\n

Docherty, like so many athletes, admits to an obsessive, even an addictive streak. It manifested in different ways \u2013 from doing 400 metre sprints between cycles of chemotherapy, to the way he tackled rehab, to developing a gambling problem.<\/p>\n

Sam Docherty had two bouts of cancer, three knee reconstructions and countless injuries during an AFL career spent with two clubs. Photograph: Kristian Gehradte<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an athlete, they\u2019re great traits to have at times, but they can also be incredibly unhealthy,\u201d he says. \u201cThey definitely helped me in my ability to get back from hard things, especially my obsession with the level of detail, that ability to flick the switch when required. I was able to go to levels in a high-performance environment that few others were willing to, because of my obsession with it. But it got me in a lot of trouble as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Docherty is straight to the point when summing up the past decade and a half. \u201cObviously life\u2019s been pretty hectic,\u201d he says. He had been at Carlton a few days after joining from Brisbane in late 2013, and was on a high altitude camp in Arizona, when he was handed a phone. Docherty\u2019s dad Eddie was a gate ranger in Phillip Island, stopping people from terrorising and stealing penguins. He was having a beer at the pub when he had a heart attack and died. He was 53.<\/p>\n

Docherty\u2019s first serious knee injury came in November, when the Blues were training at a potholed local dog park. There was no pain. It sounded like a large elastic band being snapped. It took a long time for it to dawn on everyone that he\u2019d seriously injured it. Almost a year later, pitted against Charlie Curnow in a drill called \u201cThe Barbarian\u201d, he did it again. Again, he thought he was OK. He was out shopping when he got the news that he\u2019d miss another season. Bill Knowles, one of the world\u2019s leading reconditioning experts, told him he was a JCA \u2013 a \u201cjoint compromised athlete\u201d. \u201cYou will never come out of this,\u201d Knowles told Docherty. \u201cYou\u2019ll have to do things differently to everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sam Docherty celebrates the last of his 184 AFL games in 2025. Photograph: Robert Cianflone\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he discovered a lump on his testicle. \u201cRopey and tough\u201d, he describes it, like the fat cap on the edge of a steak. His surgeon attached a prosthetic testicle, which Docherty says feels like a hard squash ball. A year later, it had spread to his lymph nodes, lungs and stomach. He had four cycles of chemotherapy.<\/p>\n

Under Victoria\u2019s strict lockdown laws, he wasn\u2019t allowed visitors. Friends and family would leave food at the front door and they\u2019d speak through a partly opened window. Docherty lost a lot of weight, and every shred of hair. He says he looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, \u201ca pale, smooth sickly creature\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Docherty also had a 10cm cut in his abdominal wall, rather like a C-section. When he stands in front of a mirror, he says it looks as if he\u2019s been in a knife fight. Through all this, the club asked him to take a pay cut to free up salary cap space for Fremantle midfielder Adam Cerra. They later asked him to step down as captain and leave the leadership group, saying he should focus on his health.<\/p>\n

Six months after his first chemo cycle, in front of 72,000 people, 17 minutes into the second quarter of the 2022 season opener against Richmond, came his most cherished memory in football. \u201cIt was just a goal,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019d been at rock bottom.<\/p>\n

Sam Docherty celebrates kicking a goal for Carlton in his return from a first cycle of chemotherapy in 2022. Photograph: Dylan Burns\/AFL Photos\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cTo look at me \u2013 severely underweight, with no hair on my body, having been barely able to run, few would have believed I could have been able to play the most elite level of football and perform. I\u2019d had so much football taken away from me, I was just desperate to play. But it was more than that. It was so crazy, so strange, but so satisfying to be representing a large cohort of people I\u2019ve never actually met. Here I was, a frontman for something bigger than me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Docherty ended up finishing second in the Blues best and fairest that year to captain Patrick Cripps, who also won his first Brownlow medal. \u201cI went into footy thinking being successful was winning best and fairest awards, playing 300 games, being All Australian,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I walked away with a completely different definition \u2013 one that was more to do with me as a person, the amount of people I impacted positively, the hope and drive I gave others.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Docherty always thought it would be his body that would tell him it was time to call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-555923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}