I Don’t Feel Like I Failed at All
As co-captain of the AFL’s Navy Blues, Sam Docherty learned a lot about winning and losing. Then cancer came calling – twice – bringing even more hard lessons.
I think 16-year-old Sam was a bit lost. I was a happy kid at school, enjoyed sports and the outdoors and all that stuff – the academics not so much. At that age you’re just trying to adapt to the environment around you before you can go off and choose your friends and find yourself.
Growing up on Phillip Island, you feel really far away from the city – and from AFL. Playing footy professionally was a genuine pipe dream. This goes more broadly for all kids from the country, too: you’ve got to be plucked out of thin air and play against private school kids to have the opportunity to play in the AFL system.
When I was coming out of school, everything that was said to you in footy was around success: winning flags, playing 300 games. The people we put on pedestals are the champions of the game, with best and fairests, individual honours and all that. That’s a version of success, but it took a long time in the career I would go on to have, to realise it doesn’t have to be my version.
I met my wife when we were in Year 7. From the moment I met Nat, I really liked her – which she says I expressed by, really, bullying her – and it’s so funny how our relationship’s changed over the years. It was her leap of faith to uproot her life and come to Brisbane [after Docherty was drafted by the Brisbane Lions in 2011] that ends up being why we’re still together, why we got married and got two kids. Those sliding doors moments are thanks to her, taking that big jump and that show of faith in us. She understands me, from the country kid on Phillip Island to what I am now: I’m lucky to have someone who’s been there through it with me.
Footy is chaotic: it jams 30 years of development and stress into 10. The product on the field that everyone sees is glamorous and amazing, and I still pinch myself that I got to do it for so long. But there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye: the heartache and the work ethic, the injuries. I’m one story of hundreds in the whole league, and writing my book was a way to be vulnerable and share my version of the sacrifice that it takes to play and perform at that level.
As much as you want to win flags and everything, you have to enjoy the journey of it. If you just go off win‑loss, then success is winning one game on the last Saturday of September. It’s something I’ve grappled with across my career, the win-loss versus the process. And I didn’t win a flag, and I had to learn to love that part of it. Otherwise, your career is a failure, and I don’t feel like I failed at all.
The worst pain I’ve felt in my life: oof, depends on physical or mental. The hardest moment to take was when I first got told I had testicular cancer. The thought of dying was real, and it was like a form of pain. My life in some aspects flashed before my eyes: I really wanted to have kids, that was maybe the main thing, and in that moment you worry you won’t ever be able to do that. It was like so much of the life that I was still yet to live was taken away for a moment.
Where your head goes in those moments is just so scary. Having to tell loved ones, the emotional fatigue of giving bad news to your nearest and dearest. Telling the world I had cancer was not exactly something that was on my bingo card – nah, I wanted to crawl up in a ball and hide. The way we released the bad news, in the end, was around owning the narrative as much as I could, as opposed to everyone writing me off or feeling sorry for me. You don’t get to control it all, but it was about giving my own version of what the diagnosis meant for me.
My story through that period is that I had the whole footy world behind me. It’s very rare that you get that opportunity to see the absolute best in humanity. And even more, to live past it and stay involved in the advocacy over the years. I’ve played with some of my childhood heroes, Kade Simpson, and then played golf with some of them, which is really cool. Footy’s great and all of that, but the people that have meant the most to me are others who have gone through cancer and chemo. My friend’s mum was in hospital getting treatment at the same time as me, and she’d always visit my room with a smile on her face. I got to know Kellie Finlayson, met families through the Royal Children’s Hospital, people who are facing terminal illness and going through real stuff.
The first goal I kicked after chemo changed my whole purpose. To this day, people still talk to me about where they were when that game happened, that they were crying because of somebody in their life who had cancer. It gives me so much joy that I had the privilege to give that to people, showing that you could keep playing and have some hope after chemo and rehab. It gave so much more meaning to why I played footy, and why I feel like I’m on the earth.
I’d tell my younger self to find the goodness in every moment, even when it’s really, really hard. Try to practise gratitude even in the hardest moments. In my last year of footy, it was incredibly difficult coming to terms with the fact that this wouldn’t be my job anymore, but I wish I had spent a little bit more time being grateful for the opportunity. And grateful for my family, my wife, my dog, being able to play at the MCG. I still fail at it, to be honest, but if I could bottle that up and give it to my younger self, that’s something that would have held me in such good stead through my life.
One of the biggest bits of advice that’s stuck with me is from my mum: she’d say, “Everything happens for a reason”. I’ve ended up using that a lot, but amending it to “everything happens for a reason if you allow it to”. If you allow it to take on meaning and have some sort of framing in your mind, you’re always going to be better placed. I’ve always taken a lesson out of hardship or failure, and I know that it’ll be better for me at a human level.
My kids have no idea what I do or what I’ve been through in my life. That’s the cool thing about writing a book: they can learn all about it later. Whatever my kids want to do with their lives, I’ll back them and I’ll be all in to help them. I still struggle to let them make mistakes and figure things out themselves (especially with my three-year‑old daughter who thinks she knows everything).
I’m a real-life story of consistently facing moments that you come back from and you grow from, and I don’t want to protect my kids from that just because it might hurt them for a little bit. I don’t know that I’d recommend they go for footy, but if it’s footy, I’ve got a lot of lessons from my career that can help them. But I’ve got many years to figure out the rest of it before they make those decisions.
SAM’S MEMOIR WHAT IT TAKES: SAM DOCHERTY IS OUT NOW THROUGH AFFIRM PRESS
By Eliza Janssen Deputy Editor
Published in ed#770
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