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…