Sam Mitchell a bird of a different feather

Alone in a room with Sam Mitchell, one is taken both by his bright, intelligent eyes and his body, which at 34 still looks infallible. The shoulders sloping from the neck like an Andalusia Bull's. He looks a player both near the end of his career, but also at the end of decades of work designed to refine his mind and body for Australian football.

On Friday he flashed me his phone and smiled. It was a group message from teammate Josh Hill asking players if they wanted to join a game of FIFA at the hotel. Somewhere in the thread was the errant homophone "your", and Mitchell's reply consisted of a one word correction. "You're."

Sam Mitchell talks about his football journey with Timothy Boyle. Credit: Pam Morris

He is by any measure an unusual person. He's a giant of modern football with a sharp intellect that he adjusts for his audience, and for the straightforward practice of football talk. Early in his career he had a fixation with high performance, and an associated attitude that sometimes made him abrasive.

"Moving clubs has forced me to be more open-minded," said Mitchell, "which traditionally has not been a strength of mine.

"When I was young, I lacked empathy. I wanted things done my way. I probably had that issue some leaders have where they set a high standard for themselves and get frustrated by people that don't. I didn't have the experience to understand that other people see things differently, do things differently."

He was once completing a sudoku puzzle on a plane next to a physiotherapist who was laughing at a Ricky Gervais podcast. Mitchell asked what was so funny, and when told what it was is said to have replied, "I don't find comedy funny."

While Mitchell has no memory of this, he squirms at the thought and admits his comedy preference is more slapstick. Former teammate Brad Sewell said of Mitchell's humour: "He's the kind of guy who finds it hilarious to drill a ball into the back of someone's head." At this, Mitchell laughed out loud.

Mitchell in action on the field. Credit: Michael Willson/AFL Media

Even before he was a rising star in 2003, Mitchell carried crossword books on bus trips, and at one point was seen taking notes from The Alchemist, a novel by Paulo Coelho. When I saw him on Friday, Mitchell had just finished an audiobook called Predictably Irrational, a psychological dive into why smart people make irrational decisions.

"When I was 20 I wanted to be an engineer," Mitchell said. "When I was 23 I wanted to be entrepreneur. When I was 26 I wanted to be a CEO. You go through these phases but basically I always wanted to be ready to take whatever opportunity came to me."

Today he is finishing an MBA, and has already completed coaching courses in preparation for his future at West Coast. He is a man who has functioned at the edge of his capabilities for more than 15 years, and it's hard to know exactly what this does to a person. Certainly it makes him a formidable worker, and he's a person unlikely to stop pushing when it's time to stop playing.

"Maybe in my mid-twenties I thought there's more to the world than football," he said. "I thought I'd go into business, live in a different country, see the world. But since I met my wife, had children, and got to know myself better through family, I realised that not everyone has a passion in their life. Mine's obvious, so why get away from it?"

Boyle demonstrates the art of pizza making.Credit: Pam Morris

"I was driven by fear of failure early in my career. Not so much in the later part. The old man was always one of those hard-on-you types. You needed to play better, no matter how you played.

When I was young, I lacked empathy. I wanted things done my way.

Sam Mitchell

"I grew up in football like that, where you're forever looking for a pat on the back that's never coming. I suppose that's where it starts, but it became a self-motivated thing. I'm my own harshest critic now."

Head of fitness at Hawthorn, Andrew Russell, who spent 12 years observing Mitchell, describes his demeanour before games as "completely calm".

"In his later years at Hawthorn," said Russell, "Mitch compartmentalised his life. He realised he could perform at a high level regardless of how he felt."

Mtchell shows he is pretty handy with the dough as well. Credit: Pam Morris

Russell, considered by many to be the game's authority on high performance, was in awe of Mitchell's consistency.

"Mitch would be in [the] top three mentally resilient athletes I've ever seen. He does not accept being sore, being tired. He accepts the hits, absorbs them, and just moves forward."

A limited athlete by nature, Mitchell forged his playing legacy by focusing on training that was specific to his strengths, largely dismissing his weaknesses as being things outside of his control.

"Quite often I'd train really hard at the start of a session, and hold no ego about my running ability," Mitchell explained. "I'd come 20th in a run at the end of a skills session. Internally, I knew I'd done the work, so on a confidence level it made no difference to me."

In training, Mitchell engages a practice that in football has only recently been isolated as a specific talent. When he gets the ball he initiates movements designed to upset defenders, a style that has perhaps evolved from a goose step into what the modern sports world describes with words like kinetics.

"I do short, lateral movements," explained Mitchell. "In American sport they call it 'quickness'. They have speed, which is straight-line, and clearly I'm poor at that. But they also have 'quickness', which has nothing to do with speed.

"I always worked really hard on quickness. If you set up cones and ran us one to the other I'd be one of the last. But if we were to move in and out of them I'd be first, or nearly first. It's my point of difference, so it's what I've always worked the hardest on."

Hawthorn's David Rath, whose job title is head of football strategy and innovation, says one of Mitchell's talents is to "destabilise the environment" with an initial, confusing movement.

"Cyril Rioli does this too," Rath said. "They instigate a movement and then react to the defender's response to it."

"I don't know why I started doing that," said Mitchell. "I think because it was effective in games. When you make an initial movement you're trying to make the defender make a mistake, but you have to have the tools to make the most of the error they make."

At training, Rath works with players to develop foot skills, sometimes outside the classic framework. At every session Rath would kick random, tumbling balls to Mitchell, who would mirror the kick back to Rath, an act of mimicry that requires a type of high-intellect.

"It was like having a conversation with him," said Rath. "His mind was always operating at a conceptual level. We also had a lot of complicated conversations about game style. Part of his brilliance is in his knowledge of when to play the game plan, and when to play the game."

Mitchell puts the finishing touches on his favourite pizza: tomato sauce, basil, ham, chilli, capsicum, bocconcini and oregano. Credit: Pam Morris

Mitchell grew up kicking on both feet, which has complicated his game and made his lateral movements hard to negate.

"Every coach I had tried to get me to stop kicking on my left foot," Mitchell said. "I thought my left was good enough so I just kept using it. I had a couple of years where I didn't use it much and I didn't play that well.

"The reason not many players use both feet comes from an era of coaches wanting hot performance at training," Mitchell explained. "They didn't want mistakes. I think that's already changing, and mistakes are accepted if a player is trying to stretch himself."

Of his much talked-about move to West Coast, Mitchell is diplomatic.

"It wasn't the easy decision to leave, was it? It was the harder decision, to leave a club that you've known and to move your family. But the discomfort of it, the challenge, was part of the appeal.

"I felt comfortable [moving] because the club came to me," said Mitchell. "I never went to them and said, 'I want to leave'. It was them coming to me and saying, 'Would you explore it?"'

Hawthorn was 15 years of Mitchell's life, and he says he wanted to leave on the best terms possible.

"I feel that when I left Hawthorn they respected me and I respected them. It was a clean break, mostly in a positive light, and that was important to me."