Lance Franklin spoiled Jordan Lewis’ only chance to make a good first impression in front of new teammate Sam Mitchell with an outrageous kerb-side projectile vomit.

It was the pre-season of 2004-5 and three seasons into a career Mitchell had scratched and clawed to establish, he was giving a ride to a pair of cherished top ten picks.

“My first memory of Sam?,” Lewis said this week.

“When he picked up ‘Bud’ and I for recovery. We were both hung over and Sam was driving a Mitsubishi Evolution. It was the quickest car we had been in and by the time we got to the beach Bud had spewed three times….”

“My first memory was no corners cut. He was ruthless. He was direct. But it was always backed up by his actions. He had an absolute dedication to his craft. And he expected the same attention to detail.”

But was Mitchell, Lewis’ teammate of four premierships and 12 seasons, actually well liked?

“Um…. Was he well liked?” says Lewis after a pause you could drive a freight train through.

“He was well respected in a sense. Everyone knew he wasn’t a lad. He was who he was. And he wasn’t trying to be anyone else. Everyone respected that…..

“But he was an acquired taste.”

Two months short of 20 years on from that first meeting, 41-year-old Mitchell will on Friday night spearhead his young side’s preliminary final charge against Port Adelaide.

And he will do so having completed one of football’s great 180 degree turns.

A player with a brutal whatever-it-takes disposition is suddenly the king of the bunch of kick-arse kids who are taking the AFL by storm.

A player who spent most of an entire 2011 season sleeping in a hotel room on game eve after wife Lyndall gave birth to their twin girls who had some initial health challenges couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about Jack Ginnivan’s London Tavern preparation.

A captain replaced by Luke Hodge as the club’s official leader given his teammate’s charisma and ability to read the group’s mood was this week was tut-tutting Hodge over his outdated views on Ginnivan’s cheeky Insta replies with Brodie Grundy.

He was a player who urban legend suggested was so dedicated to the craft and so uninterested in being one of the “boys” that only a handful of teammates actually came to his own wedding.

And yet not only has Mitchell completed one of the great AFL transformations, he is doing it without a fake note or whiff of the inauthentic.

As Lewis says of Mitchell: “I think he’s emotionally intelligent enough to know if he was who he was as a player, he wouldn’t last that long”.

Former Hawthorn captain Shane Crawford says of Mitchell’s take-no-prisoners attitude after making the grade as a diminutive Box Hill graduate: ”He was brutal as a player, there is a reason he was a part of four premierships, he demanded the very best out of everyone”.

HAWKS HARD-ARSE

To fully appreciate the person who Mitchell has become, it is necessary to realise the environment he was created in as a footballer.

According to former Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett, “Sam wasn’t always the most favoured bloke in the playing group, in the sense that his personality was always geared towards being the best player he could be. He set a standard of training and commitment.”

His tongue could be as cutting as one of those razor sharp right-foot drop punts to Franklin, yet he always backed it up with performance.

As one of the senior leaders in those premiership years reflects: “At times it was too brutal... In those early days you were more likely to get pissed off with him than become a mate”.

Says Crawford: “There were plenty of arguments had on a training track and on the footy field with Sam Mitchell. But it always came from a good place – to be the best. He had to work on that … on how to deliver certain messages to players when he was frustrated and angry with them.”

He gave savage feedback, but he copped it as well.

His coach Alastair Clarkson rode him relentlessly, especially after a quiet first half in the Grand Final of 2008.

“Clarko gave Sam Mitchell the biggest spray I have ever heard in my football life,” said Crawford this week.

“This was half time of the (2008) Grand Final, I have never heard a bigger spray to a player in my life. So much so that I mentioned to Luke Hodge we need to get around him to make sure once he walks out that door, he is ready to go.”

As his on-field reputation grew, Mitchell was remarkably self-assured.

He was in too much of a hurry to care about your feelings, to check back in about whether those slights had injured you instead of motivated you to greater heights.

In the kill-or-be-killed world of the AFL, he was determined to be a survivor.

And yet he did have firm friends and confidantes, even if some of them were in upper management instead of built through footy trip shenanigans.

That mythical story about the wedding where his teammates were MIA?

Of course they were there.

Lewis remembers wearing a grey suit to a black tie event on a night where then football boss Mark Evans was the MC and Jarryd Roughead, former assistant Todd Viney and Hodge were among the attendees.

TRANSFORMATION

As a budding young Channel Nine reporter. Chris Jones knew his friendship with Sam Mitchell had strict parameters.

Jones, the newly appointed director of network sport at Seven, remembered this week: “We used to joke that you were friends with Sam until Thursday. You could be a friend during the week but from Thursday onwards you wouldn’t hear a peep of him. He was so locked in to what he did. He was weighing his food, he was getting everything out of himself.”

It was Jones who would play the unlikely match-maker with Mitchell and his good friend Lyndall in the early years of Sam’s AFL career.

“Lyndall was a great mate of mine and the Hawks had played a game down in Tasmania and I had been doing the boundary for Nine,” Jones said.

In his autobiography Mitchell writes that Jones warned him as he gave out her number days later: “She’s a good one, she’s a keeper”, although old habits die hard.

At their first date at The Pier, Mitchell told her he had to be home by 9.30pm so he could get enough sleep.

It was the beginning of a brilliant partnership, with Lyndall a mother of three, leading executive at an insurance firm and consigliere to her footballing star husband.

Their twin daughters Scarlett and Emmy were born prematurely in 2011, a year after their son Smith was born.

Lyndall had an emergency caesarean when Scarlett’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck twice, with the pair enduring a torturous period where Scarlett was unable to keep down food.

Gradually, she recovered but as the parents battled with little sleep all year Mitchell began to stop sweating the small stuff.

“When the twins came and had their health problems, I truly believe that softened him, gave him more perspective,” Jones said.

“He felt there was more to life than football. Now to see the girls playing footy and doing bloody well too, it’s amazing to see the whole evolution.

“Sam and Lyndall don’t try to be anyone other than who they are. As a player Sam was singularly focused and it’s what made him great. But he’s just evolved.”

Kennett believes Mitchell’s own health issues as he was hospitalised with pneumonia in New York in December have also added to his sense of perspective.

Lyndall is also getting her share of credit given the integral role she is playing in recruiting for the Hawks.

She might not get the finders fee that pro-scout Jarryd Roughead collects, but she is helping land the big fish.

“I reckon Lyndall is the secret weapon, especially for the players who have partners,” star ruckman Lloyd Meek said this week after he was recruited in late 2022.

“I have a long-term partner El (Elonie), and Sam and Lyndall flew over to Perth to meet us. They were there for three or four hours. I knew pretty much straight away what outstanding people they were. Everything they spoke about that day, in terms of the vision and the culture, has pretty much happened.”

Says Kennett: “Lyndall is strong, Lyndall is caring, Lyndall allows him to go away and have a couple of days down the beach so that he can refresh. Today (Wednesday) for instance he is down the beach cutting down trees and tidying up the garden.

“I don’t think you should underestimate how important Lyndall is to attracting players to Hawthorn. And the other one you should not underestimate is Dr Anne-Marie Pellizzer, who is on the board at Hawthorn, and is very close to Sam and Lyndall. And you shouldn’t underestimate former member Dr Andrew Kaye. If it hadn’t been for their intervention when Sam was sick in New York (last December), we could have lost him.”

MITCH’S PLAYERS

Some of Mitchell’s friends still roll their eyes at his defence of Ginnivan, adamant he would be barrelling him behind the scenes while supporting him in public.

But for all the books voracious reader Mitchell has consumed on modern leadership, he just has a natural touch with his players.

He actually seems to have stopped caring about that stuff, actively engaging in the player celebrations as he texts them potential inspiration for their next antics after a goal.

He knows when to be hard and when to have the lightest of touches.

Half forward Connor Macdonald was smitten from his first interaction.

“The first night I met him was when Hawthorn drafted me. I was at my manager’s place, and he just came over straight away, gave me a jumper to put on, gave the family all Hawthorn gear, and was just so inviting,” he said.

“He even shared a beer with my dad and myself.”

Sam and Lyndall open their house to the players but often get them to cook _ Macdonald’s recent chicken pesto pasta creation got him the tick of approval.

“He’s changed as a person because he was so hard as a player but he’s had to adapt to all the different characters that come in,” says Macdonald.

Flighty half back Jack Scrimshaw was floating through his career as a former top 10 pick, with Mitchell adamant he could have “wasted” his ability if he hadn’t got to work on what actually helps the team instead of his own stats line.

“I had a lot of conversations with Sam and spent a lot of time with him,” Scrimshaw said on Monday.

“We watched a lot of vision and that spray that I copped at the start of the year, I have had a lot of those in the past. He wanted me to be a reliable teammate and improve my game defensively and let the offence stem from there.

“We were looking at effort plays and how I was defensively. We would go through stoppages and my body language and little things. He was quick to clip me if I was lazy or not showing effort.

“Last year we played Richmond in round 20 and Liam Baker kicked a goal after the siren. I was walking and didn’t show that desire to defend. So he showed me things like that. It’s so clear now as to when I would get those things right, it helps my game so much.”

Lewis says he gets the game plan, and the individual care, and the small moments.

“Just little things like when Calsher Dear was nominated for the Rising Star, a young coach might not have the foresight but he got Jack Gunston to tell him.

“The greatest thing with him is that people speak about the way Hawthorn play. It’s three years in the making. The AFL want a quicker game style with the rules they have introduced. So Hawthorn have gone about drafting kids who can run. He has given them the game plan to allow them to expose the opposition with the stand rule.

“Two years ago he knew if you were a coach who didn’t look to expose your opponent behind the ball, you would be behind in the game. He was the most intelligent player I ever came across. For footy intelligence and probably intellect outside the game.”

Kennett can be prone to hyperbole but might have nailed his assessment of Mitchell this week.

“I really admired John Longmire and I really admire Chris Scott,” he said.

“Sam is potentially the next generation of a modern coach.”

So as part of that transformation, how is that relationship between Mitchell and Lewis all these years after that rehab session disaster?

“It’s funny. I have become better mates now that we have been out of the game. We catch up quite regularly. When you have a working relationship your life outside the club can be quite separate. He had kids and I didn’t but now we both do, there are a lot of things that come into play. I would call him a good friend.”