After the Chargers left San Diego for Los Angeles, former Chargers center and apparently former Chargers color analyst Nick Hardwick decided he’d had enough.
“I have no interest in the Los Angeles Chargers,” Hardwick said at the time, via the San Diego Union-Tribune, adding that the organization made him “feel like a used item” after he served as a mouthpiece for the effort to get public funding for a stadium that would have kept the Chargers in San Diego.
Now, Hardwick will join the Chargers in L.A., reprising the radio role he had previously abandoned.
“I’m just really thankful that my family accepted me back, as a former player, and one of the alumni, as a family member who lashed out,” Hardwick said, via the Union-Tribune. “I was emotional, I was upset, I was scared. I was confused by the whole situation.”
So what changed?
“I tried to give up the NFL, I tried to go agnostic,” Hardwick said. “I tried to not care about any NFL football team and then just cover it in a broad sense . . . . After I went to the Super Bowl, and after being around football people, I realized, ‘Nah, these are my people, these are my folks.’”
The draft further rekindled Hardwick’s feelings for the Chargers, and Hardwick later decided to approach the team about getting back the job he had quit, Costanza style. But he didn’t go full Costanza and show up, as if he’d never left.
“I literally broke my neck for that team, I just cared so much, and I wanted to be back involved,” Hardwick said. “I said, ‘I don’t know if this is off the table or not, based on what I said and how I reacted initially, but I want to be back involved.’”
And now he is, pairing with Matt “Money” Smith (who replaces Josh Lewin) to handle the radio calls of the games played by the L.A. Chargers.