Nick Hardwick emotional about chance to help coach Chargers

As an NFL player, Nick Hardwick was as complex and colorful as the tattoos swirling down his tree-trunk arms, a Pro Bowl center fueled by emotions.

A decade after retirement, that has not dissipated.

Hardwick, now assistant offensive line coach for the Chargers, fought the urge to cry when he bumped into Lorenzo Neal, his old fullback, and again when he ran into Hall of Fame running back LaDainian Tomlinson.

When a reporter played him a recording of quarterback Philip Rivers reminiscing about his longtime center, Hardwick quickly wiped away tears rolling from under his sunglasses.

“You just miss ‘em,” said Hardwick, 42. “You get flooded with memories.”

Hardwick is barely recognizable from his playing days, which ended one game into his 11th season because of nerve damage in his neck. He’s fanatical about working out and eating ultra-healthy, and now weighs 235 pounds. That’s 60 pounds lighter than his playing days, and the same weight he was when he walked on at Purdue.

At one point after retiring, he weighed less than 210 pounds, meaning he was lighter than current Chargers kicker Cameron Dicker (216). Hardwick used social media to develop “Lose Like a Lineman” a health and wellness program that helped people shed pounds.

He worked as a sports radio host in San Diego before moving to Indiana with his wife, Jayme-Lee, and their two young sons. Hardwick had been working as a volunteer assistant coach at a high school just north of Indianapolis and never lost that passion for being part of a team.

“I was staying up ‘til 1 in the morning, waking up at 5, grading film, doing all the things required to being on a winning football team,” he said. “I guess I just realized how much I loved all of it. All of it. The film, the practice, the meetings. Just having people count on you is a really big deal for me. Where you are held accountable and you have to get your job done. There’s no getting out of it, and you wouldn’t want to.”

When Jim Harbaugh was hired in January as coach of the Chargers, Hardwick called the organization and offered his services. A week later, he was headed back to the West Coast to work as right-hand man to offensive line coach Mike Devlin, another former NFL center.

“Nick as a coach is kind of like how he was as a player,” Devlin said. “He’s tough, he’s loyal, he’s relentless, and he’s like a sponge and learning everything. We speak the same language.”

Even at 295 pounds, Hardwick was undersized as a player and leaned on his background as a wrestler to contend with much bigger men across the line of scrimmage.

“You’re standing on the sidelines and the national anthem’s playing and you’re looking across the field,” he said. “You’ve got Richard Seymour and Vince Wilfork and Albert Haynesworth and Sam Adams and John Henderson. You’ve got giants that you’re fighting. They weigh 350 pounds and are 6-6, 6-7. And you realize for the next 3½ hours you’re going to fight a human being that potentially could knock your head off your shoulders. That’ll light you up.”

Developing an underdog, unbreakable mentality was a big factor in the cerebral Hardwick getting those tattooed sleeves.

“I wanted to look like this,” he said. “When I was playing, I felt like it was strategic deterrence, where I’m wild enough to do this to my body. The opponents are looking at you a lot of times for the first time. They’ve never seen you in person. I know what I felt like when I looked at an opponent for the first time, I’m like, `Man, that’s a big dude right there.’ You size him up and you’re looking at his ankles and his build and his angles and his arm length.

“I didn’t want to look like just an average dude out on the field that was small. I wanted to look like there was some piece of me that was different.”

Former teammates have indelible memories about Hardwick as a player, but those have nothing to do with body ink.

“Watching Philip and Nick in the meeting room together was like watching two physicists talk about the quantum realm,” former Chargers offensive lineman Rich Ohrnberger said. “It was like no other experience I’ve ever had. They would dissect plays sometimes for 20 minutes at a time, just discussing every single possibility that could happen and reasons why they could happen. These guys were in love with the game in a way that their energy and enthusiasm couldn’t be matched.”

Hardwick said working with high school players and younger, including teaching the keys to blocking to his sons, is already helping him with NFL players.

“If you can coach a third grader a specific technique and give him cues that he will understand,” he said, “then you can most certainly coach one of these finely tuned machines that when you just make a slight adjustment or give a slight cue, they pick it up right away.”

Simply put by Chargers center Bradley Bozeman: “He really sees the game the way we see it.”

Rivers said beyond Hardwick’s toughness and meticulous attention to detail was the fact that he cared so deeply about his job and teammates.

Hardwick has lost a lot of weight, but he hasn’t lost that.

“He’s one of the most genuine, loyal people I’ve ever met,” the quarterback said. “I never like to say somebody’s the best teammate I’ve ever had because there’s other guys I think so highly of too, but Nick’s in that highest category.”

There’s no crying in football? Every so often, Hardwick has to break the rules.