Former San Diego Chargers center Nick Hardwick is barely recognizable these days. Just six months ago, the 33-year-old was listed at 305 pounds. He’s a lot closer to 200 now.
Hardwick has lost 85 pounds in six months and is pushing toward the weight he was at in high school, when he was a standout wrestler in the 171-pound weight class in Indiana. He began packing on pounds in college at Purdue, mostly by way of constantly stuffing his face.
Hardwick talks about all that and more in a piece Emily Kaplan of The MMQB that is worth reading in its entirety. He also said he was bothered by Tony Kornheiser implying Hardwick used performance-enhancing drugs.
“That hurt,” Hardwick told Kaplan. “I knew what I went through to get to that point. It wasn’t like I was 300 pounds of muscle before. I had fat on me. Not to mention, I got tested quite frequently. I don’t even know how it’s possible for guys to use steroids in the NFL today.”
On a recent episode of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” Kornheiser said Hardwick was “artificially pumped up like a Perdue chicken.”
“It is eyebrow-raising. It’s a tremendous amount of weight that he has lost in a very short amount of time, and it leads anybody to reasonably conclude that this guy was artificially pumped up like a Perdue chicken,” Kornheiser said. “I mean, I understand that they lift a lot of weights in football and they eat a lot of food to maintain their weight, but you have to wonder at some point, with football players and all athletes, if there aren’t performance-enhancing drugs at work here that artificially build them up.”
When you hear what Hardwick — now 225 pounds — used to eat, you won’t be surprised that he lost 85 pounds by dieting and exercising. Hardwick isn’t the first former NFL lineman who has lost a ton of weight in retirement (see: Birk, Matt), and if anything he should be applauded for it. Some guys go the other way and end up jeopardizing their health.
Photo via Nick Hardwick/Twitter
