Rams Head Coach Dick Vermeil had noticed Hobgood-Chittick during a scrimmage with the Colts and decided to reach out after the Colts cut him.
"When he called me, he said, 'Nate, I've just got done with practice and I've been thinking about you. You've got a real good opportunity here. We'd like you to be a part of this team,'" Hobgood-Chittick told the Morning Call. "The whole thing really stuck out in my mind because no one had showed me that kind of consideration elsewhere."
Vermeil recalls that he "almost immediately started developing a fondness and respect for him, because he was one of those extremely high-effort guys no matter what you were doing. He had a hard time going slow on a walk-through," a non-contact practice held the day before a game.
While with the Rams, Hobgood-Chittick spent six hours each week volunteering at a crisis hotline for suicide intervention, according to the Morning Call.
Also a staunch Democrat, he could never figure out why Vermeil was a Republican.
"I used to say, 'Nate, just because I'm a Republican doesn't mean I don't care about people just like you do,'" Vermeil recalls, laughing.
Hobgood-Chittick played in ten games that season and recorded thirteen tackles.
Once again, in St. Louis, his dedication as well as his fun spirit endeared him to his teammates. He and Ray Agnew, a Rams defensive tackle and North Carolina State graduate, enjoyed the rivalry between their former schools. Agnew lost a bet and had to wear a Tar Heels hat for a day. Agnew also remembers Hobgood-Chittick's van.
"Most guys had regular cars," Agnew says, laughing. "He had a van, and all the D-linemen used to get in it. I was older than the rest of the guys, so I didn't get in it, but it was kind of like the hangout van, the party van."
Tom Chittick, his younger son Luke, Kelsey, who was still dating Hobgood-Chittick, and family and friends traveled to Atlanta for Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000 between the Rams and the Tennessee Titans.
Mary Hobgood decided to stay in Boston. She was now teaching at the College of the Holy Cross, and "the psychology students were informing me about what they were learning about brain injuries and football," she says, "so I was kind of sick of the football thing, and I didn't go."
In October of that year, Mike Webster, a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, brought more attention to the dangers of the game when he announced that the repeated head trauma he suffered during his career had left him with a traumatic brain injury. He had become estranged from his family and homeless in the early 1990s. He died in 2002 of a heart attack.
So Mary watched the game with two friends who knew nothing about football but were "emotional supports," she says.
Hobgood-Chittick recorded three tackles in the game, which the Rams clinched with one of the more memorable plays in NFL history: With St. Louis leading by seven, Titans wide receiver Kevin Dyson caught a pass near the five yard line and ran toward what seemed like a certain touchdown, only to be caught just short of the goal line by a diving Rams linebacker, Mike Jones. Rams 23, Titans 16.
"It was amazing just to walk in there," Tom says. "The last five minutes of that game, I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack — the excitement was so enormous."
After the win, Hobgood-Chittick, drenched in sweat, leaped into the stands.
Kelsey was certain that he was coming for her. But he went straight to his friends from Allentown.
"He kissed them all, and I realized for him, the joy was providing them that experience — way more than" for himself, she says.
Afterward, Hobgood-Chittick told the Morning Call, "Man, I'm beat up. This is going to sink in in a week or two and I'll wake up to what we just accomplished, but right now, all I can say is I hurt."
Vermeil retired after the Super Bowl. With his main supporter gone, Hobgood-Chittick's place in St. Louis was suddenly in flux. The Rams cut him midway through the 2000 season, so he signed with the San Francisco 49ers. He was still trying to figure out what to do in 2001 when Vermeil returned to coaching with the Kansas City Chiefs and brought him aboard. Hobgood-Chittick started a game for the first time in 2001 and played in thirteen games over two years.
He and Kelsey got married in July 2002 and eventually had a son, Jack, and daughter, Addison.
He went to training camp with the Arizona Cardinals the next year but didn't make the team.
"It's over," he said to Kelsey over the phone.
"How do you feel?"
"Sad but relieved."
Four days later, he enrolled at California State University-Long Beach, near where they were now living, to get his master's degree in social work. He graduated and then became a financial adviser in 2008.
"He had seen so many NFL players work so hard and then having nothing to show for it because either they had invested it wrong, or got taken by some bad adviser or just made bad decisions, so he had this idea" to try and "handle their money the way he would ours," Kelsey recalls.
He enjoyed success in that realm and was a great husband and father, she says. He supported her as she pursued standup comedy.
"My husband has a lot of really amazing, wonderful qualities ... none of which I'm going to touch on tonight," Kelsey said during one gig.
Hobgood-Chittick was fine with being the butt of her jokes.
"When you're watching your wife perform, you so badly want her to succeed. You want her to be funny. So at that point when you're watching the performance, you're rooting so hard, you don't care what she says, as long as she gets a laugh, because that's ultimately what you're after," Hobgood-Chittick told El Segundo TV.
While Kelsey gave her husband a hard time in her comedy — "he is the quintessential man, except he can't fix anything, which bugs me because if you're going to be a meathead and just watch TV, at least be able to, like, make me a tool bench or something" — she became increasingly concerned about his health.
The entire time they were married, he used a sleep mask because he had sleep apnea, a common issue among heavy retired players. He struggled to lose the weight he had gained during his career.
"He had gotten so big that his body had gotten to a new set point," Kelsey says.
He also took anti-inflammatory drugs like Vioxx to manage the pain in his joints and back, which left him with terrible acid reflux, Kelsey says. Eventually he had to sleep sitting up.
The issues weren't all physical.
Mary Hobgood would go to her grandchildren's games with Hobgood-Chittick, and "he would not say anything to me the entire game."
Another time, they were driving in Maine, and he "yelled and screamed at me for two hours ...and this was totally out of character for this warm and generous person ... I thought maybe it was just because he was under so much stress because he was launching a career" in finance, Mary says.
But Kelsey also noticed changes.
"He had always been different — just kind of in his head — but he seemed more confused, more sad, more introverted the last couple years," she says. "He was really good at pretending and trying and hiding it, but he was quiet, and I knew something was wrong."