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Mike Giardi is back covering the NFL, this time as a writer
As noted in this space last week, Mike Giardi was overdue for a good break to come his way.
This past week, he got one. But it comes in a format that might be surprising to those familiar with Giardi as a trustworthy sports anchor and reporter in this market for more than 20 years, first at New England Cable News and then NBC Sports Boston, before going national with NFL Network in 2018.
Giardi, who was let go by NFL Network in March in a decision that raised eyebrows and blood pressures of those that enjoyed his informed, good-natured reporting, signed on with Greg Bedard’s Boston Sports Journal website this past week. There, Giardi has returned to roots many didn’t know he had — as a writer.
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Giardi has been part of the site’s thorough coverage of the Patriots’ first few days of training camp, writing insightful, observational articles with such titles as, “Five Items I’ve Got My Eye On As Patriots Camp Opens” and “One Word May Define An Entire Season For Patriots, Mac Jones.”
“It been a little while since I was a full-time writer — try 25 years,” said Giardi, who began his career as the sports editor of the Falmouth Enterprise, where he worked for three years in the 1990s before turning to the television side. “So I’m a little nervous about it, but it’s exciting.
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“One of the things I’ve always prided myself on is being adaptable, whether it’s doing a story and it ends up going in a different direction than I expected, or something where you just sort of have to switch on the fly. This is me switching on the fly and going back to my roots. I’d be lying to you if I said there weren’t moments of real nervousness in the first five or six days of doing this.”
Giardi said Bedard was one of the first people to reach out after news broke that NFL Network would not extend Giardi a new contract.
“It was not just that Greg expressed disappointment for me, but he said, ‘Just stay in touch.’ At various points over the last four months, we’d have a message here, a text there, just to keep me in mind,” said Giardi.
“Then it was funny, I was actually closing in on taking a different writing job recently, and he was like, ‘We’ve got to do this,’ and just put it into overdrive. It all came together in about 10 days after that.”
Giardi is enthusiastic about the new job and happy to be reporting from the familiar territory of Patriots training camp, but he acknowledges that the wounds from losing a dream job that he did well have left scars, some more visible than others.
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“It was rough. Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, look, you’re going to get another job, it’s going to happen fast.’ And I remember turning to my wife and being like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know that it’s going to happen again,’ “ he said. “I’m 52 and the business isn’t about me anymore. And I mean that in a million different ways. I think there are places that don’t care if you’re good at TV anymore, as long as you’re younger and cheaper.”
Giardi said NFL Network personnel knew that layoffs would be coming for approximately a year. But his prominence on the network didn’t wane even as the Patriots became less of a national story, and he had reason to feel that his job was safe even with his contract soon to expire.
Giardi’s responsibilities included covering the immediate news and the aftermath when Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during a Monday night game. Giardi also was designated the Chiefs reporter during the Super Bowl, even though he had worked only one of their games during the season — the AFC Championship game, where he was the Bengals reporter.
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Giardi met with his bosses at the NFL Combine in the first week of March, and came away feeling like he was in line to get a new contract. He was informed he would no longer be needed before the end of the month.
Giardi was let go at the same time NFL Network was receiving major backlash after reporter Jim Trotter revealed his contract was not being renewed. Trotter had made an admirable habit out of making commissioner Roger Goodell uncomfortable with public questions about NFL Media’s lack of diversity. Goodell denied having anything to do with Trotter’s departure, but historically, the commissioner’s denials and the truth eventually go their separate ways.
“I know a lot of people there, I love a lot of people there, they’re going to be friends for life,” said Giardi. “I think they trusted me and I think if it was up to the people that ran the newsroom, I’d still be working there. But that’s not how it goes anymore.
“I’m just happy to be working. We figure out a way to cobble this together. I’ve got a junior to be at Lafayette and a senior in high school. So, got to keep those checks rolling in. You just want to be able to support your people. You want to be able to give them the things they deserve and need, and it just shakes you to the core a little bit, like, ‘How am I going to make all this happen for everybody?’ But I’m not the first to have this happen, and I won’t be the last. And I’ve been so fortunate for most of my career. If I had the chance to go back to the beginning of my television career, knowing how it would end, I still would have done it.”
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