SAN DIEGO _ The NFL team that called San Diego home for 56 years worked out Thursday at Chargers Park for the final time.
Not everyone said goodbye for good, though.
"I'm going to get some tools and come back here in a few days," Antonio Gates said, smiling.
His mission: To unloosen and possess a fourth-row seat inside the main auditorium.
"That's my seat," Gates said, still smiling.
Players tend to switch seats as they progress through their NFL careers.
Gates, as consistent off the field as on it, clung to a corner seat in the fourth row.
It was his bedrock spot.
He parked there as an undrafted wannabe in 2003, trying to relearn football after reluctantly stifling his Basketball Jones because, for all his dominance on the Kent State hoops team, he profiled as an NBA project at 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds.
At Chargers Park, where he mastered the craft of basketball on grass, he stayed at his fourth-row address even while accruing eight Pro Bowl selections and credentials that should earn him a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
Along with the seat and a few Chargers photographs, Gates is relocating his 1986 Cutlass convertible to the great sprawl north.
The stylish ride evokes Gates' presence at Chargers Park.
Tooling into or out of the parking lot off Murphy Canyon Road the past several years, flashing his megawatt smile, Gates looked like a California movie star, right down to the yellow diamonds in each ear.
A habitue of Los Angeles, where his wife has roots, Gates is known to attract TMZ's cameras.
"I think it's the valet guy who tips them off," he said, laughing at the sluggish car retrieval that allows TMZ sleuths to bracket him, a la a Romeo Crennel defense.
Yes, Gates screwed up two years ago when he consumed a banned substance _ via a supplement, he said _ and flunked a test for performance-enhancing compounds.
He regained his touchdown form, after the stream of passed drug tests that followed. "I think that showed people that (he's not a cheater)," said Gates, who still donates blood and urine, often with scant notice, to the PED gendarmes.
Throughout his Chargers career, he maintained the sleek Cutlass as carefully as his body.
They're about the same age _ Gates set to turn 37 on Sunday, making him six years older than the car.
Another smile.
"I'm from Detroit," he said. "We take care of our cars."
Chargers fans would love the Cutlass that Gates will have transported from his Poway home, which is for sale, to his residence in the San Fernando Valley
"San Diego Blue," he said of the color.
So, this sports entertainer who made his name in San Diego will drive his San Diego Blue car in L.A., wearing the familiar lightning-bolts duds and helmet.
In Hollywood's shadow, he'll catch passes from a north San Diego resident named Philip Rivers.
(Yes, Rivers continues to say, although rather vaguely, he will make the San Diego-Orange County commute, which under optimal conditions is about three hours roundtrip.)
This exodus is the strangest of its ilk.
The football team's San Diego tenure spanned from John F. Kennedy to Donald J. Trump _ at 56 years, the longest continuous tenure of a relocating NFL franchise.
Los Angeles staged no hardcourt press to deliver Team Spanos a new stadium, but the moving vans will head up the Interstate 5 any day now, ensuring that Antonio Gates' anchor site, unlike that of the comparably impressive Tony Gwynn, will move outside San Diego's borders.
"Bittersweet," Gates said a few times Thursday.
He'll make the best of it, if his San Diego chapter is a preview of this Los Angeles Chargers launch.
Best wishes to him.
On behalf of San Diego, it was a real slice.
