Speaking from the heart and not a script, Nick Rolovich on Monday painstakingly thanked more than a dozen people, former coaches, teammates and family mostly, for their part in his becoming the University of Hawaii’s head football coach.

And curiously during his introductory press conference, Rolovich also paid homage to somebody he had never coached with or played for. Somebody who had, in fact, forced him to leave UH.

“I’d like to thank Coach (Norm) Chow,” Rolovich said, his voice rising with genuine appreciation.

It was four years ago that Chow, in refusing to retain the then-32-year-old offensive coordinator from Greg McMackin’s staff, sent Rolovich packing for an uncertain future.

With a wife from Maui, the father of two young children and a Rainbow Warrior to the marrow, “I didn’t want to leave,” Rolovich recalled. “It was scary.”

But in showing Rolovich the door, Chow left him with a thought and a challenge. “It is going to be better for you (this way),” Rolovich remembered Chow saying.

While it hardly salved the pain initially, after the devastation wore off, Rolovich said, “Deep down I believed him.”

The dismissal catapulted Rolovich from his comfort zone and forced him to look beyond the June Jones offense he had played in and coached. It forced him to reexamine his path and required him to broaden his horizons beyond his alma maters, UH and the City College of San Francisco, where he had played and coached.

He had options on two coasts and eventually went to work for crusty Chis Ault, the College Football Hall of Famer and inventor of the pistol offense at Nevada. There, among other things, he would learn patience as well as X’s and O’s.

That would be followed by three years with Ault’s successor, Brian Polian, in Reno, where lessons expanded to recruiting and other facets.

“You either respond (to the career challenge) or you fade away,” Rolovich said. “I like to think that I was able to respond, pick up my feet and keep going. Obviously, it was a good learning process. But it is being uncomfortable. It is being able to attack the adversity of that uncomfortableness and keep going.”

Left unsaid was that had he stayed he may well have been caught up in the constant revolving door that Chow’s dysfunctional coaching staffs became. In Chow’s four seasons, UH went through five official or de facto offensive coordinators.

At USC, Chow’s relationship with his two young understudies, Steve Sarkisian and Lane Kiffin, became strained, and you wonder what the coupling here might have held for Rolovich had he been retained.

But there was no wondering among those who knew or worked with Rolovich in his stay at UH as a player (2000-01) and coach (2003-04 and 2008-11) that he would eventually find his way back to Manoa. Or, that he would someday become the Rainbow Warriors’ head coach. It was just a matter of when.

“I always believed that I’d be back,” Rolovich said. “I did not know how quick. I always believed that I belonged here.”

Turns out it was sooner rather than later and Chow, the man he replaces, gets an assist.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.