Road to 1991 Perfection: Jaime Fields was Weight-Lifting Freak of Nature
Talent galore filled the roster of the 1991 University of Washington football team. Yet it was still all up to these guys to make themselves bigger and stronger.
It was on them to become national championship material by working out obsessively in the offseason.
To do this, the players followed a laborious weight-lifting regimen by wrapping up their bodies where needed, getting properly fired up and warmed up before clutching a barbell and grunting out personal bests.
This was all done on schedule and choreographed to a certain degree.
Except for one guy — Jaime Fields.
Fields had no routine, boundaries or the slightest need for personal motivation.
He just strolled into the Husky weight room and tossed up inhuman amounts of weight.
"We had one athlete and everyone would agree with what I'm going to say," said Rick Huegli, the UW strength and conditioning coach in 1981-99. "Jaime Fields was a freaky, heat-seeking missile kid."
Offensive guard Pete Kaligis was by far the strongest Washington football player purely from an upper-body standpoint, benching upwards of 550 pounds. All-America defensive tackle Steve Emtman was maniacal in transforming his body by adding 30 pounds of muscle one offseason and taunting others to lift until they puked.
Fields, with his 5-foot-11, 230-pound frame, made everyone in the weight room stop what they were doing and watch him.
The outside linebacker didn't warm up. He didn't have time for that.
He didn't sit in a corner working himself into a frenzy. He didn't have any time for that either. Fields could grab nearly 600 pounds, do a number of squats without warming up and effortlessly throw the weight back on the rack.
Offensive lineman Todd Bridge, sitting nearby and going through a series of systematic steps to prepare to squat 500 pounds, could only stare dumbfounded at Fields and go, "Damn!"
All this week, we remember outside linebacker Jaime Fields, one of the key figures on the 1991 national championship team. Fields, who went on to play in the NFL for the Kansas City Chiefs, was killed in 1999 by a hit-and-run driver near Los Angeles.
In the video below, Rick Huegli, former UW strength and conditioning coach, talks about his career with the Huskies and what he does now.
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