Road to 1991 Perfection: Fraley's Husky Teammate was a Fields of Dreams
Chico Fraley saw Jaime Fields from all sides.
They played next to each other, opposite each other and with one in front of the other.
They were University of Washington linebackers from Los Angeles, speed guys brought in specifically to change the tone and the face of Husky football, and they did — helping the unbeaten 1991 team run the table in 12 games and claim a national championship.
While Fields moved from strong safety to inside linebacker to outside linebacker throughout his UW career, Fraley was never far away from him as he rotated into the different linebacker slots.
They were both thoughtful, quiet sort of guys, well-liked because they could really play the game and demonstrated almost no need for anyone to feed their egos.
Naturally, Fields and Fraley gravitated to each other.
"When I actually think about Jaime, the first thing that comes to mind isn't football," said Fraley, who lives in Bend, Oregon. "The first thing that comes to mind is his smile. For a guy as tough as he was, he was just a great human being."
Fields didn't drink alcohol, a rarity for a college student, but he still came to all of the university social gatherings and hung out with his teammates. He always seemed happy to them.
"He exuded I am who I am," Fraley said. "It was I'm going to walk my path."
Fields continually kept the others in awe of his football gifts. He was on the shorter side, just 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, but he could physically match anyone on that '91 Husky team in a foot race, with a barbell or a vertical leap.
"As an athlete I don't think you could put more power into an individual," Fraley said. "When I say power and explosiveness, he was running a low 4.4 (second 40-yard dash) and benching 400 pounds. He was ridiculous."
So quiet and mysterious, Fields was a sportswriters' nightmare. He often would just stand there and look at you. There were few profiles written about him because of his reticence to speak about himself or much about anything to the press. He was considered more shy than standoffish.
Yet I pushed and prodded him one season to sit for interview and was pleasantly surprised during the course of our discussion when I found out something about him that I wouldn't have guessed.
Fields was a Mel Kiper fan. Even more than a Kiper fan. Jaime wanted the guy's job. He wanted to know all that I knew about Kiper. I later called Kiper to tell he had a big fan in Seattle and the self-made talent scout was amused by this, though he certainly was well versed in everything else about Jaime Fields.
Fraley, the other linebacker from L.A., was deeply affected when he learned that his former teammate was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1999 near Los Angeles. They had been Huskies, linebackers and friends together. And now Jaime was gone.
"It broke my heart when someone like him, in the prime of his life, was tragically taken away in a car accident," Fraley said.
All this week, we remember outside linebacker Jaime Fields, one of the key figures on the Huskies' 1991 national championship team who went on to play for the Kansas Chiefs.
In this second video, Chico Fraley recounts his own recruitment to Washington and brings us up to date on his post-football life.
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